Mamet: Why I Am No Longering A Brain-Dead Liberal

The Village Voice is a fine paper. It can afford to run long and thoughtful pieces like this new Mamet essay on the nature of politics. They then tart up the Web page with so many bad ads that it is nearly unreadably, and deliver it from servers that are far too slow. (Here's the unpaged version, which is preferable to the normal one).

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

But, in what Mamet calls the essence of liberalism and “these saddest of words: ‘. . . and yet’”.

I don't meet anyone at the water cooler who thinks torture should be legal. I don’t meet anyone who thinks the Justice Department should be run as part of the spoils system and should prosecute the political enemies of the current administration. I don’t meet anyone at the water cooler who thinks we’re better off having fought the Iraq War than having sent those thousands of dead soldiers to Harvard and, with the left-over money, funded Social Security into the 22nd century.

Another New York writer said that "These are the saddest of possible words: Tinkers, to Evers, to Chance." Curious.