In response to a positive review in The New York Times of the recent revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, one young theater maker, @harharharbour wrote, “Fuck Mamet, there’s nothing he has to say worth hearing. Stop giving racist transphobic playwrights platforms. This show is shit.”
This tweet epitomizes what is now an entirely mainstream, and in some circles mandatory, view of David Alan Mamet, 74, of Chicago, the great American writer of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, Wag the Dog, Oleanna, and a mountain of other novels, books, essays, plays, and even cartoons. Mamet must be canceled. The “trash”—as Tony-winning actor and writer Colman Domingo writes—must be taken out. But as we Jews have learned all too often the hard way, silencing our prophets is usually a mistake.
Mamet’s most recent book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, came out in April. It’s very good, though on the surface at least not nearly as thrilling as his 2012 The Secret Knowledge, a book of political essays which in turn seemed cranky when it was first published but predicted with shocking acuity the cultural and political turmoil we now face.
Rereading The Secret Knowledge 10 years on it is impossible to deny that Mamet has a prophetic gift for understanding American life, honed in his drama, perfected in his prose, and that there’s a lot that Americans of all political leanings could probably stand to learn from reading his work. But for the past 14 years, the cognoscenti have ignored, shunned, and demonstratively not read, David Mamet. His crime? Abandoning his tribe.
(via Ed Driscoll)
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