from The Corner Tavern via democommie
Imagine you’re a playwright whose chief talent is
finding creative ways to use the word “fuck.” Imagine, too, that the more you
use the word “fuck,” the richer you become. And the richer you become, the
further removed you are from reality. Imagine you become richer and richer and
further and further removed from reality, till you morph into one of your own
characters, hurling invective into the void of cyberspace.
You’ve just become David Mamet.
Mamet, who is, let’s face it, a fucking genius when
it comes to saying “fuck,” is considerably less talented when it comes to
understanding American history. And when it comes to understanding the U.S.
Constitution, well, he’s a fucking idiot. On those topics, he has all the
analytical skills of an eleven year old boy obsessed with comic books and
superheroes – not altogether unlike the National Rifle Association’s Wayne
LaPierre, who responded to the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School thusly:
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is
a good guy with a gun.”
Today, Mamet provided a sterling example his
pre-adolescent, superhero-worshipping take on our history and our Constitution
in an article entitled “Gun
Laws And The Fools Of Chelm,” on Newsweek’s Daily Beast website. Mamet’s piece is comical
both in terms of it’s razor-thin analysis (“Karl Marx summed up Communism as
‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’”) and its
desperate attempt to appear intellectual (“This is a chillingly familiar set of
grievances; and its recrudescence was foreseen by the Founders”); but its most
damnable feature is that it’s utterly devoid of facts. Mamet doesn’t cite or
link to a single source anywhere in the piece, even when he quotes the Declaration
Of Independence. (See, that wasn’t so hard.)
