Norman Mailer - February 20, 2003
ONLY IN AMERICA
Norman Mailer
Author
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say, a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed. The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world - bin Laden, conceivably, for the greater glory of Allah - and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the 19th century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen duke it out, then jump the one or two who are left.
Today, however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to 9/11 planned to destroy bin Laden and Al Qaeda. When the campaign in Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not Al Qaeda, but Iraq.
Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is those covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate tonight. I will attempt to understand what the president and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.
Let me begin with Colin Powell's presentation before the UN two weeks ago. Up to a point, it was well-detailed and looked to prove that Saddam Hussein (to no one's dramatic surprise) was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you just swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, "I never said that," or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Confusion is sown rich in permutations. So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals - most of them under the counter - with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians, the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the Third World. He convinced many a good heart all over the world. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but, indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the world. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.
There had been talk before, and there was certainly talk then in the White House that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton's adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian anti-aircraft. We did it all from 15,000 feet up. So, Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud - a necessary qualification for the presidency - but Clinton's vulnerability stifled all that. So, in 1998, Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell's speech was full of righteous indignation at the bare-faced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America's readiness to go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now, yes, they, too, were ready for war, God bless us.
The major weakness in Powell's presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to Al Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Great Britain, the veto power in the Security Council, which is to say the French, the Chinese and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution. Not a week later, Al Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden that gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam's enemy now become Saddam's friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish Iraq and still suffer from the major catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to avert. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden.
Without those weapons, Al Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his bio-warfare and chemical stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous.
The inner diktat of George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible, now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional countermove. Was he saying in effect, "Allow me to string along the inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go to war with me." Since the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we allow such choices in the first place - these hellish Hobson choices?
Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the Bush agenda for war. The European edition of Time magazine had been conducting a poll on its web site: "Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?" With 318,000 votes cast so far, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent….
As John le Carré had put it to The Times of London: "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember."
Harold Pinter was no longer chose to be subtle in language: "…the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless."
A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate-slash-illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. For 125 years, the progenitors of the Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 were descended from lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow's home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their soul. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course, their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still thought there were rules to the game. They did not understand that cherished rules no longer apply when the stakes are large enough.
If Bush's legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as president was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded too simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself into the words.
Then came 9/11. There is such a thing as God-given luck in human affairs. (Which is also known as diabolical luck.) September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, suddenly, the horror had shown itself to be real. Gods and demons were invading the U.S., coming right in off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd guilt so many felt after 9/11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.
And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about 9/11. The manic money-grab excitement of the '90s had never been altogether free of our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn't necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren't supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good American psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don't consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.
Even before 9/11, many matters grew worse. America's spiritual architecture had been buttressed since World War II by our near-mythical institutions of security of which the FBI and the Catholic Church were most prominent, equal in special if intangible stature to the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Now, all that was taking its terrible whack. Old and new scandals of the FBI were brought into high focus by the Hanssen case which broke in February of 2001. An ultra-devout Catholic, Robert Hanssen had been a Soviet mole for 15 years. No one in the FBI could believe it. He had seemed the purest of the pure anti-Communists. Then after 9/11 came the pedophile lawsuits against the Catholic Church, and that opened an abyss of a wound in many a good Catholic home. It certainly injured the priesthood grievously. How could a young or middle-aged man wearing the collar walk down the street now without suffering now from the averted eyes and false greetings of the parishioners he met along the way?
And then there was the stock market. It kept sinking. Slowly, steadily, unemployment rose. The CEO scandals of the corporations became more prominent.
America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money-cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow who gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite 50-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void, and beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses, plastic, front runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor - only 16-story urban renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.
Then came a more complete exposure of the economic chicanery and pollution of the corporations. Economic gluttony was thriving at the top. Criminal behavior was being revealed on the front pages of every business section. Without 9/11, George W. Bush would have been living in the non-stop malaise of uglier and uglier media publicity. It could even be said that America was taking a series of hits that were not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is likely that Hitler would never have come to power 10 years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, 9/11 had done something comparable to the American sense of security.
For that matter, conservatism was heading toward a divide. Old-line conservatives like Pat Buchanan believed that America should keep to itself and look to solve those of its problems that we were equipped to solve. Buchanan was the leader of what might be called old-value conservatives who believe in family, country, faith, tradition, home, hard and honest labor, duty, allegiance and a balanced budget. The ideas, notions and predilections of George W. Bush had to be, for the most part, not compatible with Buchanan's conservatism.
