Cracks in the Monolith

Recently it was playwright, screenwriter and director David Mamet, writing in The Village Voice, to announce that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal."   He believes instead that the understanding of the world shown by free market thinkers such as Thomas Sowell, "our greatest contemporary philosopher, . . . meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

Now comes director and producer David Zucker, another erstwhile liberal Democrat who has "grown in office" in recent years.   His new movie, An American Carol, will be released in October.   From the trailer it looks like a hilarious critique of the liberal cultural monolith, focusing on an anti-American filmmaker, "Michael Malone," who campaigns to end the Fourth of July holiday on grounds that America's past and present is offensive, and therefore shouldn't be celebrated.



For taking aim at a fundamental article of left-wing faith -- America is bad -- Zucker should expect efforts by true believers to stop the film's distribution.

It's a long way to liberation from leftist cultural hegemony.   Mamet, Zucker and others are making the first cracks from within. But remember that the liberation of Europe in 1989 began with cracks in the Soviet monolith made years earlier, by Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and others.

We recall Mamet's Village Voice essay:   "We were riding along and listening to NPR.   I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind:   'Shut the fuck up.' "

Sounds like a crack in the Monolith to us.