A Year In David Mamet's Marketplace
One year ago today, playwright David Mamet wrote of his personal transformation from a "brain-dead liberal" to one more person who sees the country mainly as a "marketplace". The author of Glengarry Glen Ross -- the ultimate drama of visionless American capitalism -- announced one year ago "a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."
While I remain a great fan of Mamet and hold his many works in the highest esteem, on the anniversary of his screed I can't help but ask: how's that free market working out?
In the time since, the economic meltdown has served to tear away a great deal of conservatism's camouflage, revealing the "marketplace" conception of this country as sorely wanting. In reality, the country resembles far more closely a fiefdom, not something so pleasant as an egalitarian arrangement of buyers and sellers, but rather a brutal exercise in naked class antagonism.
Hyperbole? Hardly. In one year of Mamet's marketplace, the fraud of laissez-faire economics has simply and expensively died. Trillions of public dollars have been appropriated by the dominant class of business interests via no such quaint mechanism as competition. Competition -- never the preference of the wealthy to begin with -- has been cancelled. The fittest along with the unfit banks and corporate giants live on in the commons, our togetherness no less real for having been denied so forcefully by the conservative party line. Shameless panhandling imposes profoundly on all of us. No invisible hand picks our pockets -- rather it is plainly attached to a piggish body, arm stretching from Wall Street through Washington, wrist adorned as ever in Patek Philippe.
To the surprise of nobody who saw through the "free market" canard from the beginning, the overarching theme of conservatism today is to heap blame for the sinking vessel anywhere but upon where it belongs -- itself. To do this, the very language and the meaning carried by its words is constantly sacrificed on the altar of cheap PR flackery. It is in this aspect that Mamet's abandonment of progressivism hurts most, because his gifts as an artist are plainest in his dialogues, and these depend utterly upon the integrity of the words they employ. If there are two camps, Mamet has regrettably chosen the one least ethical with language. No modern conservative ever met a word he couldn't happily debase and weaponize, as any summary of their vocabulary shows:
Repeating "No Child Left Behind" is how conservatives have destroyed public education. Repeating "Big Government" is how conservatives have destroyed law and regulation in the financial markets and created an unprecedented privatization golem in everything from prisons to airport security theater. Repeating "Liberal Media" is how cultural conservatives pretend that college professors, and not corporate boardrooms, determine what is presented as news on television. Repeating "Tax and Spend" is how conservatives have pitted the people against the government, and therefore themselves. Repeating "Socialism" is how conservatives deny the barest notion of a public interest. And now, repeating "Obama Recession" is how conservatives will pretend that thirty years of laissez-faire deregulatory free-market worship never even happened, let alone are responsible for the coming months and years of crisis.
When it comes to foreign policy, Mamet has long indulged the conservative's peculiar penchant for semantic warp. His call for government to "get out of the way" pulls up regrettably short at Washington's billions in military aid to Israel. The latest result of this support has been nothing to pat one's self on the back about, for in the past year the US-armed IDF have indiscriminately killed and wounded thousands of Gazan civilians while strangling that urban hellhole of basic staples. In this, who was Mamet's chosen villain one year ago? Unbelievably, NPR. In last year's essay, Mamet mentions National Public Radio's liberal reporting bias ("National Palestinian Radio") in his decision to repudiate liberalism. If he was offended by hearing the human cost of lopsided, gratuitous force before his transformation, what will be the fruit of his outright embrace of the neocon worldview? I'm having fevered visions of a one-man Broadway show entitled Wolfowitz! that I can only hope are absurd.
We may not see David Mamet return to the progressive cause, nor even expect him to cease conflating it with utopianism. Though we will no doubt see and admire his works. They will as always make us think, and uncover ways of being. If he finds something of value in conservatism, I will continue to presume there is something in it I have missed. But to his new ideological pals, I warn: he is one Hollywood (former) Liberal who is far too thoughtful to make much use of on the national stage. For that, stick with the Limbaughs, the Palins and the Jindals. Keep them loud and up front -- and thereby hasten the day that Mamet finds your brand of brain-death less appealing than our own.