The gap between his school of thought and that of value conservatives could yet produce a dichotomy on the right as clear-cut as the differences between Communists and Socialists after World War I. Flag conservatives paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom, they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When invalids have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be - fell, mighty, and near-holy words - the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world.
That is a very large statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic. While I am hardly in accord, it is, nonetheless, logical if you accept its premises. From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are loose. Bare bellybuttons pop onto every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals' eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can't read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all commitments, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Once we become a 21st century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture with all the hypocrisy attendant on that. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers are, of course, crazier than any average man when in and out of combat, but the overhead command is a major everyday pressure on soldiers and could become a species of most powerful censor over civilian life.
To flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and Evel Knievel might be able to bond together, after all. Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word 15 times in every speech.
There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain. This, I would opine, is the prime subtext beneath the Iraqi project, and the flag conservatives may not even be wholly aware of the scope of it, not all of them. Not yet.
Besides, Bush could count on a few other reliable sentiments that are very much present in our daily affairs. To begin with, a good part of American pride sits today on the tripod of big money, sports and the Stars and Stripes. Something like a third of our major athletic stadiums and arenas are named after corporations - Gillette and FedEx are but two of 20 examples. The NFL Super Bowl could only commence this year after an American flag the size of a football field was removed from the turf. The U.S. Air Force gave the groin-throb of a big "V" overhead. Probably half of America has an unspoken desire to go to war. It satisfies our mythology. America, goes our logic, is the only force for good that can rectify the bad. George W. Bush may even sense better than anyone how a war with Iraq will satisfy our addiction to living with adventure on TV. So, yes, if this is facetious - so be it - the country is becoming more loutish every year. War is also mighty TV entertainment.
More directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge 9/11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in 9/11, but President Bush is a philosopher. 9/11 was evil; Saddam is evil; all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.
The president can also satisfy the more serious polemical needs of a great many neo-cons in his administration who believe Islam will yet be Hitler Redux to Israel. Protection of Israel is OK to Bush, electorally speaking, but it is also obligatory, especially when he cannot count on giving orders to Sharon that will always be obeyed. Sharon, after all, has one firm hold on Bush. With the Mossad, Sharon has the finest intelligence service in the Near East if not in the world. The CIA, renowned by now for its paucity of Arab spies in the Muslim world, cannot afford to do without Sharon's services. These are all reasonably good reasons Bush can find to go to war. As for oil, allow Ralph Nader a few statistics:
"The United States currently consumes 19.5 million barrels a day, or 26 percent of daily global oil consumption. The U.S. [has to] import 9.8 million barrels a day, or more than half of the oil we consume.
"The surest way for the U.S. to sustain its overwhelming dependence on oil is to control the 67 percent of the world's proven oil reserves that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf. Iraq alone has proven reserves of 112.5 billion barrels, or 11 percent of the world's remaining supply. Only Saudi Arabia has more."
I would add that once America occupies Iraq, it will also gain a choke hold on Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Near East. One can also propose that we wish to go into Iraq for the water. To quote a piece by Stephen C. Pelletiere in The New York Times of January 31: "There was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and by extension, Israel. No progress has been made in this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all this could change." So, yes, oil is a part of the motive, even if that can never be admitted. And water could prove a powerful tool to pacify a great many heated furies of the desert. The underlying motive, however, still remains George W. Bush's underlying dream: Empire!
"What word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?" wrote Michael Ignatieff on January 2 in The New York Sunday Times Magazine. From Timothy Gorton Ash in The New York Review of Books, February 13: "The United States is not just the world's only superpower, it is a hyper-power whose military expenditures will soon equal that of the next 15 most powerful states combined." Perhaps the most thorough explanation of this as-yet unadmitted campaign toward Empire comes from the columnist Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Back on October 14, four months ago, he wrote:
"This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe that the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination."
Back in 1992, a year after the final fall of the Soviet Union, there were many on the right in America, early flag conservatives, who felt that an extraordinary opportunity was now present. America could take over the world. The Defense Department drafted a document which, to quote Bookman once more, envisioned the United States as "a Colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in its final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush. The defense secretary in 1992 was Dick Cheney [and] the document was drafted by [Paul] Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense under-secretary for policy." Now, as many of you know, he is deputy defense secretary under Rumsfeld.
