These exceptionalists also happened to be hardheaded realists. They were ready to face the fact that most Americans might not have any real desire for global domination. America was pleasure-loving, which, for exceptionalist purposes, was almost as bad as peace-loving. So, the invasion had to be presented with an edifying narrative. That meant the alleged reason for the war had to live in utter independence of the facts. The motives offered to the American public need not have any close connection to likelihoods. Fantasy would serve. As, for example, bringing democracy to the Middle East. Protecting ourselves against weapons of mass destruction. These themes had to be driven home to the public with all the paraphernalia of facts, supposed confirmative facts. For that, who but Colin Powell could serve as the clot-buster? So Powell was sold a mess of missile tubes by the CIA. Of course, for this to work, the CIA also had to be compromised.
So we went forward in the belief that Iraq was an immediate threat, and were told that hordes of Iraqis would welcome us with flowers. Indeed, it was our duty as good Americans to bring democracy to a country long dominated by an evil man.
Democracy, however, is not an antibiotic to be injected into a polluted foreign body. It is not a magical serum. Rather, democracy is a grace. In its ideal state, it is noble. In practice, in countries that have lived through decades and centuries of strife and revolution and the slow elaboration of safeguards and traditions, democracy becomes a political condition which can often withstand the corruptions and excessive power seeking of enough humans to remain viable as a good society.
It is never routine, however, never automatic. Like each human being, democracy is always growing into more or less. Each generation must be alert to the dangers that threaten democracy as directly as each human who wishes to be good must learn how to survive in the labyrinths of envy, greed, and the confusions of moral judgment. Democracy, by the nature of its assumptions, has to grow in moral depth, or commence to deteriorate. So, the constant danger that besets it is the unadmitted downward pull of fascism. In all of us there is not only a love of freedom, but a wretchedness of spirit that can look for its opposite—as identification with the notion of order and control from above.
The real idiocy in assuming that democracy could be brought to Iraq was to assume that its much-divided people had not been paying spiritually for their compromises. The most evil aspect of fascism is that all but a few are obliged to work within that system or else their families and their own prospects suffer directly. So the mass of good people in a fascist state are filled with shame, ugly memories of their own small and occasionally large treacheries, their impotence, and their frustrated hopes of revenge. Willy-nilly, their psyches are an explosive mess. They are decades away from democracy. There is no quick fix. Democracy has to be earned by a nation through its readiness for sacrifice. Ugly lessons in survival breed few democrats.
It is all but impossible to believe that men as hard-nosed, inventive, and transcendentally cynical as Karl Rove or Dick Cheney, to offer the likeliest two candidates at hand, could have believed that quick democracy was going to be feasible for Iraq.
We are back to oil. It is a crude assertion, but I expect Cheney, for one, is in Iraq for just that reason. Without a full wrestler’s grip on control of the oil of the Middle East, America’s economic problems will continue to expand. That is why we will remain in Iraq for years to come. For nothing will be gained if we depart after the new semioppressive state is cobbled together. Even if we pretend it is a democracy, we will have only a nominal victory. We will have gone back to America with nothing but the problems which led us to Iraq in the first place plus the onus that a couple of hundred billion dollars were spent in the quagmire.
Let me make an attempt to enter Cheney’s mind. I think, as he sees it, it will be crucial to hang in at all costs. New sources of income are going to be needed, new trillions, if for nothing else than to pay for the future social programs that will have to take care of the humongously large labor force that will remain endemically jobless because of globalism. That may yet prove to be the final irony of compassionate conservatism. It will expand the role of government even as it searches for empire.
Cheney’s looming question will be then how to bring off some sizable capture of Iraq’s oil profits. Of course, he is no weak man, he is used to doing what it takes, no matter how it smells, he is full of the hard lessons passed along by the collective wisdom of all those Republican bankers who for the last 125 years have been foreclosing on widows who cannot keep up with the mortgage on the farm. Cheney knows. You cannot stop a man who is never embarrassed by himself—Cheney will be full of barefaced virtue over why—for the well-being of all—we have to help the Middle East to sell its oil properly. We will deem it appropriate that the Europeans are not to expect a sizable share since, after all, they do not deserve it, not given their corrupt deals with Hussein under so-called UN supervision. Yes, Cheney will know how to sell the package for why we are still in Iraq, and Rove will be on his flank, guiding Bush on how to lay it out for the American people.
It seems to me that if the Democrats are going to be able to work up a new set of attitudes and values for their future candidates, it might not be a bad idea to do a little more creative thinking about the question for which they have had, up to now, naught but puny suggestions—which is, How do you pick up a little of the fundamentalists’ vote?
If by 2008, the Democrats hope to come near to a meaningful fraction of such voters, they will have to find candidates and field workers who can spread the word down south—that is, find the equivalent of Democratic missionaries to work on all those good people who may be in awe of Jehovah’s wrath but love Jesus, love Jesus so much more. Worked upon with enough zeal, some of the latter might come to recognize that these much-derided liberals live much more closely than the Republicans in the real spirit of Jesus. Whether they believe every word of Scripture or not, it is still these liberals rather than the Republicans who worry about the fate of the poor, the afflicted, the needy, and the disturbed. These liberals even care about the well-being of criminals in our prisons. They are more ready to save the forests, refresh the air of the cities, and clean up the rivers. It might be agonizing for a good fundamentalist to vote for a candidate who did not read the Scriptures every day, yet some of them might yet be ready to say, “I no longer know where to place my vote. I have joined the ranks of the undecided.”
