"No longer a brain-dead liberal."--David Mamet, Village Voice

(David Mamet): "...I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

• As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative,

and that people are generally good at heart.

• These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life.....

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that

• the chief executive will work to be king,

• the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware,

• and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches.

So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long....

• Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view....

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow....

• I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military).
• *One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost;"
• ****(This is the Bud Selig--Global Warming--Kyoto One World Government view) sm****
• (David Mamet): "and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting)."....
• From Village Voice article by David Mamet, 3/11/08, "Why I am no Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal"

***Selig succeeded in finding a group of people who are not willing to fight his global views: many baseball fans.

• One thing Bud can't control: the price of oil. Stretching US baseball players across the globe is a crime to begin with.

But his idea can't flourish with the present and future price of oil. (sm)

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