Some flowery insight
The playwright David Mamet visited Austin this week to unveil his archives at the Harry Ransom Center. Mamet, one of the most accomplished living playwrights, has a reputation for being hard to deal with. But I was comforted by his brusque, ceaselessly opinionated demeanor, which reminded me of my headstrong Zionist grandfather in Chicago. Being with Mamet was like being back home again.
Despite his theatrical prowess, theater was not the main item on the menu when I had lunch with him and a group of other students on Wednesday. Mamet spent most of the time talking politics. After expounding for some time on issues related to Israel, Mamet offered us a morsel of conventional political wisdom: One should form their views by reading the opinions of the side he or she doesn't agree with. While it's easy to "enjoy having people to hate," as he said, the answers we're all looking for don't exist in the safety of like minds.
The best place to start understanding politics is right here at our university, where officials meander and conspire beneath the feet of oblivious students. UT, Mamet observed, is a "campus of movement. This doesn't look like a lot of the campuses I know," he said, "where kids are just lounging around."
UT has no shortage of differing opinions among the heads adorned with cowboy hats and those with beanies. But the campus also has an alarming surplus of those who don't have opinions or choose not to voice them aloud or at the polls. Too many students are scared by politics, but the secret is that politics is not difficult to understand. As Mamet said, the only things you need are literacy and a brain. From those, opinions flower. And every day is spring.
Finnegan is an American studies senior.
Mamet's 'finest hour'
"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
- Winston Churchill
Speaking Thursday to a class of students born with an extra Y chromosome, David Mamet, the writer and director best known for the play and film "Glengarry Glen Ross" and the screenplay for "Wag the Dog," opened with a short discussion about a man most know chiefly from history books. "Churchill. That's the guy," Mamet said.
He gave us a short bio of the man the United Kingdom once named the greatest Briton of all time. Mamet said Churchill, like himself, was told he was dumb as a child and was put in a remedial English grammar class, in which he mastered the language. Churchill was elected Prime Minister while England was embroiled in war with Nazi Germany, and he used linguistic skill to gain the financial and military support of the United States and, most importantly, to rouse the spirits of an England under bombardment.
"Those speeches on the radio he gave ... He saved Western Civilization," Mamet said. "I put him up there with Shakespeare ... That's the power of words."
Mamet's Churchill anecdote serves to illustrate what is commonly forgotten in the fray: the fact that neither side of human endeavor, humanistic nor scientific, exists in a vacuum. This we must remember when contemplating the age-old debate of who rules when it comes to the humanities and the sciences. No matter how stirring Churchill's speeches were, England would have been decimated had it not been for the technical advances made during the war. And this truth is still evident in reverse, as it took a leader such as Churchill to mobilize scientists, engineers and industrialists to fight, in their own way, for Mother England.
Mamet, himself no slouch with the language, emphasized the importance of studying the rhythms and peculiarities of English, but an addendum to that could be that the disciplines of biology - or literature, or dance, or engineering - do not compete with one another. Instead, they join together to form the mosaic of our continually evolving cultural landscape.
N'Diaye is a government and English junior.
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