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There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national political arena for the legendary ''duality''—the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts—that almost everybody except America has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. (416) | There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national political arena for the legendary ''duality''—the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts—that almost everybody except America has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. (416) | ||
Despite the relative lack of drama at the 1972 conventions, such real-life events do tend to offer their own conflict and resolution. Dramatically, however, works of literary journalism are typically open-ended, refusing to impose narrative closure on historical events which continue to unfold even as the narratives reach their tentative conclusions. As John Hartsock theorized about literary journalists in the Gilded Age, at “a time of social and cultural transformation and crisis,” and surely the early 1970s were just such a time, they “recognized at some level the impossibility of ever adequately rendering a contingent world and thus confronted the phenomenological fluidity of what critic Mikhail Bakhtin called the ‘inconclusive present’” (42). In the closing pages of ''St. George'', Mailer says he “never found the major confrontation for which he looked” at the Republican convention (221); nevertheless, the event was not without violence. Minor confrontations erupted between the police and the protestors, and Mailer, watching the action from a rooftop, was inadvertently tear-gassed as a helicopter hovered overhead. He concluded that “the action which is going on is sad and absurd and pointless and lost and will not save a soul in Vietnam” (226). Yet later he wondered, without urgency, “Is the day actually coming when there will be real battles in the cities and true smoke over the moon?” (226). Those battles were never fought, of course. Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, only to be driven out of office by the Watergate scandal, plunging the country into what Jimmy Carter would later call its collective “malaise.” The conclusion of ''Campaign Trail'' suggests that Thompson’s trials and tribulations were neverending. Foretelling the destruction of America by the greed, brutality, and stupidity of its leaders, Thompson adopted a prophetic tone, prefacing the December chapter, following the '72 election, with an allusion to the Book of Jeremiah: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (459). Indeed, that last chapter assumes the tone of a jeremiad; yet, like the Old Testament prophet, Thompson held out some hope for redemption. | |||
Five years after Nixon’s re-election and subsequent resignation, President Gerald Ford faced a challenge by that same peanut farmer turned Georgia Governor, Jimmy Carter. Neither Mailer nor Thompson covered the 1976 campaign as they had in 1972, but they both made the pilgrimage to rural Plains, GA to interview the man who promised to restore honor and trust to the White House. In “Christ, Satan, and the Presidential Candidate: A Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains,” Mailer confessed at the outset that during the hour he had to spend with Carter he did “too much of the talking,” and the subject, “ill-chosen,” was religion, a topic on which any politician, especially a devout Baptist like Carter, would need to take care in addressing (316). Mailer made several conversational forays, including a reference to Kierkegaard’s existential claim that we are not, in the mind of God, capable of knowing the goodness or badness of our actions, but Carter was characteristically cautious in his responses. Ultimately, speaking again of himself in the third person, the journalist conceded that “Mailer was finally beginning to feel the essential frustration of trying to talk about religion with Carter on equal terms” (326), and he emerged from the interview with the deflating feeling that he did not yet have a clear sense of how to engage with and dramatize his encounter with his cerebral and soft-spoken subject. | |||
Thompson spent much more than an hour with Carter, beginning with a visit to the Governor’s mansion in Atlanta where he spent some time as a guest. His own essay, “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” is a rambling and disjointed narrative that begins with his demoralizing assumption that the Democratic nomination would go to Hubert Humphrey whom he had characterized in ''Campaign Trail'' as “a treacherous, gutless old ward heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current” (135). Reflecting on the failure of the 1960s counterculture which he believed the McGovern campaign symbolized, and the dark days of disillusion that followed, he returned to the theme of rebirth he developed in ''Campaign Trail'', sensing that “The electorate feels a need to be cleansed, reassured, and revitalized” (476). He then reflected on a visit he had made to the University of Georgia in 1974 when he attended a Law Day speech given by Governor Carter on corruption within the criminal justice system. What Thompson heard was “the voice of an angry agrarian populist” delivering a blistering speech “which was and still is the most eloquent I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician” (477). Unlike Mailer, Thompson had discovered the dramatic moment, the urgency he needed to engage with his subject. Both Mailer and Thompson had evoked Kierkegaard, but it was Thompson who seemed once again to have taken the Leap of Faith. | |||
Works Cited | Works Cited | ||