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A guy who's made a career writing plays and movies about the art of the grift couldn't be an orthodox liberal. This is a guy who understands something about human nature. About why people sucker and how other people get suckered. "If men were angels," and so forth. So David Mamet writes in the Village Voice this week how he figured out he's no longer a "brain-dead liberal." Uh oh.

Here's Mamet on how he changed his mind:

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

From there, Mamet embarks -- as only Mamet can -- on an exegesis of the Constitution. And he encapsulates in a few paragraphs the essence of Hamilton, Madison and Jay (John, not Ricky) quite nicely:

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.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests....

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.

James Madison, eat your heart out.

So Mamet gets it. But you could detect this "newfound" world view, if you were paying attention, in Mamet's work these past decades. Even when he thought he was ripping capitalism in Glengarry Glen Ross, he was really sending up the lust, greed, envy, sloth "and their pals" of... well, you and me.

One of my favorite movies of the past 15 years or so, on a long list of favorites, is The Spanish Prisoner. Steve Martin plays the bad guy. Brilliant. The thing about bad guys is, in Mamet's world, it's not that they lie. They just don't tell the whole truth. But Mamet hits on a particular truth with this exchange between Martin's Jimmy Dell and Campbell Scott's Joe Ross:

Jimmy Dell: I think you'll find that if what you've done for them is as valuable as you say it is, if they are indebted to you morally but not legally, my experience is they will give you nothing, and they will begin to act cruelly toward you.
Joe Ross: Why?
Jimmy Dell: To suppress their guilt.

Dell knows a lot about guilt and cruelty and even violence. So does his creator, David Mamet. No romantic, he. That's what makes him great. The human comedy is the same year in and year out. Only the scenes change.

Photo credit: The Associated Press