David Mamet's Bubble

David Mamet is a fiction writer. These days it appears he is sticking with fiction.

In his new autobiography, Mamet tells a story about his discovery, after supposedly years of believing otherwise, that he is really a conservative. As part of his explanation for how he could have been so mistaken about his own beliefs, he claims to have been living in a “bubble” which caused him to be unable to perceive the truth about economics, conservatives and liberals.

He claims never to have “knowingly met a conservative” until he was 60 years old. He claims he didn’t learn anything true about politics or economics at his “hippie” undergraduate school in Vermont.

The implication here is that the treacherous “bubble” was there in the outside world, constructed by others—by unthinking liberals, I take it—and that he was its victim.

He talks about this bubble as if liberals caused him to live in it.

His story is that he just never bothered to learn anything about economics until one day, late in life, he started to read Milton Friedman. Bear in mind, Mamet went to school. In fact, he went to the same school I did, the one in Vermont. I was there only a few years after he was, and somehow—against the grain, I guess, according to Mamet’s story-telling—I read economics books there, among other kinds of books. Even a “hippie” college has classes. I took classes there, where I learned a lot of things, because I was in school, and that’s what you do in school.

It seems to me that what Mamet is really revealing in his story is his own profound lack of curiosity. One irony here is that the very idea of that “hippie” college in Vermont is that you get out of your education what you put into it, that the responsibility for educating oneself is on you, and his silly story about the “bubble” reveals that he didn’t bother.

Whatever failure of education he describes is his own.

I should have just posted this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-the-secret-knowledge-by-david-mamet.html?_r=1