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.  

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}}

For Mailer, the phantasmagoric events of 9/11 bear comparison to the nightmare of [[w:Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|Hiroshima]] and the death camps, if not in magnitude, in terms of the equivalent shock to the American psyche and shattering of our national identity, creating spiritual wounds of infinite proportions, fragmenting Americans inwardly and dividing them against one another and against the world. “9/11,” Mailer says, “is one of those events that will never fade out of our history, for it was not only a cataclysmic disaster but a symbol, gargantuan and mysterious, of we know not what, an obsession that will return through decades to come.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=4}} The visual impact of the planes striking the twin towers and the hellish devastation at [[w:Ground zero|Ground Zero]] raises for Mailer the specter of Yeats’s rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, or is it Washington? Where we are now, Mailer feels, is the world Yeats was describing: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere / (talk about propensity) The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The momentous question, Mailer says, is who exactly was the “beast”? Were we not who we thought we were? To be capable of wrongdoing would be un-American, but how could anyone hate us so much, the bastions of justice and liberty for all, so as to be ready to immolate themselves to destroy us? Now, says Mailer, there was still less chance that Americans would come to understand the contradictions that had always split the good Christian psyche—the half that saw itself as charitable and the other half that was ruthlessly competitive—“Jesus and Evel Knievel . . . in one psyche.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=46}} This war, Mailer says, could prove worse than any we have yet experienced because “we will never know just what we are fighting for.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=81-82}} Muslim and Christian fundamentalism seemed mirror reflections. Whatever good these religions might possess, Mailer argues, “[their] present exercise, in the world seems to be a study in military power and greed.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=27}} “We are speaking,” he says, “of a war then between two essentially . . . inauthentic theologies. . .. A vast conflict of powers is at the core, and the motives of both sides do not bear close examination. At bottom, the potential for ill is so great that we can wonder if we will get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large, long before a final conflagration.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=82}} Mailer concludes that “[t]he wars we have known until this era, no matter how horrible, could offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not attracted to negotiation.” Only victory is acceptable,{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=66}} and people who were ready to kill themselves for their beliefs were also ready to destroy the world.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} For Mailer, the randomness of terrorism augurs a deeply personal spiritual wound, the prospect of life as ultimately meaningless. “Nightmares,” he says, “tell us that life is absurd, unreasonable, unjust, warped, [and] crazy.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} If life could be erased so suddenly and gratuitously by such a pointless death, then our ability to find meaning in our lives is lost. The prospect of an absurd death is still more terrifying for Mailer than Vonnegut. For Vonnegut, death is the end to what is primarily an absurd existence to begin with—an existence only made purposeful by the humanity of our actions. For Mailer, however, who professes to believe in reincarnation in a “next existence” where was there to be the “comprehension of our death” that would provide the logical spiritual connection between this life and the next that “we have worked to obtain.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=20}}

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}}

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.