The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer and Thompson on the Campaign Trail, 1972: Difference between revisions

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell claims that political orthodoxy almost inevitably leads to bad writing, arguing that “Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line.’ Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”{{sfn|Orwell|1981|pp=165–166}} Mailer was particularly sensitively attuned to the styles of political discourse. He dismissed Nixon’s style, both as a speaker and as a campaign choreographer, as “pedestrian,”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=137}} and he longed for McGovern to adopt some of the eloquence of Gene McCarthy, for “Whenever it could create a mood, language gave life to the human condition Totalitarianism was the need to inject non-words into the language, slivers of verbal plastic to smash the mood.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=57}} It was Orwell, again, who stated in “Why I Write” that the primary motive for all of his literary work was “to make political writing into an art,{{sfn|Orwell|1981|p=314}} and both Mailer and Thompson employed their finely-crafted literary styles as a counterpoint to the objectifying effect of conventional journalism and mind-numbing propaganda of political discourse. While Mailer adopted different styles for different purposes throughout his career, his literary journalistic style is often syntactically complex, figurative, digressive, descriptive, allusive, and heuristic in that the reader gets the sense that the writer is writing not just to communicate but to discover his meaning spontaneously in the act of composing. Thompson’s Gonzo style employs a verb-driven syntax (influenced by his early training as a sportswriter) displaying digressions, metaphors, fragments, ellipses, abrupt transitions, and gaps, as well as confusion and emotional outbursts that record a dark reality, sometimes fictionalized, spontaneously and heuristically. Kenneth Burke in ''A Rhetoric of Motives'' observes that “the more urgent the oratory, the greater the profusion of stylistic devices,”{{sfn|Burke|1969|p=57}} and in both ''St. George'' and ''Campaign Trail'' we find that, when the degree of the writer’s involvement with his subject is at its most intense, his style becomes most densely-packed with stylistic intensity. Sentence by sentence, however, ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' is a more artistically rendered and aesthetically compelling narrative than ''St. George'' precisely because in 1968 Mailer was more emotionally engaged with events than he was in 1972, and the Gonzo passages in ''Campaign Trail'' tend to be the purest expressions of his Gonzo aesthetic as defined in my article, “What’s Gonzo about Gonzo Journalism?”

Literary journalists analyze events on a more symbolic level than conventional, objective journalistic practice typically allows. Mailer and Thompson both saw political campaigns as social rituals which political myths have been invented to explain. Mailer as Aquarius claims that he is “mystical about the presidency” which he believes is a “primitive office.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|pp=22–23}} In an extended metaphor, Mailer reveals his conceit that “In America, the country was the religion . . . the political parties might be the true churches,” and that “the American faith might even say that God was in the people.”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=87}} Yet, Mailer also claimed that the Republicans, self-righteously believing themselves the moral majority, were unwittingly in league with Satan, or his emissary, Nixon, the man whom he had famously described as that ”somber undertaker’s assistant.”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=3}} Reflecting on the debacle in Vietnam, Mailer observed that Republicans “seemed spiritually incapable of hating a war they could not see . . . nobody could see the flowering intestines of the dead offering the aphrodisiac of their corruption to the flies, so was it a compact with the Devil to believe one was a minister of God . . . and never lift one’s eyes from the nearest field?”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=154}} In ''Campaign Trail'', Thompson similarly imagined the ritual of the myth of the dying king beneath the surface narrative of the campaign. The American people, he said, collectively believe that presidents, like kings, become feeble or corrupt and must abdicate, and a new king steps to the throne. Facing political pressure over the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek reelection, an event which Thompson compared to “driving an evil king off the throne.”{{sfn|Thompson|1973|p=140}} In 1972, Nixon resigned as the evil king, and America had become a political and spiritual wasteland. Disease, both literal and figurative, is a major motif in both writers’ literary journalism. Mailer supported McGovern with the caveat that McGovern’s “revolution was a clerical revolution, an uprising of the suburban, well-educated . . . genetic engineers of the future . . . opposed to any idea of mystery.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=26}} In his 1960 essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” Mailer drew a clear dichotomy between John F. Kennedy, the hero of the piece, and Richard Nixon, the villain. He posed a final question about the fate of America and the American myth of freedom and adventure. Americans faced two choices: one, Kennedy, who would resurrect the myth, and another, Nixon, the symbol of stability and monotony, who would leave it buried, and Mailer brooded over which “psychic direction America would now choose for itself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=36}} In 1972, however, Mailer did not regard McGovern and Nixon as the embodiment of “polarized instincts,” identifying McGovern as “the Democratic Nixon.”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|p=22}} Both men,” he claimed, “project that same void of charisma.”{{sfn|Mailer|1960|pp=22–23}} Thompson endorsed McGovern much more enthusiastically, and in a world of ambiguity and uncertainty, where appearances often deceive, he regarded Nixon and McGovern as polar opposites:

{{quote|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.{{sfn|Thompson|1972|p=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,{{' "}}{{sfn|Hartsock|2000|p=42}} In the closing pages of ''St. George'', Mailer says he “never found the major confrontation for which he looked” at the Republican convention;{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=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?”{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=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 never ending. 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.”{{sfn|Thompson|1973|p=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.{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=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,”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=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.”{{sfn|Thompson|1979|p=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”{{sfn|Thompson|1973|p=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.”{{sfn|Thompson|1979|p=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.

* {{cite journal |last=Booth |first=Wayne C. |title=Loathing and Ignorance on the Campaign Trail: Rev. of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 |url= |journal=Columbia Journalism Review |volume=12 |issue=4 |date=1973 |pages=7-12  |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=McKeen |first=William |date=2008 |title=Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson |url= |location= |publisher=W. W. Norton Company |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mosser |first=Jason |date=2008 |title=The Participatory Journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: Creating New Reporting Styles |url= |location= |publisher=Edwin Mellen Publishing |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Orwell |first=George |date=1938 |title=Homage to Catalonia |url= |location= |publisher=Harcourt, Brace & Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Orwell |first=George |author-mask=1 |date=1946 |chapter=Politics and the English Language |title=A Collection of Essays |url= |location= |publisher=Harcourt, Brace & Co. |pages=156-171 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Orwell |first=George |author-mask=1 |date=1946 |chapter=Why I Write |title=A Collection of Essays |url= |location= |publisher=Harcourt, Brace & Co. |pages=309-316 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |date=1990 |chapter=Chicago 1968: Death to the Weird |title=Songs of the Doomed |url= |location= |publisher=Touchstone |pages=122–126 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |author-mask=1 |date=1971 |title=Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream |url= |location= |publisher=Vintage Books |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Thompson |first=Hunter S. |author-mask=1 |date=1973 |title=Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 |url= |location= |publisher=Warner Books |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |editor1-last=Wolfe |editor1-first=Tom |editor2-last=Johnson |editor2-first=E. W. |date=1973 |title=The New Journalism |url= |location= |publisher=Harper & Row |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}