Norman Mailer: What I've Learned About Rage

[Kire]

Norman Mailer: On Bush, Fahrenheit 911, Anarchism and Protest

As New York City prepares itself for the trauma of the Republican
Convention Norman Mailer let's loose on a wide variety of topics. On
Bush: "Bush can't solve any of our problems. He never was able to.
That may be the main reason he looked to empire-building. He had
nothing to offer but world conquest. So, if he's reelected, what will
he do if things remain bad in Iraq? You'll look back on the Patriot
Act as being liberal and gentle." On Fahrenheit 911: "You don't make
your case by showing George H.W. Bush and a Saudi sheikh shaking
hands. On a photo op, important politicians will shake hands with the
devil. Moore seems to think that if you get people laughing at the
right wing, you will win through ridicule. He's wrong." Read the full
interview in New York magazine.

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/rnc/9574/

[indigobusiness]

1. Sing it, Norman...

snip

Norman Mailer I don’t disagree. I saw it for the first time last night, and was upset through the first half. You don’t make your case by showing George H.W. Bush and a Saudi sheikh shaking hands. On a photo op, important politicians will shake hands with the devil. Moore seems to think that if you get people laughing at the right wing, you will win through ridicule. He’s wrong. That’s when we lose. Back with the Progressive Party in 1948, we used to laugh and laugh at how dumb the other side was. We’re still laughing, and we’re further behind now.


On the other hand, the stuff on Iraq was powerful. There, he didn’t need cheap shots. The real story was in the faces. All those faces on the Bush team. What you saw was the spiritual emptiness of those people. Bush has one of the emptiest faces in America. He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock. It could be that the most incisive personal crime committed by George Bush is that he probably never said to himself, “I don’t deserve to be president.” You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself. The vanity of George W. stands out with every smirk. He literally cannot control that vanity. It seeps out of every movement of his lips, it squeezes through every tight-lipped grimace. Every grin is a study in smugsmanship.


JBM His face does bring out the rage of the left. Never before have I seen so many people’s blood boil at the sight of an American president. Especially in New York. Of all the cities out there, why would the Republicans pick New York to hold their convention?

snip

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Good stuff!

[depakid]

3. -on the war against "the corporation"

NM: To win this war will take at least 50 years and a profound revolution in American values. We’d have to get away from manipulation. What we’ve got now is a species of economic, political, and spiritual brainwashing, vastly superior to the old Soviets, who were endlessly crude in their attempts. Our governmental and corporate leaders are much more subtle. Remember years ago, when you were around 15, you were wearing a shirt that said stüssy on it? And I said, “Not only do you spend money to buy the shirt, but you also advertise the company that sold it to you.” And you said, “Dad, you just don’t get it.” All right, you were right, I didn’t get it. But now, I notice, you don’t wear logos on your shirts.


JBM: I try my best not to. It’s hard to find a shirt that doesn’t have a logo these days....

[indigobusiness]

4. And this is particularly astute...

JBM I don’t know that we can make it through another four years of Bush.


NM Oh, we’ll make it through, although I’m not saying what we’ll be like at the end. By then, Karl Rove may have his twenty years. Just think of the kind of brainwashing we’ve had for the last four. On TV, Bush rinses hundreds of thousands of American brains with every sentence. He speaks only in clichés. You know, I happened to run into Ralph Nader recently in Chicago, and I, like a great many others, was looking to dissuade him from his present course. He’s a very nice man, maybe the nicest man I’ve met in politics—there’s something very decent about Nader, truly convincing in terms of his own probity. So I didn’t feel, “Oh, he’s doing it for ugly motives.” Didn’t have that feeling at all in the course of our conversation. Still, I was trying, as I say, to dissuade him, while recognizing that the odds were poor that I’d be successful. At one point, he said, “You know, they’re both for the corporation, Kerry and Bush.” And it’s true; both candidates are for the corporation, and I do agree with Nader that ultimately the corporation is the major evil. But in my mind, Bush is the immediate obstacle. He is a collection of disasters for America. What he does to the English language is a species of catastrophe all by itself. Bush learned a long time ago that certain key words, “evil, patriotism, stand-firm, flag, our-fight-against-terrorism,” will get half the people in America stirred up. That’s all he works with. Kerry will be better in many ways, no question. All the same, he will go along too much with the corporations who, in my not always modest opinion, are running America. At present, I don’t see how any mainstream politician can do otherwise. Finally, they’re working against forces greater than themselves.

