I have to say that I didn’t find Mamet’s essay nearly as surprising as other people seem to have. His 1992 play Oleanna showed a keen ear for the tyranny of PC, and the astonishing fact that much of its New York audience sympathized with the female character — contemporary reviews recount loud arguments on the way out of the theater — shows just how precisely Mamet perceived the zeitgeist of that hyper-sensitive era. He calibrated his drama to elicit liberal outrage with the absolute minimum provocation. (In the post-Clinton era, the play, which Mamet made into a movie, plays as a hilarious comic period-piece, a sort of highbrow That 70s Show for the early ’90s.) You can’t observe a milieu that keenly without noticing the flaws in its worldview.
