User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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One could certainly debate Mailer’s conclusions, the sort of sweeping, summative analysis he was fond of making on the large questions of politics and life, but that is not the object here. My point is that forty-four years after the publication of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for all of the differences in the

contexts and the details, Mailer is using the F-ism to test and partially justify the C-ism in a way that is not unlike Hemingway’s approach to the same question. And like Hemingway, Mailer comes down on the side of the now former Reds partly because they are not fascists.

We can say former Reds now not just because there is no longer a Soviet Union, but also because in Russia the word itself has long since lost the edge it possessed in the early years of the establishment of the Soviet state. Of course, the word remains in such terms as the Red Army, but there it is in a vestigial role, not the provocative one it once had. Similarly, by the time Mailer began visiting the Soviet Union the energy of the 1930s, its frenzied “socialist building" had flowed over the dams of all those hydroelectric plants, flown up through the stacks of all the steel mills, and become frozen in the gray cement of the resulting Soviet concrete colossus. During Harry

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 One could certainly debate Mailer’s conclusions, the sort of sweeping, summative analysis he was fond of making on the large questions of politics and life, but that is not the object here. My point is that forty-four years after the publication of ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for all of the differences in the
 contexts and the details, Mailer is using the F-ism to test and partially justify the C-ism in a way that is not unlike Hemingway’s approach to the same question. And like Hemingway, Mailer comes down on the side of the now former Reds partly because they are not fascists.
+We can say former Reds now not just because there is no longer a Soviet Union, but also because in Russia the word itself has long since lost the edge it possessed in the early years of the establishment of the Soviet state. Of course, the word remains in such terms as the Red Army, but there it is in a vestigial role, not the provocative one it once had. Similarly, by the time Mailer began visiting the Soviet Union the energy of the 1930s, its frenzied “socialist building" had flowed over the dams of all those hydroelectric plants, flown up through the stacks of all the steel mills, and become frozen in the gray cement of the resulting Soviet concrete colossus. During Harry
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