User:KMullins/sandbox

These developments fed the early LQ verdict in the January 2008 Smithsonian, a print-medium legacy bible. The presumptive judge, Lance Morrow,dissects Mailer’s “huge ego” and finds it “unpleasant” and “poisonous.”Thus, Mailer “[I]n his own ways he embodied America’s worst faults: selfindulgence, bullying, sense of entitlement, irrelevant belligerence, the obnoxious American self-importance that is a corrupted Emersonianism—Emerson without the sweetness, the calm, the brains, the transcendence”(97).Such deconstruction gets a body English treatment when Morrow refers to a 1994 Valentine’s Day incident at Carl Bernstein’s fiftieth birthday party.Mailer was about to commit a social atrocity and was likened to a madcap Existential killer-driver:

He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet in the boxer’s way he had, a rhythmic motion meant to conjure menace, as if he wished to let you know that while he had one foot safely on the brake, the other was pressed on the accelerator, his motor surging ... so that if he chose, he might release the brake and hurtle across the room and smash through the brick wall and cause God knows what mayhem in the world outside.