We’ve discussed some of the stupid things that Cornell West and Bernard-Henri Levy recently. Here’s an intellectual luminary acting even stupider — newly minted winger David Mamet berating the Stanford faculty for not listening to enough rightie talk radio.
Maybe I’m wrong, but sometimes I think a lot of famous intellectuals aren’t all that different from Luke Scott or Kelsey Grammer when you get right down to it. It probably shouldn’t be news when one of them says something idiotic, anymore than it is when an athlete or an actor does.
El Tiburon
I have not followed the Cornell West situation too closely at all.
I did listen to a segment between Sam Seder and Eddie Glaude (He is the chair of the Center for African-American Studies and the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University.)
I don’t recall any reference to the stupid things he said. Perhaps someone can give a Cliff’s notes version here or link to the appropriate discussion.
beltane
And unlike idiotic actors and athletes, the idiotic intellectuals are complete unknowns to the vast majority of Americans, making their idiocy relatively harmless. To most people, Cornell West elicits a “Who?”, David Mamet a “What?”, and Bernard-Henri Levy a “Isn’t he the French guy who raped that hotel maid?”
trollhattan
Still trying to figure out when Mamet got kicked in the head by the horse. “Coffee’s for closers!” Never realized he identified with the bastards in his works.
Get a grip, doooood.
Villago Delenda Est
Shorter David Mamet: “You don’t have enough batshit crazy in your media menu.”
freelancer
This is just so goddamn disappointing.
And because I want to have a heart attack by 35, I listen to RW talk to and from work. It’s just wall-to-wall stupidity, lies, and gnashing of teeth.
Fucking Mamet. And the thing is, IMHO, Redbelt was one of the best movies of 2008. Wtf.
gogol's wife
This is good. I’ve always had a feeling that maybe I’m not well educated because I don’t know the works of David Mamet. But they never sounded that interesting to me. Now I know I don’t have to bother and can read something worthwhile.
gogol's wife
And Cornel only has one l.
trollhattan
Also, too, having a hard time getting worked up about anything Cornel
lWest says. As with most performance artists, I generally fast-forward past him. Schtick=old.Zifnab
My god. If there was ever a parable to highlight the horrors that come of religion, that is it right there.
“Kindly, quiet, well-respected liberal turns into raging America-First anti-tax Becktard after being feed a diet of conservative propaganda he never would have looked at sideways if it hadn’t come from his rabbi.”
What a sad, sad tale.
Jewish Steel
Whoops! Wrong side, Martin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger_and_Nazism
beltane
@gogol’s wife: It’s not that you’re undereducated; it’s that you instinctively knew David Mamet would one day be just another wingnut and so you were subconsciously prodded to avoid his plays.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
my problem with mamet, even within his plays/screenplays i like, there is about 20 minutes of sheer unadulterated boredom. where the characters are defined, and there isn’t much more for them to do, except reach whatever conclusion there is to be had, where it just drags..
Lev
Here’s the thing about Mamet: I feel like he knows a lot about con games and writes good dialog, but he’s never been one of the guys that really nails how humans are and how they behave. So this is one of those things that I file under “I don’t care.”
Of course, I do remember listening to his commentary on House Of Games, his best film, where he starts off by talking about how George W. Bush lies all the time and is terrible at it, which proved to Mamet that he’s a good guy because he must have a conscience. I just want to know the point at which conservatives went from inveighing against moral relativism to being its biggest boosters.
kc
A conversion to right-wing douche-itude is sometimes just the thing for a flagging career in entertainment.
General Stuck
More often than not, when folks, even some of color, reach a certain level of accolades in the rarified airs in The Ivory Tower, the distance betwixt liberal and conservative becomes shorter on that starlit highway.
And the little people only seem to get in the way. Except for designated times to empathize the pain of world hunger with polite political banter over Escargo and lobster tail steamed just right.
kc
God damn it, the formatting on this site is really pissing me off.
Tom Levenson
Mamet’s not newly minted. He’s been a winger for a while (I date it back to Oleana, but it could have been longer ago). He’s got a phenomenal ear for language and dialogue; but we have ample evidence that talent != capacity to reason.
All that’s happened now is that he’s making noise about views evident for a while. Hopefully, he’ll start going into more detail about what he believes and why, and we’ll smack him down appropriately. He doesn’t like that one little bit.
SFAW
Yeah, it gets you a MNF gig, where you can display yore iggerance for 100 million (or whatever their share was), instead of the three or four persons who see you do standup at the Hollywood Blow.
ruemara
@Zifnab:
Religion made me very liberal, but then, I actually read the bible. YMMV.
