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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address: Difference between revisions
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{{Byline|last=Broer|first=Lawrence R.|abstract=No two contemporary writers have looked harder or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman {{NM}} and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08broe}} | {{Byline|last=Broer|first=Lawrence R.|abstract=No two contemporary writers have looked harder or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman {{NM}} and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08broe}} | ||
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Vonnegut’s diagnosis of our leaders as pathological personalities coincides perfectly with Doctor Mailer’s description of the warped skills Republicans seemed to possess for dirty legal fighting, that which Mailer and Vonnegut both view as accounting for, as Vonnegut puts it, the “shamelessly rigged election in Florida which disenfranchised thousands of African Americans.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} Such “Republicans,” Mailer says, “[were] descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s house or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclosure on Monday.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=44}} Mailer explains, “The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are [so] immense.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=45}} | Vonnegut’s diagnosis of our leaders as pathological personalities coincides perfectly with Doctor Mailer’s description of the warped skills Republicans seemed to possess for dirty legal fighting, that which Mailer and Vonnegut both view as accounting for, as Vonnegut puts it, the “shamelessly rigged election in Florida which disenfranchised thousands of African Americans.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} Such “Republicans,” Mailer says, “[were] descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s house or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclosure on Monday.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=44}} Mailer explains, “The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are [so] immense.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=45}} | ||
The following paradigm reminds me of an old Greek proverb passed to me by a retired federal judge in Tarpon Springs, Florida, that “the fish always rots from the head.” Mailer and Vonnegut show that the insanity of greed and cruelty at the top is part of an all-inclusive national sickness, what Mailer calls a “cognitive stew,” composed of a corrupt Corporate America, aggressive Christian militants Mailer calls “flag conservatives,” and a military Mailer says is, of course, composed of crazier than average people.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=52-53}} We know of course that Mailer and Vonnegut have never been fans of Corporate America, whose “polyglot oligarchs,” as Vonnegut calls them, are our new ruling class,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=51}} and whose dehumanizing technologies and impersonal “electronic communities”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=61}} are, in Mailer’s words, our only real culture, a culture with tyrannical people in the seats of power, run for the wealthy with the poor getting less and less, and a culture that had succeeded only in making the world a more dangerous and uglier place to live. | The following paradigm reminds me of an old Greek proverb passed to me by a retired federal judge in Tarpon Springs, Florida, that “the fish always rots from the head.” Mailer and Vonnegut show that the insanity of greed and cruelty at the top is part of an all-inclusive national sickness, what Mailer calls a “cognitive stew,” composed of a corrupt Corporate America, aggressive Christian militants Mailer calls “flag conservatives,” and a military Mailer says is, of course, composed of crazier than average people.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=52-53}} We know of course that Mailer and Vonnegut have never been fans of Corporate America, whose “polyglot oligarchs,” as Vonnegut calls them, are our new ruling class,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=51}} and whose dehumanizing technologies and impersonal “electronic communities”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=61}} are, in Mailer’s words, our only real culture, a culture with tyrannical people in the seats of power, run for the wealthy with the poor getting less and less, and a culture that had succeeded only in making the world a more dangerous and uglier place to live.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=48}} “There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor,” Mailer says, “only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=48–49}} And now we were exporting our “crud,” this “all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=49}} all over the globe, reason enough, Mailer reasons, for the world of Islam, into whose own culture we had encroached, to hate us so. While Mailer clearly loathes terrorism, he falls just short of endorsing Islamic culture as a civilization superior to ours. Those who understand his cosmic view of a primitivistic God and a technological Devil struggling for possession of the soul of mankind cannot mistake where his sympathies lie when he writes, “I’ll go so far as to say that this is a war between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a century [or more] ago. . .. [T]he purpose of human beings on earth is not to obtain more and more technological power but to refine our souls.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=28}} | ||
Mailer sees that the same advertising mendacity and manipulative marketing strategies that frame the CEO scandals—and which he and Vonnegut feel now own the television industry—explain [[w:George W. Bush|George W. Bush’s]] capacity for “absolute lying” and his power over the “flag conservatives.” Bush, Mailer says, knew never to speak to his political base in specifics but in mottos and platitudes, sprinkled with “an incomparably holy touch of mendacity.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=88}} Bush knew they loved words like “evil,” which the President would use like a “button” or a “narcotic.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=51}} Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Keep them thinking in generalities. “September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=55}} Even, by the way, as I was writing this, Bush was in the news admonishing Muslims for exploiting religion for political purposes and for pursuing evil in the name of God. | Mailer sees that the same advertising mendacity and manipulative marketing strategies that frame the CEO scandals—and which he and Vonnegut feel now own the television industry—explain [[w:George W. Bush|George W. Bush’s]] capacity for “absolute lying” and his power over the “flag conservatives.” Bush, Mailer says, knew never to speak to his political base in specifics but in mottos and platitudes, sprinkled with “an incomparably holy touch of mendacity.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=88}} Bush knew they loved words like “evil,” which the President would use like a “button” or a “narcotic.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=51}} Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Keep them thinking in generalities. “September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=55}} Even, by the way, as I was writing this, Bush was in the news admonishing Muslims for exploiting religion for political purposes and for pursuing evil in the name of God. | ||