The American Spectator

p>Some conservatives reacted to Mamet’s essay with a Manifest Destiny attitude — providence long ago deemed he would be ours; it was just a matter of time. True, the former Chicago cabbie’s rough-hewn, workman attitude toward the craft of writing (“You know…you need to build a garage but you can’t afford a bricklayer,” he once told the New Yorker ‘s John Lahr. “Well, hell, figure out how to lay bricks. You need a script, well, hell, figure out how to write one”), his crew cut (“the haircut of an honest, two-pair-of-jeans working man, a man from Chicago, a man without vanity whose being stands without need of either introduction or apology,” he wrote in a 1992  New York Times essay), combined with a pronounced distaste for pretension — all this suggested something more substantial than fey liberalism. Consider, as further evidence, the following exchange from his one-act play Bobby Gould in Hell : br> /p>

Bobby: “Nothing’s black and white.”

The Devil: “Nothing’s black and white? What about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb f—k!”

br> No moral relativism here. Mamet may have attended Goddard College in the 1960s — a “hippie, radical, drug-infested school for f—k-ups like myself,” he once told the Guardian , preparing students for “no society more exclusive than the criminally bohemian” — ushering in a lifelong love affair with flinty rural Vermont, where the writer still maintains a home, but he never romanticized the era. Asked by New Theater Quarterly in 1988 whether he felt the performance art of the 1960s served an artistic end, Mamet sniped, “It had a purpose in the way a guy goes into McDonald’s, pulls a gun, and kills a bunch of people. Obviously, there is some meaning. But it’s not very constructive.” In his book