[Miss Authoritiva]

2. With this, Mr. Mailer, I forgive & forget past falling-outs.

"It could be that the most incisive personal crime committed by George Bush is that he probably never said to himself, “I don’t deserve to be president.” You just can’t trust a man who’s never been embarrassed by himself."

[tom_paine]

5. Wow.

[indigobusiness]

6. kick

kick

[reprehensor]

7. More on the RNC Protests...

From a DemocracyNow! interview on Monday, Aug. 9th.

Norman Mailer: Why I Am Protesting the Presidency

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't we continue in that vein and you wrote an incredible work, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, about what happened in 1968. Why don't you talk about the siege of Chicago and relate it to what you're talking about today.

NORMAN MAILER: Well, there you had -- in a funny way, what you had was a reverse media, because the media covered the massacre on Michigan Boulevard. Most of you, I’m sure, know all about it, but for those of who you don't, there was a huge march of demonstrators, an essentially a peaceful march that went up Michigan Boulevard and at a given moment, given the order by Mayor Daly then, not the present Richard Daly, but his father, the police surged into the marchers and beat them up with canes. It was all on television. It was extraordinary television. One of the incredible moments of network television, and everyone was shocked down to the core. The Cronkites, the Rathers, whoever was there then. I don't remember. They were all profoundly shocked. It looked at the moment, it looked like: how awful, how awful, the republicans are going to pay for this, quite the contrary. The republicans won. Because out there on the core of America, the thing we have to recognize is the injustice that you are talking about in the media, which has rankled me for so many year that I cannot talk about it are not going to be overcome by talking, but they're going to be overcome by acquiring bits of power more and more. I would argue with you that The New York Times, bad as it is today, it's far better than it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago it wasn't written well. And the point is that to overcome, to overtake this incredible centrality of the corporation, we have got to learn guile. We have to learn to understand the enemy, and we have to devote our live to it. Not all of our lives. None of us will do that, I hope. We have to devote a good part of our lives to recognizing that we are not going to win this war by being funnier than the republicans. The democrats and the left have been incredibly more funny than the republicans for 50 years. I said this in Wellfleet last year. We have been laughing at them for 50 years and we are further back now than when we began. The way to do it is to acquire power and people in the middle America are terrified of change. Very often they have bad conscience. The bad conscience comes because to the degree they're good Christians, which would be half of the country, they feel they're a little too greedy to be a good Christian and it bothers them, which is why we keep getting this brainwashing all the time, which is immensely more successful than the brainwashing that went on in the Soviet Union. That was crude - the kids saw through it and they hated it. Now the brainwashing is immensely sensitive. It's clever. You pointed it out all over the place what they do. I was agreeing with you every step of the way, but statement, I kept saying it can never be enough pause because we're talking to ourselves. We have to reach into the middle. I would just say that the first step is to get Kerry elected, whatever faults he has. Once he's elected. We will have more of a voice. We're not going to have the voice. The corporation will still have the voice. But it can be the beginning of a very long march back toward at least the center of the power that we need. And I’m lightly ahead and I’m going to quit.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the role of protests? I mean, you have extensively written about it. You won the Pulitzer Prize for your book --

NORMAN MAILER: I'm also protests – I’m all for protests when an election is not coming up. Because: protests can have a huge effect, slowly, steadily not immediately. Almost immediately, the media particularly in America does its best to put protests down. But over a long haul, the march on the Pentagon ended up being a success. I have said this many times, but what Lyndon Johnson saw was that 50,000 middle class people, middle aged and young and a few old, paid their way to get to Washington with the prospect of being hit over the head before a club. Lyndon Johnson was a very canny man. He knew there's one thing about middle class people: they didn't like getting hit over the head with a club. If they -- if they are going to spend their money to come to Washington to protest, he was sick. Because he knew if he paid the way of all of the people who would come to support his war in Vietnam, he would be lucky to get 5,000 people. 50,000 had come this way, with all fear and determination, then there were probably somewhere between 5 million and 50 million behind them. He didn't want to find out. It took something away from them. He brought in Clark Clifford at one point to ask him for an honest appraisal of the war in Vietnam. Clifford said, it's a loser. Clifford was respected by Johnson because he was rejected. He said, you're not going to win this war, you cannot. I think that led to -- well, now we get into all of the complications of history. It's never clean. So, Johnson stepped down, Nixon came in, and Nixon knew advantage was to keep the war going for four years to get re-elected, et cetera, et cetera. Here we get into all of the tangles. I'm saying that we have to enter the land of the tangles.

more@link

[swag]

8. Norman lost me at

"women are low sloppy beasts" way back when.

Sorry, but I'm glad Gore Vidal shoved him down to the couch in that there drunken scuffle so long ago.