Cornel West is a living minstrel show. At times. It is part of the schtick, he says very worthy things and his past work was not being done. He deserves respect for that, but his current path is not worthy of him. He’s more than capable of educating people of the reality of what happens in government, but instead, this is mostly about his ego. Plus I went to school with Michael Levin and Leonard Jeffries, along with lower profile ass George Preston. Smart people, but as humans, kinda worthless.
kc
@Lev:
Sheesh, I’d never heard that. As inept a liar as Dumbya was, he sure fooled (and killed) a lot of people.
Anyway, I love “House of Games.” Even though it has always made me kind of queasy. Thinking about it makes me want to watch it again, though I’m gonna have to wait until the knowledge of Mamet’s douchiness is less fresh in my mind.
Tom Q
@Lev: I’ll echo your take. Mamet has always had a knack for snappy dialogue, but his plots are often lame (Homicide — movie, not TV series — has about the stupidest shaggy-dog ending I’ve ever seen), and he shows little-to-no understanding of the human condition, or at least any broad spectrum of it. Even House of Games amounts to “the broad takes it too serious; she should realize it’s all a game to us tough guys”. It doesn’t surprise me in the least his Deep Thinking leads him to a shallow place.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Cornel West said this –
That’s not a stupid thing to say. Then he said this –
He admits he was wrong. That’s not a stupid thing to say, either. Balloonbaggers would do well to follow his example.
.
.
slag
Pretty much why arguing with wingnuts serves no rational purpose. Who among us hasn’t heard it all before?
kc
@SFAW:
Not that Roger L. Simon’s career is exactly on fire now, but at least he has some kind of gig. Assuming Pajamas Media hasn’t completely folded yet. But even if it has, heck, how many people would have ever known his name if he hadn’t converted to a crusading war hawk?
MikeJ
Boingboing links to something for Ben Stein, a list of economists involved in sex crimes.
AAA Bonds
I like the title of your post
Hunter Gathers
There’s one thing that binds all of these fucktards together: they are has beens.
Mamet – no one has admittedly gone to the theater since about 1977. Most widely seen film that he has a screen-writing credit for is that horseshit Costner vehicle The Untouchables.
Grammar – Frasier has been in re-runs since 2004, and can only find work when The Simpsons has a Sideshow Bob episode.
Bernard-Henri Lévy – who the fuck is this guy again? A never was as opposed to a has been.
Scott – was left off the Astros World Series roster in 2005, is now struggling to hit his weight with a franchise that has not had a winning season in 10 years. Has but one major league skill (power) in a game that no longer values said skill like it did 5 years ago. Is best friends with a failed Chicago Cub prospect.
West – the highlight of his celebritude is a bit part in one of those excremental Matrix sequels. Now currently screeching loudly about how Obama stole his man parts.
slag
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: I don’t know why I’m doing this, but…
Christina Rhomer
Jared Bernstein
Hell, even Paul Volcker.
Not only that, he started out with a guy named Van Jones.
So, if we’re going to be critical of the Administration, I feel it’s incumbent upon us–as supposed liberals–to be honest in our criticism and not be prone to hyperbolic attacks. Assuming we want others to take our criticisms, seriously, that is. And not just as whining that daddy doesn’t pay enough attention to us.
hell's littlest angel
I’ve always been baffled by Mamet’s reputation. His dialog sounds to me like an emotionally-stunted twelve-year old’s idea of how clever adults talk. Cynical, misogynistic tough guy characters were old hat when Mickey Spillane was a pup.
I’ll bet Steven Baldwin is thrilled by all this, fantasizing about finally getting a part in a movie that isn’t an utter piece of shit.
mistersnrub
@Hunter Gathers: Add Dennis “Bordello of Blood” Miller and Victoria Jackson to that list of washed up losers.
Elliecat
@Tom Levenson: I’m not well-acquainted with Mamet’s work but I remember reading things about and by him in Chicago newspapers way back when and I never got the idea he was a liberal.
Hunter Gathers
@mistersnrub: I should also add Pat Caddell and Lanny Davis.
WereBear
In his book Blinded by the Right David Brock admits he drifted towards conservatism because it was not a crowded field.
Thus, conservative intellectuals and artists.
Ooooh, Fred Sauer wants to sell me his book on how liberalism destroys people and nations! Do tell!
