David Mamet: As dumb as Jon Voight, only dumber

What have I seen of David Mamet's work? Glengarry Glen Ross? I hated The Untouchables. I saw the movie Homicide which I thought was essentially racist.

Homicide was what it would be like if Mickey Spillane tried to write a serious work about anti-Semitism.

It was about a Jewish detective who comes back to his Jewish heritage while investigating the murder of a Jewish shop owner. He asserts his Jewish identity by joining a JDL-like terrorist group and blowing up a building, and this all happens in a single evening. In interviews, Mamet made it clear that he intended this to be taken seriously.

Normally, a movie in which elderly Jewish shop owners ran guns to Zionists in Palestine and still kept large caches of weapons and explosives on hand in New York would be considered anti-Semitic. And the way black people are portrayed in it is clearly racist. In the end, two black children are arrested for the murder.

It's amazing the garbage people take seriously.

Now Mamet has become a Tea Bagger. He's written his book promoting his new ultra-conservatism. He included Glen Beck in his acknowledgments.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a pretty good review of it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html

Here are excerpts of Hitchens' review. He begins:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:

“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”

Or this:

“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”

Some of David Mamet's unqualified declarations are made even more tersely. On one page affirmative action is described as being “as injust as chattel slavery”; on another as being comparable to the Japanese internment and the Dred Scott decision. We learn that 1973 was the year the United States “won” the Vietnam War, and that Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin — “never worked a day in his life.”...

Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in The Secret Knowledge that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.

...

...Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case. But then he writes: “The BP gulf oil leak . . . was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks was good. Why?” This is merely lame, fails to compare like with like, appears unintentionally to be unsure why the gulf leak was “bad” and attempts an irony where none exists....