A top shelf writer, to me, is one I enjoy reading even when I disagree with him or her.
Thus, my love for deeply Christian writers Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and G.K. Chesterton. I don't exactly know how an evening with Waugh would have played out; I suspect the great man would have tired of me before I of him. But it's hard for me to imagine a sentiment so tedious that Waugh could not have enlivened it with his voice and style, shot through as it was with the best sentences available to us in English.
Shimmying across the street from Jesus's romanticizers to his descendants, we have the Jewish writers. For psychological and emotional reasons which may amuse and divert some among you, I put Jewish writers in a somewhat different category from the Christian luminaries above. Although I have no religious beliefs, I'm reluctant to tar Judaism with the same brush I use to tar Christianity. Do I believe in any Jewish religious doctrine? I do not. Do I therefore lump it together with its Christian cousin? I do not. What is my justification for this double standard? I have none.
Except, that is, for the way I feel. I've never felt that any Jewish person had the slightest interest in indoctrinating me, or the remotest need to shame me for not sharing their beliefs. This statistic has little value as data for generalizing purposes; much of my youth was spent in a Catholic private school which kept me largely (not entirely) sheltered from Jews, paupers, and nonwhites. But I can also say from my non-scientific observation of Jewish people, that proselytizing is not their thing. Whereas Christians of various stripes have knocked on my door, left things on my windshield, and accosted me in the street to tell me about the god they trust, I can't recall any Jews ever encouraging me to be more Jewish. Perhaps this is one reason why I don't typecast them as people I disagree with. Whatever Jewish doctrine may be, no Jews have ever felt the need to explain it to me, and thus its very mystery makes it enticing where the Christian doctrine is wearyingly familiar.
Perhaps for this reason, the Jewish writers I love don't have any kind of uphill battle to win me over. Masters like Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Isaak Babel are so packed with mystical storytelling and language that I can't imagine getting tired of them. In Babel's case, even after he's been filtered through translation, I still can't think of a person who does more with words.
But David Mamet is a special case.
Not only do I disagree with him on much, many of our areas of disagreement are like load-bearing walls for me. Politically speaking, my operating philosophy differs from his. But here's where it gets interesting.
It wasn't until I'd spent years with his movies and books that I discovered he was conservative. It was a shock for me, but that says more about my ignorance than about any contradiction or hypocrisy on his part. The shock came because he's so damn intelligent. The Mamet I've read (as opposed to heard and seen) is all essay; as a rule, I avoid essays and non-fiction unless the writer has grabbed me with fiction already. Mamet's ideas about art, and the business of art, and the people that make art and consume it, are endlessly fascinating. He's influenced me quite a bit.
So when I saw a recent book of his with one of those uplifting titles I see so often on the book piles of Costco ("How Liberals Have Fucked Up the World, and How We Can Still Un-Fuck It If We Act Now"), I was dismayed and resisted buying it. But in my recent fog of tolerance, it occurred to me that I should give this book a chance.
Happily, this polemic of Mamet's gives me a golden opportunity to test out my burgeoning chops in the field of fallacy identification. If I thought for a moment that I'd find fewer fallacies in Mamet's book than I do on social media, I was quickly disabused of that notion.
Creative artists who depend on collaborators to bring their work to life are forced to learn how to work with other humans. It's one of the hardest things I've had to do, and where some of my collaborators will tell you how inflexible I was, others will tell you I was sometimes casual to the point of being annoying.
Mamet, on the evidence, is not a great compromiser. But the many positive things collaborators have said paint a picture of a man with infinite patience, and love for those he works with. So while David Mamet may demand that things be done his way, he has boundless confidence that everyone will be able to do it his way in the end, and he doesn't seem to be inclined to bully them toward that goal. Which makes his conservatism all the more intriguing.
Mamet's screed, while more eloquently expressed, has much in common with the thinking that has glibly swept Trump into office. In other words, he's more passionate about what he hates then what he loves. And what he hates is liberals.
I won't get into detail on this yet; I want to save my fallacy-hunting for the radio show. I will say this, though-- the fallacies grow thick on the ground in Mamet's jeremiad. And I'm not at all sure my current enthusiasm for actually reading the damn thing represents any kind of evolution on my part; I can't help but think that I'm wading into it for entirely selfish reasons. I'm enjoying the book quite a bit. Sometimes I enjoy it when Mamet is able to articulate and skewer an aspect of liberal thinking (or, more to point, liberal talking) that has bothered me, but other times I'm pleased to see him indulging himself with rationalization so nakedly obvious that he would be taking no prisoners if he encountered anything comparable from the enemy.
Even when I find him wrongheaded, I always leave his work with gratitude at how invigorating it was. He's a terrific fucking writer, and Americans and Jews alike are lucky to have him representing them. Just as Shakespeare made poetry feel as commonplace as breathing, Mamet turns vulgarity into poetry. He sanctifies it, both with rhythm, and with a glorious forward drive not unlike what you hear in the work of our greatest composers.
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