By George Noga
David Mamet: A Selection of Pearls and Nuggets
The More Liberty – Less Government (“MLLG”) Foundation blog began in November 2007; hence, 2012 begins our fifth year. It also is likely to be our final year.
As you may infer, I am hedging slightly and not ruling out continuing past 2012 in some form or other. By the end of this year we will have published 200 posts comprising 700 pages on myriad subjects. It is time for reassessment.
MLLG has enjoyed its fair share of success. Beginning with only 150 potential readers, we have grown to more than 10,000 including state, national and international blogs and websites that routinely incorporate our postings. We have a website containing all our work. Our fund raising has been sufficient to cover expenses.
So, why quit? Five years and 700 pages takes its toll. By the end of this year I will have covered much of what I set out to write about. Perhaps there is a better way to accomplish our mission going forward. Perhaps I will continue the blog utilizing a different format. I really haven’t decided.
“We will address many radioactive topics; so, stay tuned
for a plethora of pithy, provocative postings in 2012.”
The good news is there is a year of MLLG posts remaining. The better news is I have saved a dozen or so special topics for my final postings. These will address radioactive topics such as: (1) the role of IQ in both private actions and public policy; (2) racism in America; (3) why liberalism is a lie; (4) the debt crisis and the future of the USA; and, (5) reflections about the Obama presidency.
I also will write about school choice, a subject with which I am intimately acquainted but have refrained from writing about before this year. So, stay tuned and buckle your seat belt; 2012 will feature a plethora of pithy, provocative postings.
David Mamet: On the Dismantling of American Culture
A few months ago I read acclaimed playwright David Mamet’s new book “The Secret Knowledge – On the Dismantling of American Culture”. It is one of the best books I have read in the past few years and I heartily recommend it.
Following are four vignettes from the book as well as from Mamet’s interviews by The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Bear in mind Mamet, who is Jewish, was a Hollywood liberal all his life until his epiphany at age 60.
“I was at a neighbor’s for dinner, and they’d ordered takeout Japanese food and had, at their table, a daughter recently returned from college. The father was deconstructing his California roll to eat it and the newly enlightened freshman explained to him that to do so was to disrespect the sushi chef who had labored to make the roll just so and was his work worth nothing? I commented that his work obviously was worth what one paid for it and that the price did not include respect. And I did not say, but wondered, what of respect for the poor father who had worked for the money to buy the California roll and, sorrowfully, for the money to send the young woman off to college to fill her head with trash”.
“Higher education is an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. Four years of college is like a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom – Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer; pull the lever and get rewarded with: a grade, a degree and a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way. “
“But I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it and didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love Kennedy; he didn’t write Profiles in Courage – he lied about that. ‘Bush is in bed with the Saudis!’ Okay, Kennedy was in bed with the mafia.” . . . My liberal friends would mime the act of vomiting at the mention of Sarah Palin’s name. This is the reaction of the herd instinct. When a sheep discovers a wolf in the fold, it vomits to ward off the attacker. It’s a sign their position in the herd is threatened.”
“The country that existed in my once-fevered liberal imagination – a dystopia crippled by crises that required the immediate deployment of the federal government – bears little resemblance to the country in which I actually live, where people interact smoothly in the marketplace to their mutual benefit. I had come to realize that corporations were good for providing the necessities of life. The big bad military of my youthful fantasy was, I believe, an organization built on courage and honor.”
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