Afterward, from 1992 to 2000, this dream of world domination was not picked up by the Clinton administration and that may help to account for the intense, even virulent hatred that so many on the right felt during those eight years. If it weren't for Clinton, America could be ruling the world. Obviously, that document, "Project for a New American Century," projected prematurely in 1992 has now, after 9/11, become the policy of the Bush administration. The flag conservatives were triumphant. They could seek to take over the world. Iraq could be the first step. Beyond, were not only Iran, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea, but China.
Of course, not every last country had to be subjugated. Some needed only to be dominated or brought into partnership. There could be firm and mutual understanding. To speak of China as existing in a symbiotic relationship with us is too exceptional a remark to make without some projection into possible reasons and causes. It is not inconceivable that some of the brighter neo-cons do see some fearful possibilities in our technological development Non-military perils also loom for the future. A late January piece in The Boston Globe by Scott A. Bass sets it forth:
"Research and development at American universities relies heavily on foreign students in the crucial fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM fields.) Too few domestic students are earning advanced graduate degrees in STEM fields to support our economic, strategic and technological needs. … They may have found the academic rigors of the STEM fields too challenging. "Between 1986 and 1996, foreign students earning STEM field Ph.D.s increased at a rate nearly four times faster than domestic students. In 2000, 43 percent of student science Ph.D.s went to non-U.S. citizens." Flag conservatives may yet be hoping to send some message like this to China: "Hear ye! You Chinese are bright. We can tell. We know! Your Asian students were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don't get much pleasure anyway, so they like the notion of cybernetic power right at their fingertips. Technology is ideal for them. We can go along with that. You fellows can have your technology, may it be great! But, China, you had better understand: We still have the military power. Your best bet, therefore, is to become Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well. You will be most important to us, eminently important. But don't look to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope for, China, is to be our Greeks."
In the 1930s, you could be respected if you earned a living. In the '90s, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed. It may be that empire depends on an obscenely wealthy upper-upper class who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, are bound to feel no great allegiance in the pit of their heart for democracy. If this insight is true, then it can also be said that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the '90s, may have created an all-but-irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to empire. That would safeguard those great and quickly-acquired gains. Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he's doing for the future of empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?
Of course, terrorism and instability are the reverse face of empire. If the Saudi rulers have been afraid of their mullahs, for fear of their power to incite terrorists, what will the Muslim world be like once we, the Great Satan, are there to dominate the Near East in person?
Since the administration can hardly be unaware of the dangers, the answer comes down to the unhappy likelihood that Bush and Company are ready for a major terrorist attack. As well as any number of smaller ones. Either way, it will strengthen his hand. America will gather about him again. We can hear his words in advance: "Good Americans died today. Innocent victims of evil had to shed their blood. But we will prevail. We are one with God." Given such language, every loss is a win.
Yet, so long as terrorism continues, so will its subtext, and there is the horror to its nth power. What made deterrence possible in the Cold War was not only that there was everything to lose for both sides, but also the inability of either side to be certain they could count on any human being to turn the apochryphal switch. In that sense, no final plan could be counted on. How could either of the superpowers be certain that the wholly reliable human selected to push the button would actually prove reliable enough to destroy the other half of the world? A dark cloud might come over him at the last moment. He could fall to the ground before he could do the deed.
But this does not apply to a terrorist. If he is ready to kill himself, he can also be ready to destroy the world. The wars we have known until this era could, no matter how horrible, offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not interested in negotiation. Rather, it would insist on no termination short of victory. Since the terrorist cannot triumph, he cannot cease being a terrorist. They are a true enemy, far more basic, indeed, than Third World countries with nuclear capability who invariably appear on the scene prepared to live with deterrence and its in-built outcome-agreements after years or decades of passive confrontation, threats and hard bargaining.
It must be admitted, however, that Bush does have liberal support. The New Yorker, The Washington Post and some on The New York Times are joined with Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein, Senator Joe Lieberman and Senator Kerry in acceptance of the idea that perhaps we can bring democracy to Iraq by invasion. In a carefully measured appraisal of what the possibilities might be, Bill Keller speaks in The New York Times Op-Ed page on February 8 of a war that might go quickly and well: "Let's imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of Cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage. [Even so] a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them open.
"[Is] our aim to promote secular democracy, or stability? Some, probably including some in Mr. Bush's cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam's Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months."
Or, perhaps, argues Keller, we will fashion a real democracy in Iraq after all, and the Near East will benefit. It is as if these liberal voices have decided that Bush cannot be stopped and so must be joined. To commit to a stand against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at the administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq.
It is an argument that can be sustained up to a point, but the point depends on many eventualities, the first of which is that the war is quick and not horrendous.