Tim, Interrupted
Since this is a non-ABL thread, please allow me to say that Dr. West speaks for many of us, even lily white homos like me.
Or are lily white homos allowed to have an opinion on this? From whom do I get a ruling on that?
Martin
I don’t understand the outrage over West’s statements. He’s an academic in an area where pushing at the edges is both encouraged and important to do. You can’t view statements in isolation, you need to see the big picture.
It’s shit like this why tenure is important, because you can’t have every paragraph you utter carved out and used as evidence that you’re unfit to teach.
Origuy
I wasn’t familiar with Mamet, so when I see his name, I think of Édouard Manet, and wonder why a 19th century French painter is talking about American politics and shouldn’t this be Tom’s thread?
kindness
The funny thing is, Stanford is not classically liberal. It’s academic open minded inquiry (other than the Loser Hoover Institute types…I’m looking at you Condi) but stanford expects their people to go out and be somebody in the world. Mamet misgauged his audience.
I’ll be the guy crapped his pants after hearing Obama’s speech yesterday.
kindness
@Tim, Interrupted: troll
WereBear
I like House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross best, but I think it’s the acting; not necessarily the writing I enjoy; there are some very heavy hitters in both pieces and they do an incredible job; the plots in each would fit on a napkin.
Jay
David Mamet is a “famous intellectual?” C’mon now.
One great episode of “The Shield” does not a famous intellectual make. :-)
SFAW
Probably about the same as now, at least as far as orders of magnitude.
So much of what gets discussed here is inside baseball. If we discount Fox (yeah, I know, maybe not a legit thing to do), how many people would know anything of Malkin, Pammy Geller, or the other psycho right-wingers that inhabit the blogoverse? Even Erick Ericksdottir wouldn’t have his megaphone if it weren’t for Fox.
Ya know, I re-read this, and I’m not sure it’s consistent with itself. But, on the other hand, ….
Anyway, I’m guessing that maybe 2% of the country has heard of Teh-Man-What-Created-Moses-Wine, and of that 2%, I’d guess 80% of them follow political blogs.
Erik Vanderhoff
Memo to Mr. Mamet:
Writing episodes of “The Unit” does not qualify you as an expert in foreign affairs or counter-terrorism.
Sincerely,
Reality
MikeJ
@Hunter Gathers: Lanny Davis was never a pubic intellectual, he’s a paid advocate. Lawyers and lobbyists don’t count in this category.
And he’s actually not that bad IRL when he’s not being paid to say stupid stuff.
kc
@SFAW:
OK, well, I’d never heard of him before, and that’s all that counts . . .
Mike in NC
When he crafts his Magnum Opus, wingnut Mamet will have plenty of ‘talent’ to draw on when it comes to casting time: Stephen Baldwin, Dennis Miller, Kelsey Grammer, Ben Stein, John Ratzenberger, and of course Jon Voight. Put them all together in a padded cell.
Bill Murray
Lawyer’s, Guns and Money covered part of his coming out in 2008
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2008/04/david-mamet-constitutional-scholar#comments
Alan in SF
I just re-read the entire West piece, trying again to find something stupid in it. Yeah, he’s full of himself, and expresses himself with an energy that borders on shtick, but if there’s anything stuipid in there, I can’t find it. Stupid would be making asinine Beavis & Butthead quality smirks when asked about the drug war, or completely glossing over the fact that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, or making it even easier for people to get and carry guns, or slashing the domestic budget just after giving an enormous tax break to billionaires.
The Golux
I am struck by what a truly great actor Kelsey Grammer is – I never realized how much talent it took to pretend to be intelligent.
Tom Hilton
@Alan in SF:
d’Fuh? Seriously???
How about ‘deracinated’ and ‘afraid of free black men’ for starters? How about the part where he complains about not getting tickets to the inauguration? And about how what made it worse was that some peon got a ticket?
And as for the ‘substantive’ part, how about the fact that it’s 100% lefty platitudes and approximately 0% substantive policy detail? Because that sure as shit strikes me as stupid.
virag
west has said some goofy shit over the years, and he has a reputation as a relentlessly self-promoting academic lightweight, but in this case, he is certainly correct. he was on point; cornel west certainly has reason to be disappointed.
gwangung
@Jay:
He’s a famous playwright. That’s not the same as intellectual (I don’t consider his body of work to be overly intellectual in the way that, say, Tony Kushner or David Henry Hwang try to be).
Lancelot Link
Still trying to figure out when Mamet got kicked in the head by the horse.
