I Caught the Flu and Away I Flew

A little food for thought on a Thursday evening...

David Mamet, the force behind Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog, and The Verdict had an interesting, if not very surprising, recent piece in The Village Voice explaining why he was no longer a "brain-dead liberal".

Now, I am by no means the wisest or smartest person to have ever walked across God's green earth, but it seems that if one is going to stand atop a soapbox and denounce your former political affiliation as "brain-dead", the best soapbox to make that kind of declaration might not be the The Village Voice. Oh well, if Mamet is anything like the characters in his films and plays, he's probably tough enough to deal with the consequences.

Jay Reding has an excellent summary of Mamet's piece here.

Mamet, however, hints at the real basis for conservatism. We can’t cure war. We can’t end all poverty. We can’t make people into angels when they are not. The fundamental principle of conservatism can be roughly summed up into this: “sometimes life just sucks.” Even if we could fix the problems that create war, poverty, racism and injustice to do so would be to have a society robbed of free will—because the root of all these problems are found in human nature itself.

That’s why Mamet rightly describes conservatism as the “tragic” view of human nature and liberalism as the “perfectionist” view of human nature. Conservatives recognize that there is no permanent solution for the ills of mankind—there are only advances which can ameliorate our conditions. We can’t create heaven on earth, we can only fumble around as best we can.