Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays

by Norman Mailer

  Abortion: What Are a Woman’s Rights?

  Roe v. Wade probably repels more good conservatives than any other item in the liberal canon. Yet a serious and intimate recognition of the question could serve a new Democratic administration. Indeed, it is imperative. The present state of the argument strips all humanity from the equation. Those for the Right to Life see every pregnancy as God’s will, God’s intention: ergo, the abortionist and his patient are both evil. Defenders of Roe v. Wade view abortion as a woman’s right yet sully their position by postulating that abortion is not killing a future human being if it takes place within the first three months, or in the first six months, or whenever. It is a stand to weaken one’s intellectual self-respect.

  Is it possible to agree that abortion is indeed one more form of murder and yet is still a woman’s right? If God’s will is flouted, it is the woman, not the society, who will pay the price. That would be a huge and indigestible political move if it were ever stated just so. Yet as a species, we humans commit murder all the time, not only in war but by way of the meat and fish and fowl we send daily to our machines of extermination. Every piece of flesh at our tables was slain.

  Such an argument is obviously not suited for travel in public. Lambs and cattle are not to be compared to humans, and war protects our endangered land, etc. Since the Right to Life will continue to insist that pregnancy is the direct expression of God’s will, let us approach that as the true field of battle for this debate. Sex, given its appeal, its mystery, its extravagances, its explorations, its commitments, its adventures—be they sordid or illuminating—sex by its unique entrance into our most private thoughts, compulsions, pleasures, and, yes, terrors, is for most humans an arena where we are aware of a presence that seems divine, but we are also sensitive often to another presence. Some fornications feel diabolically inspired. The question is begged in its entirety when we say “God’s will.” A pregnancy can seem a blessing to one woman and a nightmare to another. Most women are haunted by the fear of losing a child in their womb, but there will always be a minority who find themselves drawn to abortion. They are haunted by an opposite terror, the fear that they have conceived a monster.

  If that becomes a woman’s deepest sentiment within a pregnancy, who has the authority to declare she is in error? She is, after all, convinced that her oncoming creation is evil. This may be the extreme case, but what of the woman who knows that her vanity is still so consumed with the need to maintain her youth and freedom that she senses how badly she would rear her child? A woman can have an honest recognition that she is too selfish or too timid or in too desperate a situation to bring an infant into the world. That much self-honesty can become the first step in becoming more human or, at least, more adult. For rare is the woman who has an abortion without suffering her private horror.

  The counterattack to the Right to Life is that no man has the authority to forbid abortion until we come to the end of all wars. Otherwise, since God is always on our side in war, it must be God’s desire that we look to exterminate strangers en masse. Such slayings are highly organized, of course, but they are first cousin to terrorism. We are killing people we know nothing about. We are also destroying full-grown humans into whom God may have put much interest and much intent.

  Gay Marriage: Family Values?

  Civil marriage for homosexuals is one more problem to divide liberals and conservatives. The prejudice runs deep. Most heterosexual men and women feel they have paid a life price to duty and responsibility by the act of getting married. So their resentment is profound. Why should gays enjoy the pleasures of the sybaritic yet have the civil and economic protections of marriage as well? The answer—and it will take more than one presidential election before these matters can be discussed openly—is that mutual comprehension and tolerance between heterosexuals and gay people may begin to come into being only after gay couples have taken on the yoke of marriage and, by adoption, children. Indeed, the saving irony to convince a few conservatives is that the desire among certain homosexuals to seek out the constraints of marriage does speak of an innate pull toward domestic cohabitation.

  Besides, there is a more forceful argument. It is that in a democracy, everyone feels the need to find out who they are, what they are, and in which ways they can live and identify themselves. Is this not the theme underlining the Pursuit of Happiness? It is worth adding that every child adopted by a gay couple no longer has to spend his or her years in an orphanage. If that child might face special difficulties because the parents are gay, the question to ask is whether the problems encountered will prove more dire than growing up in an institution.

  The Bush Credo: War Is More Godly Than Welfare

  It is still an outrage. Compared with other industrial powers, we do not have a comprehensive safety net. Indeed, much of the brouhaha over affirmative action is but the visible tip of the iceberg. Relatively restrained, the opponents of affirmative action give barely a hint of the deeper aversion many of them feel toward blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics.

  The real target has always been social welfare. There were men and women on the right who were enraged that whole sections of the population seemed content to raise large one-parent families and live off the government. Since their anger was often fueled by their own hard lives, they found it obscene that others did not have to work as conscientiously.

  Let us eschew the bona fide reply that not all idle hands were happy to live with welfare. Once again, it is worth taking up the right-wing argument on its merits. They would be the first to say that work is a blessing. Let us assume it is. By such logic, the real suffering for those on welfare is, precisely, that they are deprived of that blessing. For the average human, white or black, man or woman, it is probably more difficult to live on the dole than to work. Boredom and shame do the work instead on the soul.

