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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis: Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy: Difference between revisions

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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis: Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy (view source)

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{{cquote|Nothing but integrity in private and justice in public bodies can preserve a republic. If calamities are necessary to teach us wisdom and virtue, I wish God would rain down shows of them upon us.|author=Benjamin Rush|source=to John Adams, January 17, 1778}}
{{cquote|Nothing but integrity in private and justice in public bodies can preserve a republic. If calamities are necessary to teach us wisdom and virtue, I wish God would rain down shows of them upon us.|author=Benjamin Rush|source=to John Adams, January 17, 1778}}


{{start|During the  final four years of his life Norman Mailer}} (1923–2007) wanted to clarify his ideas regarding two of his central concerns as a writer and public intellectual. To do so he opened three dialogues. His book ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation'' (2007) was a conversation with his archivist and authorized biographer J. Michael Lennon on Mailer’s meta- physical and philosophical speculations as they had evolved since the 1950s. He also published two other nonfiction books, both on American politics and democracy—''Why Are We at War?'' (2003) and ''The Big Empty'' (2006). The books on democracy opened a final dialogue with his compatriots, including the younger generations. In the former, Mailer was in conversation with his friend Dotson Rader in Part I, speaking with members of The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in Part II, and in conversation with ''The American Conservative'' magazine about “Why I am a left conservative” in Part III. In the case of ''The Big Empty'', he engaged in a dialogue particularly with the generation then coming into full adulthood because the book is composed of conversations between Mailer and his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, who was just turning thirty when the book was published. “Because the younger generations are more attuned to learning from film, television, and the Internet,” John writes in his introduction to ''The Big Empty'', “our understanding of the past is more easily manipulated by the increasingly sophisticated political and media marketing techniques used by those who hold power today. This is why it is so important that we have these conversations with the older generations.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=x}}
{{dc|dc=D|uring the  final four years of his life Norman Mailer}} (1923–2007) wanted to clarify his ideas regarding two of his central concerns as a writer and public intellectual. To do so he opened three dialogues. His book ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation'' (2007) was a conversation with his archivist and authorized biographer J. Michael Lennon on Mailer’s meta- physical and philosophical speculations as they had evolved since the 1950s. He also published two other nonfiction books, both on American politics and democracy—''Why Are We at War?'' (2003) and ''The Big Empty'' (2006). The books on democracy opened a final dialogue with his compatriots, including the younger generations. In the former, Mailer was in conversation with his friend Dotson Rader in Part I, speaking with members of The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in Part II, and in conversation with ''The American Conservative'' magazine about “Why I am a left conservative” in Part III. In the case of ''The Big Empty'', he engaged in a dialogue particularly with the generation then coming into full adulthood because the book is composed of conversations between Mailer and his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, who was just turning thirty when the book was published. “Because the younger generations are more attuned to learning from film, television, and the Internet,” John writes in his introduction to ''The Big Empty'', “our understanding of the past is more easily manipulated by the increasingly sophisticated political and media marketing techniques used by those who hold power today. This is why it is so important that we have these conversations with the older generations.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=x}}


The political books offer Mailer’s thoughts on democracy in the twenty-first century based on a lifetime of writing about American democracy and participating in it. In articles and books he had been covering Presidential primaries and conventions since the early 1960s. He ran for mayor of New York City on the Democratic ticket in 1969, once campaigning vociferously beneath the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall on Wall Street and Nassau, where Washington took his oath of office. (Mailer had hoped that a Left-Right city coalition might “make a dent in the entrenched power . . . of the corporate center”). He was one of the earliest activists against the Vietnam war. And as a member of the “Greatest Generation” who fought as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II, one can say that he also fought for democracy against the juggernaut of global fascism. It is striking how Mailer returns in these late nonfiction books to many of the questions the founding fathers and mothers faced in the eighteenth century. To Mailer having the ''dialogue'' itself was the necessary thing, as it was to the Founders as well.
The political books offer Mailer’s thoughts on democracy in the twenty-first century based on a lifetime of writing about American democracy and participating in it. In articles and books he had been covering Presidential primaries and conventions since the early 1960s. He ran for mayor of New York City on the Democratic ticket in 1969, once campaigning vociferously beneath the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall on Wall Street and Nassau, where Washington took his oath of office. (Mailer had hoped that a Left-Right city coalition might “make a dent in the entrenched power . . . of the corporate center”). He was one of the earliest activists against the Vietnam war. And as a member of the “Greatest Generation” who fought as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II, one can say that he also fought for democracy against the juggernaut of global fascism. It is striking how Mailer returns in these late nonfiction books to many of the questions the founding fathers and mothers faced in the eighteenth century. To Mailer having the ''dialogue'' itself was the necessary thing, as it was to the Founders as well.
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