The old Bill Clinton version of overseas presumption is present in any case. The argument that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germany and therefore can build it anywhere, does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were countries with a homogenous population and a long existence as nations. They each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other lands. They were near to totally destroyed, but had the people and the skills to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy were veterans of Roosevelt's New Deal and, mark of the period, were actually effective idealists.
Iraq, in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a post-World War I patchwork of Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, and Turkomans, who, at best, distrusted one another intensely. A situation analogous to Afghanistan's divisions among its warlords could be the more likely outcome. No one can declare with authority that democracy will certainly be built there, yet the arrogance persists. There does not seem much comprehension that except for special circumstances, democracy is never there for us to create in another country by the force of our will.
Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There's nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can't play with it. You can't assume we're going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.
Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.
The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. I could, for example, be entirely wrong about the deeper motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as trying in true good faith to save the world. We can be certain Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully that tears come to their eyes. David Frum, who as a speech writer for Bush (he coined the phrase "Axis of Evil") recounts in The Right Man: the Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush a meeting in the Oval Office last September. The president, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them, "You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer."
That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know for certain to whom our prayers will go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
"Our war with terror," says Bush, "begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end…until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." And, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process? "At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told his closest advisors, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. "That's OK with me. We are America."
It must now be obvious that if the combined pressures of the Security Council vetoes and the growing sense of world outrage, plus a partial collaboration of Saddam with the inspectors results in long-term containment rather than war, if Bush has to turn away from an active invasion of Iraq, he will do so with great frustration. For he will have to live again with all the old insolubles! Deep down, he may fear that he will not have any answer then for restoring America's morale. Can it be that the prospect of bringing these troops home again will prove so unpalatable that he will have to go to war? Speaking to the Senate, Robert Byrd said, "Many of the pronouncements made by this administration are outrageous. There is no other word.
"Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq - a population, I might add, of which over 50 percent is under age 15 - this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological horrors - this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.
"We are truly 'sleepwalking through history.' In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings. "I truly must question the judgment of any president who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50 percent children is in 'the highest moral traditions of our country.' This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time."
If I were George W. Bush's karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld. For those of the rest of us who are not going to depend on the power of prayer, we will do well to find the rampart we can defend over what may be dire years to come. Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower regions of a monumental banana republic with a government gung-ho to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Barbara Lane: Were you surprised by the CIA failure to anticipate 9/11?
Norman Mailer: Not at all. Not at all. First of all, even if they'd been an extraordinary organization, they might not have anticipated it because in an intelligence agency you receive so much information all the time. But the great problem is interpretation. If you're a terrorist or you belong to a group who wishes, in one way or another, to confuse the enemy, you manage to send out all sorts of double information. In other words it's the old question of turning spies. So, if you capture a spy from the other side and turn them to your side, you give them false information to send back. And so, what happens: I'm sure there are any number of informations of 9/11, plus 10 times, 100 times more information in the other direction. So, in that sense, no I don't blame the CIA at all. The point is, the CIA for the last 10, 15, 20 years has been giving all its energy, all its resources to technological ways of obtaining information. They're like the National Security Agency now much more than they were in the beginning. And they have let the human intelligence slide, because it's much too difficult to get spies. You can work and work for years, you think you get a spy, and then you don't get him; something ridiculous happens. Or you get a spy and he's turned, and he does you more damage than good. So at a certain point the CIA came to the conclusion that they were going to depend on technological information much more than they would human information. And so, of course, they were not at all in shape to have intelligence on the ground with Muslim people. And, on top of that, as I've said many times, as a good American, I can say it: We're just not good at languages. And Arabic is, well, beyond the pale. That's why I really think that the power that Sharon has on Bush when Bush tells Sharon to do something and Sharon says, "I won't," it comes from the fact that, my guess is - this is just a guess - that our intelligence depends enormously on the Mossad and Israeli intelligence. And of course that means they stay awake at night wondering if the Mossad is lying to them for their own ends. Intelligence is a very tricky business.
Lane: The newest poll showed that 58 percent of Americans still support President Bush. How do you explain his continuing support?
Mailer: Well, he's good-looking enough to be - just like Ronald Reagan - he's good-looking enough to be the second juvenile in a movie: the one who doesn't get the girl, but you end up liking him. And, for some reason, Americans wouldn't trust a number one juvenile. A lot of them were always suspicious of Bill Clinton even though he was popular. But Reagan and Bush do have this charming quality that maybe won't get the girl, but they're good guys. And, of course, my personal opinion, for what it's worth, which is very little, is that both of them are much more significant as shells than as spirits.
