The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions

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 {{quote|The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming . . . . The world is entering a time of plague.}}
+Totalitarianism has suffocated individuality; the Hilton in San Francisco is emulated before the Plaza in New York; housing projects look like nurseries and nurseries look like hospitals; appliances are plastic rather than metal; vile bully tactics in Vietnam have developed from simple occupation of Southeast Asia; the psychotic has taken over from the psychopath; pornography has gained another step on sexuality. In a word, Lyndon Johnson has replaced John Kennedy.
+Johnson, Mailer tells us, is the archetypically alienated figure—a fact which can be observed in his prose (perhaps “the worst ever written by any political leader anywhere”), in his boorish manners, in his deceitfulness, in his voracious ego, and in his almost arrogant lack of style. If a President has a profound effect on the quality of life during his era—and Mailer is convinced that he does—then hope is indeed dim. And the consequences may be far worse than possible loss of prestige, power, or land; for there is the unknown to face after death, and the possibility that there is no absolution for cowardly sins.
+But Mailer’s exhortations against the insanities of the age of Johnson do not come from one whose own tensions—between radicalism and Puritanism, heroism, and buffoonery, the playboy’s life and the intellectual’s vocation—are anywhere near control. And there is a further complication in Mailer’s complex personality, an unmistakably reactionary streak, not unrelated in impulse to his intense religiosity, which challenges his natural and professed political radicalism. Apart from the kind of conservatism that is common property among many contemporary radicals—a quasi-isolationism that urges America to terminate involvement in practically all foreign countries and a profound distrust of the liberal establishment—Mailer holds positions on matters not directly political which fall neatly into line with the conservative spirit (he is, for example, strongly opposed to birth control and abortion, and he speaks of homosexuality as a “vice”). But two pieces of evidence (both from the essay on the 1964 Republican Convention) are particularly striking. First, Mailer confesses to a buried urge to see Barry Goldwater elected:
+{{quote|I knew Goldwater could win because something in me leaped out at the thought; a part of me, a devil, wished to take that choice.}}
 === Notes ===
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