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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/On The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions
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It is a good way to approach this novel. Its historical insight is razor sharp. Take Mailer’s description of the fabled [[w:New Left|New Left]], who they were, where they came from. His remarkable frame of reference extends from the thirties to the late sixties; from the fine distinction between Leninists and Trotskyists to a real experience of marijuana and Benzedrine. And therefore his ability to show us how the New Left grew from the foundering of American radicalism of the thirties in a set of disputatious, incompatible, but nearly identical modes of political thought. Mailer describes for us the tangle of “Communist, Trotskyist, Splinter Marxist, Union Organizer, or plain Social Democrat,” and how these groups finally “succeeded in smashing the bones of their own movement into the hundred final slivers of American Marxism, miniscule radical sects complete each with their own special martyred genius of a Marxicologist.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=85}} He gives us access to the great disappointed hope of the Labor Movement, in which “Communists and Trotskyites, Splinterites, and Reutherites [ultimately came to] sit closer to the Mafia than to Marx.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}} This, precisely, is the context, most usually forgotten among people of my age, from which emerged the New Left. | It is a good way to approach this novel. Its historical insight is razor sharp. Take Mailer’s description of the fabled [[w:New Left|New Left]], who they were, where they came from. His remarkable frame of reference extends from the thirties to the late sixties; from the fine distinction between Leninists and Trotskyists to a real experience of marijuana and Benzedrine. And therefore his ability to show us how the New Left grew from the foundering of American radicalism of the thirties in a set of disputatious, incompatible, but nearly identical modes of political thought. Mailer describes for us the tangle of “Communist, Trotskyist, Splinter Marxist, Union Organizer, or plain Social Democrat,” and how these groups finally “succeeded in smashing the bones of their own movement into the hundred final slivers of American Marxism, miniscule radical sects complete each with their own special martyred genius of a Marxicologist.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=85}} He gives us access to the great disappointed hope of the Labor Movement, in which “Communists and Trotskyites, Splinterites, and Reutherites [ultimately came to] sit closer to the Mafia than to Marx.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}} This, precisely, is the context, most usually forgotten among people of my age, from which emerged the New Left. | ||
And who were they? Mailer describes “A generation of college students . . . who were finally indifferent to the blockhouse polemics of the past, and the real nature of the Soviet. It was the real injustice in America which attracted their attention—poverty, civil rights, an end to censorship.”{{sfn|Mailer| | And who were they? Mailer describes “A generation of college students . . . who were finally indifferent to the blockhouse polemics of the past, and the real nature of the Soviet. It was the real injustice in America which attracted their attention—poverty, civil rights, an end to censorship.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=120}} | ||
It is a genealogy of the New Left that, if we wish to understand who we are as Liberals and Radicals in America today, we need to master in its details. And it’s a description all the more poignant when you reflect that these hopeful words about the New Left were written in 1967, just a couple years before the New Left was to begin the process of self destruction that, I would submit to you, still casts its pall over the American Left today, its shadow of hopelessness, of pessimism and the sense that political engagement is, at heart, impossible. I refer of course to that moment in 1969, just two years later, when [[w:Weather Underground|Weathermen]] took over [[w:Students for a Democratic Society|SDS]] and put an end to the possibility of real, radical social transformation in America—a possibility that, I’ll argue, still disappoints us today. | It is a genealogy of the New Left that, if we wish to understand who we are as Liberals and Radicals in America today, we need to master in its details. And it’s a description all the more poignant when you reflect that these hopeful words about the New Left were written in 1967, just a couple years before the New Left was to begin the process of self destruction that, I would submit to you, still casts its pall over the American Left today, its shadow of hopelessness, of pessimism and the sense that political engagement is, at heart, impossible. I refer of course to that moment in 1969, just two years later, when [[w:Weather Underground|Weathermen]] took over [[w:Students for a Democratic Society|SDS]] and put an end to the possibility of real, radical social transformation in America—a possibility that, I’ll argue, still disappoints us today. | ||