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Brent Budowsky at Consortium News on the error of employing the term 'laissez faire' to describe the ambitions of the oligarchs. A 'free market' is their nightmare.
Budowsky:
" I am for laissez-faire. I am against laissez-unfair, the scandal of our times that caused the crisis of our generation. …
We must end the corrupting collusion between Wall Street money and Washington policy, and begin a serious and thoughtful relationship based on sound business and true capitalism
See the rest here: http://www
Essayists who try and make the economy a left/right issue or who insist that corporate America is 'pursuing a free market' are trying to make reality conform to their own rigid parameters of allowable analysis. They are confined to a vocabulary issued by the control apparatus itself. They're spreading more manure on the pile .
ALL corporations seek to dominate markets, not set them free. Crony laissez unfair is what they're after. They oppose free markets with all their might. They hire governments to eliminate their weaker competitors, not create conditions that would allow diversity to grow in the marketplace.
It seems like the "free market" might work if we used a value-based currency instead of a debt-based currency, however, "liberals" in general seem to simply want a system where No one is left behind, child or child-like. If we were really smart we could implement a system that accomplishes both goals: a society of compassion for all human life ( a so-called 'safety net') and one that makes use of humans' innate drive to create objects and services and technologies and, most importantly, artistic expression, which when combined with technological know-how, creates world wonders.
its like bob dylan going to "jesus".
sometimes the talented are just twitches,,,,
d
Fantastic writing! I especially like the paragraph beginning: Repeating "No Child Left Behind" is how...
Except for the frequent catastrophic 100-car pileups the unregulated "Free Road" is a great system.
Such a fuss over such an overrated bag of wind. Glengarry Glen Ross, that was a masterpiece of theater, that much is true. The man's not a total loss. But The Untouchables was unwatchable--major historical revisionism drowned in gangster-movie cliches. House of Games was amateurish, it played like he'd read a pop history of confidence games and didn't learn anything. The fact is, he's not a very good writer. I know, millions would disagree with this. Millions voted for GWB too. Millions watch reality TV every night. Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lanford Wilson, Tony Kushner--Mamet just doesn't belong in their company. So, who cares if he's a brain-dead liberal or joined Dennis Miller in his perp walk into obscurity?
How does someone who is 'not a very good writer' manage to write a 'masterpiece of theater'?
Just askin'
Mamet will come around. Can anything surpass his lyrical Glengarry Glen Ross? Don't know. But anybody with an ear like that will certainly hear things, and what a time to be listening (can you say Bernie Madoff?) My two cents: Bush/Cheney policies forced the free market to it's logical end, it was just a matter of time. Hope Mamet is paying attention. He is truly a great artist.
Perhaps if Mamet did a remake of Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman, Willy Loman would no longer kill himself at the end, but make the big sale and ride off into the sunset a happy capitalist. Somehow the play would lose its existential charm and heft. Mamet, like Madonna, may want to continually reinvent himself. I have always trusted people more who continually evolve than those who are always switching camps or belief systems. If, after the myriad failures of the Bush administration, Mamet has become a fan of preemptive war and the unfettered marketplace, hopefully he has not had his fortune in the stock market recently or he would have seen the results. I guess conservatives can create good theater, we will have to wait and see. Until then, we'll wait for Wolfowitz the Musical!
FYI: Glengarry Glen Ross was Mamet's brilliant response to Miller's brilliant Death of a Salesman (or so it seems to me).
If you're from Chicago, you don't really fit in anywhere but Chicago. Like Mamet, I'm from Chicago, and was at Goddard while Mamet was there. Goddard in those days was a fantastic place for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Only the envious would disparage it.
I've chosen to live in Boone, NC, where the scenery is just as pretty as Vermont. The climate in Boone is much friendlier, though, as a number of Vermonters now living here can attest.
Alas, I fit in here as poorly as I fit in Vermont. At least here I can get a decent deep dish pizza.
The difficulty I had with Mamet's examples is scope: a congregation, the cast of a play, stranded travellers, a jury. Behaviors and solutions appropriate for a group that can all interact equally simply don't extrapolate to a population of over 300 million. And his answer for how things will work out was much like the answer in "Shakespeare in Love": "I don't know. It's a mystery."
