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How far right?

I missed the fact that David Mamet is a conservative now. His timing isn't the best. What little I've read of his non-dramatic writing comes off as pretty pompous so I tend to avoid it. Mamet takes off after Brecht in a new book, but as this post points out he may be picking the wrong targets. (Parabasis/Wicked Stage)

Aw, fuck, I give up. A cranky conservative, a so-called "tragic" conservative—I could imagine and even distantly admire Mamet in those terms, as a sort of Beckett-y Archie Bunker. The real scandal here is that David Mamet has become a movement conservative. And for true-blue movement conservatism, the "left" means Communist/collectivist/totalitarian—hence the straw-burning of a Brecht not even John Fuegi would recognize rather than a reckoning with Miller or Pinter, two Western liberals who lived and worked squarely within the Western democratic tradition (and in Miller's case, in as irreducibly and proudly an American milieu as any preening patriot). But these are writers with whom a conservative would have to constructively engage, and perhaps concede that a spectrum of respectable right and left ideas coexist under Anglo-American late capitalism, rather than simply dismiss out of hand or tar as pandering cynics. And this, I suspect, is a parricide even this wayward son can't enact on his progenitors Pinter and Miller; better to pass over their legacies in silence.

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