Lane: There are several questions about impeaching George Bush, but here's one that says, Who can and should defeat George Bush in 2004?
Mailer: There's no one around at the moment. But, you know, in politics, the rashest thing you can do is to predict who is going to be president two years before an election. I remember all the way back in 1964 - everybody thought Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania was going to be the Republican candidate. But of course it ended up being Barry Goldwater. Things turned inside out in the last eight months. And so, there's no telling now who can come though. So much of it is luck, too. I wouldn't even make a guess. If you were to ask me if I had a preference - oh, I don't know - Kerry, perhaps.
Lane: Have we seen the end of Bill Clinton as a nationally elected figure?
Mailer: You know, it would be foolhardy to predict what Bill Clinton is going to do because all we know is that Bill Clinton wants to do something very big again, but he doesn't know yet, probably. He might end up being head of the UN or first general in NATO. Stranger things have happened.
Lane: Several questions refer to your two bids to become the mayor of New York. What type of mayor would you have been for the citizens of New York, and how's the current mayor doing?
Mailer: Let's take a negative scenario first. It could have been a disaster. The reason was that New York went broke one year after that election. And, if I had been the mayor, everybody would have said, "You see what happens when you elect guys like that?" But if it had gone well, it would have been chaos from the word go, because we wanted to change everything. I knew nothing about politics at the time, but when I came out of it I said, "The one thing I've learned is that a freshman cannot become president of the fraternity." And then came Jimmy Carter. So even the one thing I learned proved of no value.
Lane: Please comment on the nature of celebrity in the second millennium?
Mailer: Oh that's out of my competence. You mean second millennium? Up to 2000?
Lane: The year 2000 and beyond, I think.
Mailer: Isn't that the third millennium?
Lane: Yes, it is. There you go. I knew you were sharp.
Mailer: I have nothing to say about the third millennium yet, other than what I've said tonight. Celebrity I don't think has taken a turn in the last few years that I can detect. Celebrity is our own form of, how would I put it? If I were a medievalist, I would say that celebrity is the ragtag of royalty, of nobility of the Middle Ages. In other words, we look upon them with the same respect that peasants used to have for some of the lovely and some of the awful people who ride roughshod over them. But celebrity itself is an extraordinary state because a celebrity is almost always living in the middle of an identity crisis. Particularly if they're movie stars and their fortunes go up and down every few years, they never know who they are. Which, by the way, you can work in a dull job, and it can be awful for you. But, nonetheless, the one advantage to a dull job, which is why some people never quit it, is it does give you at least two of the three legs you need as a tripod in order to have a seat. In other words, there is a certain stability to sameness. If everything is changing all the time, and you end up in the most peculiar positions where you don't know who you are. Not only do you not know if you're good or bad, you don't even know if you're tall or short.
Lane: Who are your enemies at age 80?
Mailer: At age 80? Well, on the evidence of tonight, George Bush.
Lane: Any others literary or otherwise?
Mailer: Literary? Yes. Yes. Yes. Certain reviewers, who I would describe as posterior apertures.
Lane: Not naming names?
Mailer: Well, if I were called a posterior aperture, I'd hate to have my name attached to it. Actually, I know one reviewer who is possessed of a power tool up the posterior aperture whenever she has to review one of my books.
Lane: Does she write for The New York Times?
Mailer: You got it.
Lane: What do you consider the best book review ever written about your work?
Mailer: Oh, there've been a few. I really don't recall at the moment. I can tell you the best sentence that was ever said about my work. Alfred Kazin years ago once said, "Mailer is as fond of his style as an Italian tenor of his vocal chords." And I like that because it's not only funny and well-turned, but it also was useful to me. Once in a while when I was writing I would say, "Am I exercising the vocal chords?"
Lane: Speaking of all this, one of our members wants to know, Why didn't you hit Gore Vidal harder?
Mailer: I never hit him. What happened is - you know it's not easy to hit someone cold. People have a mistaken notion of pugnacity. People very often need to get very pugnacious in order to be able to throw one punch. It's hard to throw a punch. Particularly if you've grown up with any attachment to the middle class. So, I was warming up. I wanted to hit Gore, but it hasn't come yet. You see, punching is a species of inspiration, when all is said. So, I was warming up, and I wasn't getting there. I had a heavy tumbler in my hand and it was filled with ice cubes and drink, and I threw the drink into his face and then bounced this heavy tumbler off his head. And that was what he thought was the punch. He spoke later, with his wonderful wit, of, "I saw this tiny fist coming at me." It was in fact an ice cube. But I never punched him. It was very mean to take a heavy tumbler and bounce it off his head.