  Can we stare into the center of the real moral issue? A nation indifferent to social welfare, a land so fevered with the free market that it would forgo all safety nets, a country without concern for its poorest members, deserving or undeserving, has become a society with distorted values. Whether one is full of belief in a higher authority or feels no belief, the basic notion, all flaws granted, is that democracy is still a system which assumes all human beings are of value. The concept is noble. But if the emphasis is on our own rights at all costs and we have become so swollen in our egomania that we are indifferent to the homeless sleeping on the street, even furious at the fact of their existence, what kind of freedom are we then offering to the tyrannized of other countries? Bogged down in the grease-soaked sands of Iraq, we have transported ourselves to a future of large taxation to small purpose. We will have to pay off Bush’s extravagances. Why? Was it, at worst, that if all else failed, we could keep our budget deficit so big that we would never be able to provide a safety net? One of the answers to why we are at war in Iraq may be there. The harshness in the voice of the talk radio motor-mouths gives a clue.

  Foreign Policy: Get Us Off the Dance Floor

  We are at a major turn in our history. It is possible that the Republican and Democratic Parties are at the edge of an upheaval of ideologies, a schism in each of our two major political configurations that will bend every one of our notions to Left or to Right. Will old-line GOP financial conservatives be in serious conflict with their own radical right? Will there be existential Democrats in rebellion against the rigidities of political correctness?

  Ever since FDR, the Democratic Party has been internationalist. So were most Republicans. The power of their corporate center enabled them to withstand intense isolationist sentiments in their own ranks.

  Following the end of the Cold War, the triumph of the corporate economy encouraged a vanity until recently that the corporation is a morally estimable body. One manifestation of this sense of superiority is physical presence. The world is now teeming with aesthetically neutered monuments—precisely, those high-rise hotels and offices that surround every major airport and capit
al in the world, those monotonous, glassy behemoths coming forth as the virtuous architecture of the new corporate religion, an El Dorado of technology.

  One fundamental error has begun to rock the globe. It was assumed by us that the most powerful of these corporate entities, that is to say, America, knew what was best for the rest of the world. The United States was ready to solve the problems of every nation, all of them, all the way from old Europe to the flea- and fly-bitten turpitudes of the Third World.

  It could be remarked that the men who set sail with Columbus in 1492 had more idea of where they were going. The best to be said for the gung-ho capitalistas of the Bush administration is that they taught us all over again how extreme vanity is all you need to sail right off the edge of the world.

  You cannot bring democracy to tyranny by conquest. Democracy can be neither injected nor imposed. It comes into existence through a long rite of passage. It has achieved its liberty by the actions of its own martyrs, rebels, and enduring believers. It is not a system, it is an ennoblement. Democracy must come from within. Brought into oppressed nations by way of external force, it collides with all the habits those tormented populations were obliged to develop, those humiliating compromises that came from submitting to an ugly and superior force. Now all of that has been jammed into an abruptly ground-up gruel of chopped psychic reflexes, even as a strange people arrived from outside in mighty machines with guns attached, new people whose motives one could not trust. How could one? The prevailing law within a tyranny is to trust nobody. There have been too many shameful adaptations within oneself, as well as decades of long-swallowed rage. The recollection of humiliations early and late has been incorporated into the psychic core. Existence has been imprisoned too long in the virtual reality imposed by the tyrant.

  We did not have an administration who could comprehend that. We came in with our guns, our smiles, and our assumption that democracy was there to hand over to these Iraqis. Our gift! Our form of virtual reality, superior to yours!

  The truth is, we don’t belong in any foreign country. We are not wise enough, honest enough with ourselves, nor a good enough nation to tell the rest of the world how to live—indeed, such a nation has never existed. But even if we were just so fabulous, so unique, other humans would still not be ready to savage their national pride for the dubious joy of receiving our crusade against evil. We would do well to become a little more aware of Christian militancy that marches into war against any evil but its own.

  Homeland Security: Will We Ever Learn to Live with Arithmetic?

  The time has come to solve our own problems, our ongoing American problems. We have a direct need to focus on ourselves over the coming span of years and thereby become less displaced from reality. For we are the most mighty of all the nations, and we are secure. Despite all, we are relatively secure. We can absorb new terrorist attacks if they come. We do not need military invasions into foreign lands to protect us. From 1968 through 2000, the world suffered an average of 425 terrorist incidents a year, resulting in an average of 321 deaths annually. In 2001, however, came 9/11. Three thousand lives were lost. A huge number. Yet in that same period, 1968 to 2001, Americans suffered more than forty thousand deaths each year from auto accidents. So even in 2001, there were thirteen times as many deaths resulting from auto accidents as from terrorist attacks. If it be asked why such focus is now being put on automobile mortalities, it is because such tragedies are not without analogy to losing one’s life to a terrorist. You leave your home, you kiss your wife goodbye, and you are dead ten minutes or ten hours later. For those left to grieve, there seems not enough reason to such death. Not enough logic! More than any other event in our lives, our own demise excites just such a need for logic in those who remain. Lung cancer, we know, kills 155,000 people a year. That is nearly four times more than automobiles, but we can comprehend that. We are ready to decide that cigarettes or working with asbestos has something to do with it. But death without any grip on an explanation bothers people more. It does no good to tell ourselves that 2.4 million people die each year in America. We are fixed on the three thousand lost humans of 9/11. They seem more important. In truth, they have been so important to America that we have come to what may be another point of no return. Will we continue to protect our freedoms, or will we conclude that all effort must go to saving ourselves from every conceivable form of terrorist attack? The second course pursued to conclusion will lead to nothing less than a unique variety of fascism. Brownshirts or Blackshirts will not be needed. Our only certainty is that whatever it will be called, fascism will not be the word. Should Bush remain in office, we can count on virtual reality to suggest the face of the new regime. But then, that is the essence of fascism—you must give the populace a version of cause and effect that has very little to do with how things are.