Probably about the time he started to get a large Hollywood-sized taxable income.
AAA Bonds
Levy is actually quite important, as he often distinguishes himself as the leading idiot fascist within France
Alan in SF
@Tom Hilton: Like I said, full of himself. “Stupid” would be something that was blatantly incorrect or morally offensive. Maybe you could be a little more specific than “lefty platitudes” and citer something that West is actually stupidly wrong about.
minor victory
From the link:
Yes… why does everyone think of slaves as victims and slave owners of oppressors? Damn close-minded liberal elitists!
Wow. Way to undercut your own argument, Mamet. Sure, there are shades of gray to Jefferson but when it comes to slave owners and slaves, oppressor and victim pretty much DEFINES the entire relationship between the two. Could he have picked a worse example?
Cat Lady
Who cares about these clowns. When David Simon turns into a wingnut, I’ll know it’s time to turn off all the lights.
Kobie
@SFAW: Too true. There’s a reason BJ has a “blogospheric navel-gazing” tag.
In a discussion with my stepfather, who is just about as lefty as I am, is politically pretty well-read, is a card-carrying member of the ACLU and with whom I generally see eye-to-eye on pretty much everything, we hit a point of disagreement regarding something-or-other. So I started quoting some of the evil shit that Malkin and the horde had said, and he looked me dead in the eye and said “Who the fuck is Michelle Malkin?”
That said, he predicted the Teabaggers were going nowhere last year, while I told him we were all fucked, and look who was right. So yeah.
Church Lady
@ruemara:
A “minstrel show”? Racist.
joeyess
I just read that Cornell West piece and, aside from the whining at getting butt-hurt, I didn’t find anything in there that was particularly stupid. Can someone enlighten me to the actual stupidity?
MobiusKlein
@gwangung: I just can’t get too worked up about a playwright I like having wacky views about some things. I watch him for his plays, not for his current political leanings.
Dennis Miller started sucked not because of being a right wing douche –
He sucked because he became a full time douche, and unfunny to boot.
Comrade Kevin
@joeyess: It’s the “whining about getting butt-hurt”. Bitching about not getting a ticket to the inauguration, while some prole hotel worker got one, and then complaining about someone else being a “tool of the oligarchs”, is stupidity.
Dr. Loveless
@Comrade Kevin:
That’s my take too. West had a valid point until the butthurt started, and the stuff about Obama fearing free black men, and other blacker-than-thou adhominems. Which, as someone pointed out in another thread, are strange things for someone from a stable middle-class upbringing, who’s spent his whole adult life in and around Harvard and Princeton, to say about someone from a working-class broken home who spent a big chunk of his adult life as a community organizer.
Suffern ACE
@Comrade Kevin: Yep. There may be valid critiques of the president in there, but the personal ones seem to come down to “doesn’t return my phone calls” which overshadows everything else. I have some problems with the direction of this country, but I don’t think they stem from either his lack of a pipeline to the President, or my own.*
(Caveat: I am confident, however, that I would be more satisfied with the current direction of the country, if the President were to just clear his decisions with me first, .)
MaximisNYC
Do we have to ritually denounce everything that the designated enemies of the day have ever done? Because I’ve enjoyed some of Mamet’s work, and I don’t think West is totally clueless… even if their recent statements are clueless.
joeyess
@Comrade Kevin: Ok…..And I understand and stated as much. However, he does have some very valid points that no one wants to talk about. He complained about a personal affront and that wasn’t stupid, it was merely self centered. Now if we’re really interested in exposing stupidity, Cornel West shouldn’t be the target. There is a target rich environment all around us. Starting with this douche bag.
Comrade Kevin
@joeyess: Well, the problem is that, for someone like Prof. West (famous person, intellectual, etc), when he surrounds a bunch of serious points with a bunch of personal animus, the serious points will get completely lost. I would think that someone who has been around as long as he has would get that.
batgirl
@Uncle Clarence Thomas: @Tim, Interrupted: @Martin: @Alan in SF: I see Tom Hilton already responded to Alan in SF but yeah, I think this is blatantly incorrect and morally offensive and full of stupid:
General Stuck
@joeyess:
If it is the same stuff I read, what he did was opine about Obama’s blackness, and how Obama was understandably “rootless” and several other quips that reinforce the wingnut meme of Obama not being a real American and different than other Americans. This may have been unintentional, but someone this smart should know better. There were some other stuff, mostly whining about this or that. But the part that jumped out at me was sly validation of birherism from the right.
well, hell I looked up and batgirl has it quoted. gonna publish anyways from the effort.
