The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972: Difference between revisions

Literary journalists analyze events on a more symbolic level than conventional, objective journalistic practice typically allows. Mailer and Thompson both saw political campaigns as social rituals which political myths have been invented to explain. Mailer as Aquarius claims that he is “mystical about the presidency” which he believes is a “primitive office” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=22-23}}. In an extended metaphor, Mailer reveals his conceit that “In America, the country was the religion . . . the political parties might be the true churches,” and that “the American faith might even say that God was in the people” {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=87}}. Yet, Mailer also claimed that the Republicans, self-righteously believing themselves the moral majority, were unwittingly in league with Satan, or his emissary, Nixon, the man whom he had famously described as that ”somber undertaker’s assistant” {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=3}}. Reflecting on the debacle in Vietnam, Mailer observed that Republicans “seemed spiritually incapable of hating a war they could not see . . . nobody could see the flowering intestines of the dead offering the aphrodisiac of their corruption to the flies, so was it a compact with the Devil to believe one was a minister of God . . . and never lift one’s eyes from the nearest field?” {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=154}}. In ''Campaign Trail'', Thompson similarly imagined the ritual of the myth of the dying king beneath the surface narrative of the campaign. The American people, he said, collectively believe that presidents, like kings, become feeble or corrupt and must abdicate, and a new king steps to the throne. Facing political pressure over the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek reelection, an event which Thompson compared to “driving an evil king off the throne” {{sfn|Thompson|1973|p=140}}. In 1972, Nixon resigned as the evil king, and America had become a political and spiritual wasteland. Disease, both literal and figurative, is a major motif in both writers’ literary journalism. Mailer supported McGovern with the caveat that McGovern’s “revolution was a clerical revolution, an uprising of the suburban, well-educated . . . genetic engineers of the future . . . opposed to any idea of mystery” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=26}}. In his 1960 essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer drew a clear dichotomy between John F. Kennedy, the hero of the piece, and Richard Nixon, the villain. He posed a final question about the fate of America and the American myth of freedom and adventure. Americans faced two choices: one, Kennedy, who would resurrect the myth, and another, Nixon, the symbol of stability and monotony, who would leave it buried, and Mailer brooded over which “psychic direction America would now choose for itself" {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=36}}. In 1972, however, Mailer did not regard McGovern and Nixon as the embodiment of “polarized instincts,” identifying McGovern as “the Democratic Nixon” {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=22}}. Both men,” he claimed, “project that same void of charisma” {{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=22-23}}. Thompson endorsed McGovern much more enthusiastically, and in a world of ambiguity and uncertainty, where appearances often deceive, he regarded Nixon and McGovern as polar opposites:

Despite the relative lack of drama at the 1972 conventions, such real-life events do tend to offer their own conflict and resolution. Dramatically, however, works of literary journalism are typically open-ended, refusing to impose narrative closure on historical events which continue to unfold even as the narratives reach their tentative conclusions. As John Hartsock theorized about literary journalists in the Gilded Age, at “a time of social and cultural transformation and crisis,” and surely the early 1970s were just such a time, they “recognized at some level the impossibility of ever adequately rendering a contingent world and thus confronted the phenomenological fluidity of what critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘inconclusive present’” {{sfn|Hartsock|2000|p=42}}. In the closing pages of ''St. George'', Mailer says he “never found the major confrontation for which he looked” at the Republican convention {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=221}}; nevertheless, the event was not without violence. Minor confrontations erupted between the police and the protestors, and Mailer, watching the action from a rooftop, was inadvertently tear-gassed as a helicopter hovered overhead. He concluded that “the action which is going on is sad and absurd and pointless and lost and will not save a soul in Vietnam” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=226}}. Yet later he wondered, without urgency, “Is the day actually coming when there will be real battles in the cities and true smoke over the moon?” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=226}} Those battles were never fought, of course. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, only to be driven out of office by the Watergate scandal, plunging the country into what Jimmy Carter would later call its collective “malaise.” The conclusion of ''Campaign Trail'' suggests that Thompson’s trials and tribulations were neverending. Foretelling the destruction of America by the greed, brutality, and stupidity of its leaders, Thompson adopted a prophetic tone, prefacing the December chapter, following the '72 election, with an allusion to the Book of Jeremiah: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” {{sfn|Thompson|1973|p=459}}. Indeed, that last chapter assumes the tone of a jeremiad; yet, like the Old Testament prophet, Thompson held out some hope for redemption.