More power to such a man. More power to all who would be ready to live with the indecision implicit in democracy. It is democracy, after all, which first brought the power and virtue of good questions to the attention of the people rather than restricting the matter to the upper classes.
Long may good questions prevail.
* * *
* The following was a speech given to the Nieman Fellows on December 6, 2004, by Norman Mailer.
Original Publication and Permission Credits
The essays in this book have been previously published in the following publications:
American Review: “Genius”; Big Table: “Quick Evaluations on the Talent in the Room”; Dissent: “From Surplus Value to the Mass Media,” “Introducing Our Argument,” “The White Negro,” “What I Think of Artistic Freedom”; Esquire: “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst,” “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy,” “The Mind of an Outlaw,” “Our Man at Harvard,” “Some Children of the Goddess,” “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” “Suicides of Hemingway and Monroe”; George: “Clinton and Dole: The War of the Oxymorons”; The Harvard Advocate: “Comment on the Passing of George Plimpton”; International Herald Tribune: “Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?”; Look: “Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power”; Michigan Quarterly Review: “The Hazards and Sources of Writing”; The Nation: “On Sartre’s God Problem”; National Guardian: “A Credo for the Living”; The New Republic: “By Heaven Inspired”; New York: “Before the Literary Bar”; The New York Review of Books: “Discovering Jack H. Abbott,” “The El
ection and America’s Future,” “Punching Papa,” “Tango, Last Tango,” “The White Man Unburdened”; The New York Times Book Review: “Huckleberry Finn, Alive at One Hundred”; The New York Times Magazine: “Christ, Satan, and the Presidential Candidate: A Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains”; One: “The Homosexual Villain”; Parade: “All the Pirates and People,” “Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment”; Partisan Review: “Black Power”; Playboy: “The Crazy One,” “Immodest Proposals”; Vanity Fair: “How the Wimp Won the War,” “Review of American Psycho”; Video Review: “Marilyn Monroe’s Sexiest Tapes and Discs”; Village Voice: “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part I,” “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part II,” “On Lies, Power, and Obscenity,” “Raison d’Être”; The Big Empty (New York: Nation Books, 2006): “Myth Versus Hypothesis”; Cannibals and Christians (New York: Dial, 1966): “Our Argument as Last Presented”; The Prisoner of Sex (New York: Little, Brown, 1971): “Millett and D. H. Lawrence”; The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, edited by J. Michael Lennon (New York: Random House, 2003): “Review of The Corrections,” “Social Life, Literary Desires, Literary Corruption”; Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe (Boston: Back Bay, 1998): “At the Point of My Pen.”
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
GEORGES BORCHARDT, INC.: Excerpt from Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, copyright © 1969, 1970, 1990, 2000 by Kate Millett. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
GROVE/ATLANTIC, INC.: Excerpts from The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, copyright © 1963 by Présence Africaine. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material outside of this publication is prohibited.
HAL LEONARD CORPORATION: Excerpt from “Honky Tonk Man,” words and music by Johnny Horton, Howard Hausey, and Tillman Franks, copyright © 1956 by Universal-Cedarwood Publishing. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
HARPER’S BAZAAR U.S.: Excerpt from “Born 1930: The Unlost Generation” by Caroline Bird (Harper’s Bazaar, February 1957). Reprinted courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar U.S.
ALFRED A. KNOPF, AN IMPRINT OF THE KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE LLC AND POLLINGER LIMITED: Excerpt from The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence, copyright © 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC and copyright renewed © 1954 by Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Copyright © 1987 The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Digital rights are controlled by Pollinger Limited. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC and Pollinger Limited.
ANDREWS KURTH LLP: Excerpt from a speech delivered by Barbara Bush at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Reprinted by permission.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Excerpt from “Snuff This Book” by Roger Rosenblatt (The New York Times, December 16, 1990), copyright © 1990 by The New York Times. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
OFFICE OF COLIN POWELL: Excerpt from a speech delivered by Colin Powell at the 1996 Republican National Convention. Reprinted by permission.
ANN ROVERE: Excerpt from “Letter from Los Angeles” by Richard Rovere. Reprinted by permission of Ann Rovere.
VINTAGE BOOKS, AN IMPRINT OF THE KNOPF DOUBLEDAY PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE LLC: Excerpt from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, copyright © 1991 by Bret Easton Ellis. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Mailer family and David Ebershoff, Random House executive editor, for the generous opportunity to edit this volume. A nod of deep friendship and gratitude goes to J. Michael Lennon, authorized biographer of Norman Mailer (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 2013), who was particularly gracious and cogent in providing strategic inclusion suggestions as well as acquisition strategies. Caitlin McKenna, Random House editorial assistant, was exceptionally helpful in assisting with the assembly and transmission of essays and other critical segments. My special thanks and warm appreciation to M. Allison Wise, managing editor of The Mailer Review, for her painstaking and meticulous assistance in locating challenging, elusive manuscripts and assisting in generating faithful copy text. And to my wife, Cary Sipiora, my inexpressible gratitude for her unrelenting support.
PHILLIP SIPIORA
BY NORMAN MAILER
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a
Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with J. Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw
About the Author
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
About the Editor
PHILLIP SIPIORA is a professor of English and film studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author or editor of four books and has lectured nationally and internationally on twentieth-century literature and film. He is a longtime scholar of Norman Mailer and the editor of The Mailer Review.
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