The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address: Difference between revisions

Canary birds notwithstanding, of course, Mailer and Vonnegut have been as painfully conscious of the fundamental absurdities of their age as any of their contemporaries: the stockpiling of doomsday weapons to keep the world safe, the brutalities of World Wars, the quest for God through material acquisitions and technological advance, uncritical patriotism—the list goes on. Both see the atrocities of the death camps and those that followed Auschwitz as symbolizing the spiritual devastation of our age. In his essay “[[The White Negro]],” Mailer describes the Holocaust as a mirror to the human condition that “blinded anyone who looked into it.” “Probably,” Mailer says, "We will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge ... that we might ... be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by ''[[w:Deus ex machina|deus ex machina]]'' in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} In an address at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut said, “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to ''Popular Mechanics'' magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=161}} Vonnegut acknowledges that in the wake of Hiroshima and the death camps, faith in human improvement has not come easily, pointing out that he and his fellow canary-bird artists chirped and chirped and keeled over in protest of the war in Vietnam, but it made no difference whatsoever. “Nobody cared.” But, he says, “I continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=239}} That’s what our minds were designed to do.  

In their latest analyses of America’s ills, Mailer’s ''[[Why Are We at War?]]'' (2003) and Vonnegut’s ''[[w:A Man Without a Country|A Man Without a Country]]'' (2005), Mailer and Vonnegut reaffirm their love of democracy and the U.S. Constitution as civilization’s best hopes for a more orderly and saner world. As always, both labor hard on behalf of a society, as Vonnegut writes, “dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal and should not starve.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=11}} “It so happens,” Vonnegut says, “that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed clouds. It is the law. It is the U.S. Constitution.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98}} He praises his two favorite spokesmen for democratic freedoms, [[w:Carl Sandburg|Carl Sandburg]] and [[w:Eugene Victor Debs|Eugene Victor Debs]]: “I would have been tongue-tied,” he says, “in the presence of such national treasures.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=13}} He encourages us all to read Tocqueville’s ''[[w:Democracy in America|Democracy in America]]'' as the best book ever written on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in American democracy. Vonnegut asks, “Want a taste of that great book?” Tocqueville says, “and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. Okay?”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=8}} Mailer hails democracy as God’s most noble and beautiful experiment, but always “in peril.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=16}}, an existential venture whose delicacy makes it dangerously vulnerable, a “state of grace” attained only by those ready to suffer and even to perish for its freedoms.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=71}} We’ll see later how at the end of ''Why Are We at War?'' this forewarning takes a complex and troubling turn.

But, for the moment, troubling enough is Mailer’s admonition that “([freedom] has to be kept alive every day of our existence,”) because we can all “be swallowed by our miseries ... become weary, give up.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=100,16-17}} The note of futility present in the reference to “giving up” runs throughout ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'', a foreboding, deeply personal sense on the part of both writers that because of the tragic events of 9/11 and what Mailer calls the inestimable “spiritual wreckage”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=23}} that has followed, the state of the union is in terrible and perhaps irremediable trouble. “The notion,” Mailer reports, “that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} “Nobody,” he says, “ever said ... that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=103}} The problem is, he adds, that “[t]he people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} Vonnegut feels that his own personal democratic dream of a community with kindness, fairness, mercy, and mutual respect at its core has been so betrayed by the forces of selfishness and greed that he is now, as his title suggests, a man without a country. "I myself,” he says "feel that our country, for whose constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it was. What has happened is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98-99}} which “disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by the Constitution, which is to say The House and Senate and the Supreme Court.” Vonnegut observes that “our daily news sources, newspapers and TV are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=103}} Mailer decries the same lack of courage and will on the part of the liberal media and prominent liberal senators.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=65}}