Something Howie posted minutes ago got me thinking about what the post-2008 election period has done to people. Charlie Pierce once regularly called it … well, let him tell it:
The Republican Party is in the last throes of the prion disease it contracted when Reagan fed it the monkey brains.
After an inquiry this week, I asked a knowlegeable friend about a one-time government whistle-blower from the aughts who has fallen off the map. Where is he at today? Post-2016, does he have his head on straight? The answer was a blunt no.
Back in his Unclaimed Territory days (again in the aughts), Glenn Greenwald drew a following as an analyst of “intelligence policy, civil liberties, media criticism, and national security,” Sean Wilents wrote in 2014. “Over the coming years, he would win enthusiastic praise from, among others, Christopher Hayes, Michael Moore, and Rachel Maddow, who dubbed him ‘the American left’s most fearless political commentator.’”
That was then, before Greenwald’s Fox News days. This is now:
Howie looks at recent comments from playwright David Mamet. He titles his post Did David Mamet Lose His Mind? Or Just His Soul?:
In 2011 a budding actor friend of mine played the role of Charlie Fox in a college production of David Mamet’s 1988 play Speed-the-Plow. Mamet, worth $20 million today, came to the college and watched the play and told my friend he had great stage presence. That was some praise since Ron Silver had played the role in the Broadway production and won a Tony for Best Actor. I was general manager of Sire Records at the time of the Broadway production and Madonna was our biggest artist. She played the role of Karen in the play but I had an undefined creepy feeling about Mamet and didn’t go to any of the 279 performances.
That intuitive feeling of mine about it predated the infamous piece he wrote for the Village Voice 20 years later Why I Am No Longer A ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’. Already a rabid anti-Palestinian extremist, he gradually turned into a shrill and sociopathic right-wing nut who seems to be laboring under the delusion that Trump was a “great president.” He’s bought in on all of the crazy now– from anti-gun control, anti-Colin Kaepernick to insisting, in his badly-written lunatic fringe book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, that Trump was cheated out of reelection.
On Monday, Deadline reported that “With the high-profile, starry revival of his American Buffalo opening Thursday on Broadway, playwright David Mamet seems to be doing his best– or worst– to make headlines. The latest: The conservative Mamet told Fox News’ Mark Levin on Sunday night that ‘teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.’ The offensive take comes just a few days after Mamet’s appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, in which the playwright offered a muddled retraction of a claim made in his new book Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. When asked by Maher about his statement in the book that the left attempted a coup during the last presidential election, Mamet conceded that he ‘misspoke.’ But his appearance on Fox News’ Life, Liberty & Levin— again, to promote the book, not the play– wasn’t so conciliatory. Speaking on the hot-button topic of community and parental control in schools, Mamet said: ‘We have to take back control. If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed in a very real sense by people who are– whether they know it or not– sexual predators. Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so, but they are abusing them mentally and using sex to do so. This has always been the problem with education, is that teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia. And that’s why there were strict community strictures about it, thank God. And this started to break down when the schools said, You know what? We have to teach the kids about sex. Why? Because what if they don’t do it at home?'”
Aside from a few of his plays and movies, I know little about Mamet. Or Greenwald (never met him). Or a host of others who over the last decade(s) have gone down the rabbit hole of no return. Trump didn’t start this. QAnon grew out of “this,” whatever this is. People have lost fathers to Fox News. People who once seemed sane or progressive(ish) have gone full-on, Jack D. Ripper fluoridization-happy. Conspiracy theories have become a way of life for them.
Maybe it was just a latent gene waiting for the right trigger to manifest itself. I don’t know.
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