Lane: There was also a head-butt?
Mailer: That was another occasion. Actually, Gore and I, we can never say we're friends because there has been such bad blood over the years, but we can work together. We did "Don Juan in Hell" in Provincetown this fall. He was a marvel. He's a marvelous devil. He really was almost as good as Charles Laughton in playing that role. I had to work in his wake. I didn't enjoy it much.
Lane: You said women have totally taken over the book publishing world.
Mailer: I didn't say totally, I'm sure, Barbara. I probably said they've taken it over.
Lane: Question - for better, or for worse?
Mailer: I'll put it this way: I wouldn't say it's their fault.
Lane: How diplomatic.
Mailer: No, it's just that publishing has become very corporate. So, with the nature of corporations, the bottom line dips to green the more and more and the middle of publishing workers' nightmares. If there were men there, publishing would also be in trouble. But I think it's in trouble. One of my favorite remarks, I utter it every opportunity I get, is that people always complain about how much money young, ignorant athletes get. But at least they're the best in their profession. Whereas in literature, it's the mediocrities who make the most money. And that's all right. If you're really a serious writer, money should only be your second, third or fourth preoccupation, not your first. So that's all. But it irks you. I'd be happier if nobody made an enormous amount of money, but made enough to live on. That'd be more of an ideal literary world. The moment that tremendous money starts coming in, publishers naturally have to start letting go of little standards all the time - until finally it gets away from them.
Lane: Who are the contemporary novelists who should be celebrated today, who should making the money, if that's the standard?
Mailer: There are a lot of them. Let me start with the women first, since my reputation is so bad in that direction. Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates. There's a wonderful new book coming along by a writer named Ingrid Bengis who's written a book called Metro Stop Dostoevsky. It's about Russia from 1990 to the present. It's remarkable book and wonderfully written. Toni Morrison doesn't need any help from me. I can think of a few more. Of course, among the men, there is any number of good ones. There's the old four Bellow, Roth, Updike and Mailer. There's Don DeLillo. There's Bill Kennedy, a wonderful writer. There's Kurt Vonnegut. You can go on and on and on. There's Ed Doctorow; any number of very good ones.
Lane: When will you complete and publish the sequel to Harlot's Ghost?
Mailer: Probably never. I was about to start the second volume about two years ago, and something happened that never happened before, which is a new muse came into the room just as I was on the altar. And said, "Come here." And I left the second volume of Harlot's Ghost at the altar and ran off with the new muse. I've been working on a novel that I'm going to either finish it or it is going to finish me, because it's a long book that will come out in pieces. But I don't think I'll ever get back to Harlot's Ghost. Also, the CIA has changed so much that I'm not sure that what I was interested in is still there.
Lane: Can you tell us anything about the new novel?
Mailer: Not a thing. I don't even tell my wife. She guessed because she's very bright. But I didn't tell her. I'll tell you why. It's not just to be cute, which is one of my virtues and vices. It's also because if I started to tell you about it, we'd be talking about nothing else for hours, and I would talk the book away.
Lane: Unfortunately, we only have time for one more question. You did mention your wife, so please talk about, on the sixth attempt, finally finding contentment in marriage.
Mailer: You, know I didn't hear that… You swallowed your words.
Lane: Please talk about, on the sixth attempt, finally finding contentment in marriage.
Mailer: There's no such thing as contentment in marriage. There are relatively good confrontational relationships that humans lead. I once said that to me marriage was an excrementitious relationship. What I meant by that was that we go along through life looking for someone who we can dump on in such a way that we won't hurt them too grievously. And they, in turn, have to have the right to do it back to us. That's a good marriage. We're all too timid to get rid of our ugliest emotions in public because there are such consequences. So, as a result, what we need is someone up close who we can be bad, mean, ugly and stupid with. But, in turn, you have to be ready to receive that stuff. The mark of a good marriage is that you're fond of each other after a strop fight. That demands wit on both sides. You've got to be able to appreciate your opponent's wit. It's really analogous to boxing. Very often you'll see a ferocious fight for 10 rounds, 12 rounds, and in the end they embrace each other. They embrace each because they've both learned so much in the fight. They learned a lot about their own courage. They learned a lot about the surprises you can get from another human being. They learned a great deal, and they're truly fond of each other for that little bit. But, in any event, yes, the marriage has gone on for 28 years. I am, in effect, an old married man.
|