Dramatist David Mamet is a proud flip-flopper. In a Village Voice must-read, Mamet commits the bravest act known to a celebrity thinker: he changes his mind in public. No longer able to reconcile his 1960’s-born “everything is always wrong” worldview with the “rather wonderful and privileged circumstances” of American life, he has renounced his inner “brain-dead liberal.” Mamet on his moment of revelation: “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 f__k up”.

In an aside, Mamet recalls how he once won a New Yorker contest:

The task was to name or create a “10” of anything, and mine was the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: “I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.” That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

I’d say he composed a “9.5” with the following:

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

That is just about the only admission a conservative ever wants to get.