  The question, then, is whether we will be brave enough to dispense with foreign adventures. We know, or we should know, that any nation looking to attack us has to face the might of our armed forces. Any nuclear attack from North Korea or Iran would be an absolute disaster for either. Our power to retaliate is awesome. When it comes to terrorist attacks, however, we are also at the mercy of our deteriorating relations with the rest of the developed world. Military forays are not the answer—you do not wipe out terrorists with airplanes and tanks. Rather, we will be obliged to use—that dreaded term!—collective efforts to build an international police force ready to guard against major attacks comparable to 9/11. Even the best of such collaborative organizations will not prevent small terrorist acts, any more than a local police force can root out all local crime. But to be able to counter a terrorist effort on the scale of the Twin Towers, a global police system with a worldwide network of informants can be developed. It is one thing for terrorists to succeed in suicide bombings; it is another for them to find the necessary cadres, skills, and materials to bring off an immense coup against the sophisticated forces of proscription that can be put in place. Al-Qaeda took several years to prepare 9/11! Since we will, however, never be able to prevent all minor attacks, it is illogical to be ready to sacrifice our remaining liberties in order to search for a total security that will never come to pass. Terrorism, in parallel with cancer, is in total rebellion against established human endeavor. If democracy ever did begin to work in Iraq, the incidence of terrorist acts would, doubtless, increase. Suicide bombers are stimulated by the presence of the enemy, whether that presence is foreign soldiers or a political system that is anathema to their beliefs. Should Islam ever take over America, our own Christian fundamentalists would be the first to become terrorists.

  American freedom now depends on what we learned in elementary school. We must live with arithmetic! Over the last three years, 850 Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings, ambushes, sniper attacks, and gun battles. That, by rough calculation, is one Israeli in 20,000 for each of those three years. If we in America were to suffer at the same rate, we would, given our population, which is roughly fifty times as great as Israel’s, suffer approximately 14,000 deaths a year. That comes to one-third of our American loss of life from automobile accidents. Short of a major disaster, we are not likely to face 14,000 such deaths a year. We do not have the daily problems that Israelis have with Palestinians and Palestinians with Israelis. We have more freedom to explore into what we can become as a nation.

  Fighting the Mind That Is Inside the Brain

  Karl Rove, the man whom many consider the mind inside George W. Bush’s brain, is on record with his hopes for a twenty-year reign of the GOP. If that is not to take place, the need of the Democrats—it is worth repeating—is to be able to appeal to the best and most thoughtful of the conservatives. The time has come for us to understand that not everyone to the right is on the hunt for more money, more power, more conquest, and more worship of the flag. Not every conservative is for suburbs scourged by blank-faced malls, nor is every conservative ready to cheer every corporation that puts its name on a new stadium for professional
athletes. Not every conservative believes that our God-given mission is to needle the serum of democracy into nations with no vein for democracy. No, there are conservatives who believe that the United States has been boiling up an unholy brew under the lid of the corporate pot, conservatives who believe that educating our children is degenerating into a near to autistic mess, conservatives who do not think that all the answers to crime can be solved by building more prisons. No, there are even conservatives who would argue, just like Democrats, that no matter how much we spend on our schools, they don’t seem to be working. There are conservatives who have sensitive feelings on these matters—as sensitive as the Democrats’, by God. Yet neither side knows how to speak to the other.

  Still, this variety of conservative—decent not bigoted, open to discussion rather than given over, body and soul, to talk radio—is also aghast at the uneasy but real possibility that George W. Bush might be the worst and most unqualified president America has ever had. Yes, such conservatives, whatever their number, are in the same state of inanition and ideological impotence as all those Democrats who cannot believe where the country is going. Let us as Democrats consider the possibility that such conservatives can also be part of a future in which Democrats draw their political sustenance from the best ideas of Left and Right. At present, that is not easy to believe, but there are new political conceptions in the air, ideas that have not been hardened into the iron load of ideology that sits upon the elephant’s head and the donkey’s saddle. This country was founded, after all, on the amazing notion (for the time) that there was more good than evil in the mass of human beings, and so those human beings, once given not only the liberty to vote but the power to learn to think, might demonstrate that more good than evil could emerge from such freedom. It was an incredible gamble. All society until then had assumed that the masses were incapable of exercising a wise voice and so must be controlled from the top down.