Oh, those tough guys--Hemingway, Mailer, and now Mamet--their egos were so far gone they never looked outside to see how they were perceived.  Rather pathetic, that clinging to an impossible, even fictitious by-proxy manhood.

Hemingway killed himself at 61, already thinking he was an old man, one who had become impotent in more ways than would suit such a carefully groomed public vision of manliness.

I read that piece by Mamet earlier and thought about contrasting it with Stephen King's piece on being a gun owner who nevertheless can understand the need for controls, but I realized there was really no comparison.  King has never taken himself that seriously, and doesn't see himself as a wordsmith-philosopher-game-changer.  (His book on writing, however, is the best I've read.  I'm not a big fan of his novels but boy, does he get it.)

I remember that moment when Charlton Heston gave the "From my cold dead hands" speech at the NRA in the year 2000, warning of looming liberty lost unless we get ready to take up arms against a government that could go rogue at any minute.  I felt anger as much as I felt pity for that has-been actor trying so hard to pretend he could be one of his own characters. 

It's much the same way I felt when I read the Mamet piece.  You put it together perfectly.  Yes, that's what it is.

I really love David Mamet and his rightwing conversion was difficult for me.  If you look at his great works like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, there's a touch of the progressive Arthur Miller at work -- smart, clever and worthy people are taking each other down because they're trapped in a system that puts them at each other's throats.

The failures of Stanley Levine in Glengarry mirror the failures of Willy Loman and we know that hotshot sales guy Ricky Roma is headed down that path -- we even see him con a guy into buying Florida property (using some of the most fun and absurd smooth talk ever) only to have the guy show up at the office near the end demanding his money back.  "I don't have the power," the man admits (paraphrasing).  "My wife controls the money."

Mamet got his Glengarry dialogue from two places.  First, from years of listening to his father, who worked in a cutthroat insurance sales office.  Second, through the careful study of Harold Pinter and by workshopping the short pieces that make up the indispensable Goldberg Variations with his actor friends William H. Macy.  So, it's part tough guy stuff and part artistic study.  In American Buffalo, there's the famous "Fuckin' Ruthie" speech given by, I think, Teach, who earlier that morning plucked a piece of toast off of his friend's Ruthie's plate and took a bite.  She said, "Help yourself." Hours later, Teach is on a tirade about it.  How dare she quip "help yourself," to hum after all the times he's picked up a check, paid for the beer, brought her to a ball game... turns out that whole speech stemmed from Mamet visiting William H. Macy's apartment and taking a piece of cheese out of his refrigerator.  Macy said, "Hey, help yourself."  Mamet couldn't take the condescension.  What sounds like tough street talk, though, really sprang from two sensitive artists (at the time, struggling) quarreling over cheese.

So, Mamet is as much Pinter as he is Hemingway and Hemingway was as much Gertrude Stein as he was an amateur pugilist.  A life in the arts won't put callouses on your hands.

But, I believe there's something more than macho pose in Mamet's conservative turn.  For awhile, he got tired of the theatre.  He started to see it as a flabby art form, undisciplined by the higher budgetary demands of film.  He went on to make a few great films and to write for television.  His work thrived within the demands of economy.  He became very market oriented bout his creative work.  Meanwhile, a whole lot of theatre is now driven by either non-profits or public funding or a combination of both an he kind of hates many of the results.  Also, he's gone right wing on Israel.

I don't know, I like him too much to see all of this as a macho pose.  I think his esthetics just trump his politics.  It's like that with a lot of the really good writers and artists.

Does the following quote from David Mamet's 2012 book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture bring to mind machismo, toughness, authenticity or a person  unhinged from any connection with reality:

"Sarah Palin was a commercial fisherman. She actually worked with her hands, and, so, she like Harry Truman, was, to the Left, an object not only to be dismissed, but to be mocked. For the Left loves "the workers" only in the abstract; to find that they not only exist as individuals, but are willing to bet their subsistence upon their principles of hard work and thrift...."

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"I claim that when a writer becomes successful, generally, without giving it too much thought, he assumes another style of living. I don't think you can come out of the Stork Club with your belly full and caviar rolling down your vest, and rush home and write a 'Grapes of Wrath,'   In fact, I've argued with John Steinbeck about this, but he says you can, so I must be wrong." - Radio comedian Fred Allen 

  As someone who likes Mamet's early work like 'A Life in the Theatre' and 'The Water Engine', but finds most of his later work, over-blown and self-indulgent (Speed the Plow, yuck!), I think you're right about his turning Conservative.  I think he built his reputation on writing great dialogue.  And he was, and is, a great writer of dialogue.  He has an incredible ear for street-wise dialogue and tough-talking every day slang.   But, I agree, it was all just a pretense.  He wasn't really street-wise.  He had an ability to replicate street-wise and put great assemblages of tough-talking words in his character's mouths.  As he got praise for that, he took it on as his own persona.  He enjoyed being the provocateur.  But what he didn't possess, in my opinion, was / is the ability, (or perhaps the desire), to construct well-structured plays.  As someone once noted, "You don't go to Mamet's plays for the plot, you go for the dialogue."  As he has aged, Mamet has become the theater's version of John McCain; a cranky old guy.  You're right, Mamet can't replicate his early successes because they were built on a street-wise persona and toughness which was an affectation all along and he doesn't have play structure to fall back on, and so, like McCain, he has to go further and further to the Right to keep up the pretense of being a tough guy.  Let's face it, Mamet's plays, even the highly praised ones, are mostly just characters talking at each other.  In my opinion, they satisfy our desire to hear great wordplay, but leave us wanting in terms of theatrical catharsis.

I would rather sit through a dozen more performances of Long's Day Journey into Night, than see one more production of Glengarry Glen Ross.