Well done, especially at the end, but there's no comma in the title of the play Glengarry Glen Ross.
See Rob Warmowski's Profile
Tommy,
Also corrected. Thanks much.
-r
David Mamet's sympathies with the powerful rich; seeing them as resourceful, deserving and fiendishly set upon by the grubby, wife-stealing playboys. (The Edge, 1997).
No less than a bear (market) draws the adversaries to cooperate to survive. Ultimately, the real hero emerges victorious after deftly dispatching the pretender into a stake sharpened bear pit.
Echoes of the market and mammon?
There are few indications he did enough research on that essay. Time for a re-write.
How can laissez-faire capitalism be blamed for the designed economic 'collapse', when the 'collapse' was caused by a crony capitalist predator syndicate all tied to the exclusive network of private banks and speculators that owns the Federal Reserve system? There's no 'unsupervised' 'free' market in there. The system is managed right down to a microbial level by a cabal of insiders and their hired hands in government. Whatever we are seeing, it is certainly not a failed experiment with laissez-faire capitalism.
Ask yourself one simple question-
If 'laissez faire' capitalism was really to blame for the latest market manipulation, why did so many of the manipulators cash out at the top?
You can't reliably time a free system, but you can definitely time a rigged market.
Free markets work fine, people- if you could find one in America, you could prove it to yourself. In America, you're trapped inside ruling class collectivism with a double standard of rules and enforcement as different as night and day depending on who you are and who you know.
Please stop trying to make 'laissez faire' and 'uncontrolled markets' and 'weak government'
your whipping boys in an essay that also contains words like 'fiefdom'. It has to be one or the other. You have a strong, obedient government that mercilessly patrols and regulates the markets in favor of the anointed.
Take a look at the real spider's web around you: it's a textbook pyramidal oligarchical cryptocracy.
"Please stop trying to make 'laissez faire' and 'uncontrolled markets' and 'weak government'
your whipping boys in an essay that also contains words like 'fiefdom'. It has to be one or the other. "
Wow, you're almost right. Don't you see? The point is that laissez-faire policies inevitably and inexorably lead to what you call a "textbook pyramidal oligarchical cryptocrac
Your argument that we currently have a "strong, obedient government that mercilessly patrols and regulates the markets in favor of the anointed" is absolutely correct, but you have confused cause and effect. What do you think a fiefdom is, anyway?
When the government stays out of the marketplace in the beginning, it ends up getting sold in the marketplace at the end.
Laissez faire policies did not lead to the oligarchical cryptocracy. If we're talking about the last 100 years, there never was a laissez faire phase in America. The oligarchy was tightly integrated into the government command structure throughout the last century and the two moved symbiotically to enrich and empower each other.
The myth is that the business class was ever struggling to free itself from the government during this period- in actuality, the obedient government was the essential ally of the kleptocrats throughout, and the mythical pursuit of a free market was simply a dog and pony show designed to masquerade the advanced integration of wealth and state.
Each half of the two party collaborative system ( with support from the media ) pretended to be working for different factions of the American public to create the illusion of a power struggle between the oligarch class and the citizen class- one played Big Brother, the other Goldstein. The people were fooled by this false tug of war, and they did not recognize that they were being herded by dialectical friction, manufactured consent, and false choices into the Nirvana of corporatism we find ourselves in.
Funny-if I remember correctly, last weekend an NPR show host commented (paraphrased) that 'Mamet plays all view the world as people ruled by greed and power used ruthlessly
Dear Mr. Warmowski:
I hate to be your vocabulary conscience, but in the first paragraph you described Glengarry, Glen Ross as the "penultimate drama of visionless American capitalism
Anyway, loved your article, have nothing else to add that hasn't already been said below.
Oh, come on, don't go home yet. Did you see State and Maine?
See Rob Warmowski's Profile
Leopold,
I thank you for your welcome and fitting correction.
Forgive me, I went to public school.
-r
:)
Usually, my comments as the world's vocabulary conscience get deleted.
"Peridigmatic" should be spelled "paridigmatic".
Ha!!!! What's funny is, I actually looked up paradigmatic on dictionary
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