Positive Liberty

This context-plucked snippet of a phrase is from the ‘pen’ of David Mamet, surely one of the finest playwrights / screenwriters of our age. It is not, however, from any of his dialog overlapping, cynical 1.5 dimensional character cluttered literary efforts but from a longish essay in, of all places, the Village Voice. Herewith, Mamet the formerly “brain-dead liberal” (his phrase, folks, not mine) and still master wordsmith:

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

Good stuff (though not, by the way, all that much different from the slant one gets from P.J. O’Rourke’s brilliant Parliament Of Whores). Perhaps one shouldn’t be all that surprised to hear such comments from someone whose political sensibilities were sufficiently well honed to have written Oleanna back in 1992. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be a role here for Mamet perennial favorite, Ricky Jay. Even so, well worth a read.

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