Last week, I posted on David Mamet’s essay, “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.”  Mamet is lauded by most as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, and he hails from one of the most liberal environs in all of Western History: the stage (he also attended one of the most absurdly liberal colleges in the nation).  As you can imagine, his essay raised a lot of eyebrows left and right, and National Review brings you the roundup of reactions here. 

“I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right,” wrote the Guardian’s theater critic of more than three decades. “What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.”

This response is quite simply perfect, a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa of moronic imbecility.

Mamet, a dashboard saint of angst-ridden cosmopolitan liberalism, has set out to read widely and carefully, exploring how his outdated political pose no longer tracks with reality or with his own understandings of the world, and Billington worries that Mamet is locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

Now, I’m sure Mamet is wagging his head right now at a weirdo Christian like me welcoming him into the fold like some new convert, and of course he probably has a much different view of certain elements of anthropology than I do, but it’s interesting to see how the change in his political views has already made critics and writers concerned that his work will, undoubtedly suffer that “so complex and profound and gifted a playwright should now seek to reduce his own work and his own politics to simple concepts.”  Ah, yes!  Truth.  Such a simple concept!  Ah, the poetry of it.