Douglas
So he’s an utterly unserious DFH? Got it.
TD
That set of “intellectuals” is terrible–and has been terrible for well over a decade (at least). Doesn’t anyone remember when BHL wrote an entire essay on how Kant was “raving mad”, and one of his primary sources was a satirical figure created 10 years ago.
El Cid
I’ve encountered a bunch of people throughout life who think that whatever some academic circles of liberals and multi-so on and so forths hate in terms of media and which aren’t listened to be some sort of ‘working class’ stylized persona must be the genuine folk article.
And not listening to such nonsense means that is why you’re elitist.
So since lots and lots of people listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill O’Reilly or whoever, and you’re a liberal-left-feminist-LBGT-Afro-Latino-etc, and you hate that, you hate all those people.
And how could all those people be completely wrong? After all, if you release yourself from the burden of knowing much about an issue with an eye toward cutting through stuff which favors the powerful, then by gosh, it sounds like these types know their stuff!
I have known people who literally went conservative because the liberal academics they dealt with most directly were in fact snotty and elitist.
So therefore it makes sense to change your whole outlook because you feel safe in deciding that if the people you deal with are annoying and assholes and they have a certain political outlook, well, then, fuck, you just pick the opposite ideology because you obviously are correct in confusing the single as the whole.
Ija
@Alan in SF:
So you’re saying he’s absolutely right about Obama being afraid of “free black men”? Do you realize how stupid that is?
Bettencourt
I’m actually a big fan of Mamet’s work (particularly Glengarry Glen Ross and the hugely underrated Spartan and The Edge), but ever since I read this passage (all caps emphasis mine) from his 1987 essay collection “Writing in Restaurants,” I’ve had a hard time thinking of Mamet as any sort of liberal:
“When we look at our large society today we see many problems — overcrowding, the risk of nuclear annihilation, the perversion of the work ethic, the disappearance of tradition, HOMOSEXUALITY, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, the tenuousness of the economy — and we say ‘What bad luck that they are besetting us at once.’
“Even taken individually these occurrences seem incomprehensible. Taken as a whole the contemplation of them can surely induce terror. What is happening here and why have these things, coincidentally, beset us?”
Sorry for besetting you, Dave. (A-hole).
Tyro
He’s got a phenomenal ear for language and dialogue
That’s what people say, but you can pretty much always recognize a “Mamet” film by the stilted dialog and artificial speaking style the characters have.
GregB
I hear that Mamet is furiously working on his new conservative opus:
Glenngary Glenn Beck.
Jason
We shouldn’t be shocked at Mamet’s belated discovery of objectivist teahadism. Mamet’s always been a self-centered narcissistic arsehole. Study his work: it’s what the world looks like to a high-functioning sociopath. He’s finally found his home and I’m glad for him: now the left can drop the pretense that he’s a great artist.
BrianM
I found Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism awfully useful when I went through my James/Dewey/Rorty phase. So it’s sad when I hear him on the Tavis Smiley show, since it sure seems his life’s work is now himself.
TruthOfAngels
@MikeJ: ‘Pubic’. Heh. Heh heh heh heh heh.
(/beavis)
bob h
The Mamet case is odd because so much of his work looks at the sordid underbelly of business and free enterprise (“Glengarry, Glen Ross”, “Speed the Plow”, etc.) And work like “Race” can be interpreted as a protest about racism. No Republican looking at his work would be much encouraged, not that any would.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
I was a liberal before 9/11, now I’m outraged over Chappaquiddick.
El Cid
I just wanted to point out that whatever Tavis Smiley’s tantrums in ending it, those (I’m sorry I forget) annual Congress (or something something) for Black America were absolutely awesome
I don’t want to hear any bitching about it.
If you watched them, especially during the Bush Jr. years, you saw parades of panels laying out how it was in various black communities and in various patterns of AA thought, without the sort of restraint always seen in the mainstream media.
Remember that when all that seems to count of Tavis Smiley is what he did at the end.
Sophia
I suspect Mamet bonds with the wingnuts over their shared contempt for their audiences. What is the (highly polished wood) acting career of Rebecca Pidgeon if not a huge middle finger to Mamet’s fans?
Steve M.
I haven’t read through all the comments, so I don’t know if anyone else has said this, but Mamet’s conversion to wingnuttery happened years ago. His attempt to sell it a second time as a new, shocking thing is just a desperate career move.