NORMAN MAILER: Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, America is being lost, but in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost through television.
Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption. Add to that our present-day classrooms. Does anybody ever say that one reason our education is such a blighted mess is that just about all schools now use fluorescent lights? Why? Because they cost less. I would say that in the final count of dollars and cents, they cost more, because the kids are less productive. What characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer than they do under incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent tubes offer a sickly light. Skin looks washed-out and a bit livid. If everybody seems uglier than they are normally, why then, everyone naturally grows a little depressed. They begin to think, What am I doing with all these plain-looking people? Aren’t I worth more?
This little matter does contribute to the deterioration of the powers of concentration. Bad architecture, invasive marketing, ubiquitous plastic—such deleterious forces bother me much more than immigration. I could go on about this. Our first problem is not immigration but the American corporation. That is the force which has succeeded in taking America away from us.
IMPERIAL PLASTIC
NORMAN MAILER: Live in a technological environment long enough and you begin to feel as if your soul is frayed. A curious process has been going on in America for many years. You could term it the dumbing down of Americans, as if we have become cruder in certain ways as a reaction to a terribly uncomfortable time of coming to grips with technology, which is essentially antipathetic to the part of ourselves we love best—that creature who senses and can enjoy life. At this point in existence we’re being asked to substitute power for pleasure.
Technology says to you, Fellow, get it through your head: You’re going to have a little less pleasure from now on but much more power. That’s technology’s credo. And it opens a tendency for many of us to become narcissistic and power-driven. (And icy within.) Working in a technological environment, what do you have under your fingertips? Plastic. We all know plastic doesn’t feel as good as wood, or skin. Even metal offers more to the touch, but the aim of technological society, ultimately, is to work everything over to plastic—woods, metals, flowers, food if they can do it, and indeed they’ve virtually accomplished that with the astronauts’ nutrient packages.
Take commercial airplanes, for example. Getting on one is always a hellish experience. Not because you fear the plane is going to crash, but you are put into a totally plastic environment, you are hermetically sealed, you are engaged willy-nilly in the collective aura and psychic emissions of sixty, eighty strangers in a confined space. Even the air is fake. So it is a specifically unpleasant experience. And the airlines have been trying intermittently for the last fifty years to make the experience less unpleasant. The rest of the time they are looking to reduce amenities and squeeze out more money. Ah, the pangs of conscience, pro and con, within capitalism!
ISRAEL
These remarks on Israel are tentative. It cannot be otherwise. The pain of being a Jew is that one feels responsible for what all other Jews do. For to be Jewish is to live with the echo of a thousand years of alienation. To defend my own people proves as difficult for me then as it is to criticize them. I am not at ease with myself when I speak of Israel, or of Jews. All the same, some of what follows may be worth saying. I do not know that these thoughts are in all that many other places.
NORMAN MAILER: It is in the interest of the Arab nations to have Israel as the great villain. Although I’m Jewish, bone and blood, I’m not a patriotic Jew in the sense of Israel right or wrong, my Israel. I don’t have those feelings. But I do think that the end of the Holocaust gave us one grand example of how inhuman the sheiks and leaders at the top of many an Arab nation were then. They could’ve said, “Let these Jews have that land. It’s not going to hurt us. We might even be able to use each other to good purpose.” They didn’t. They chose to see these Holocaust survivors as the enemy. They used Israel to divert hatred away from their own regimes.
I expect high Saudi officials might well be content these days that the Israelis have an immense Palestinian problem. Because if they didn’t, the Saudis might. The Palestinians, given their history, are probably less malleable to the dictates of Islamic extremism than other Arab peoples in the various Muslim establishments. Not all the Palestinians are even Islamic. They could prove a difficult mixture for countries like Saudi Arabia to deal with. So the Saudis now have a wonderful ploy: They use the Palestinians as their justification to hate Israel, when in fact they look upon Israel as their safeguard against the Palestinians.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Can we address more generally Israel and its unavoidable existential dilemma, which is the Palestinians?
NORMAN MAILER: Well, I start with a set of simple, unsophisticated notions about Israel. It was such a small country when it began. If the Arab leaders had had any kind of human goodness in them, they could have said, These people have been through hell. Let’s treat them with Islamic courtesy, the way we are supposed to treat strangers. Instead, they declared them the enemy. The Israelis had no choice but to seek to become strong and ally themselves with us. In the course of doing so, some of the best aspects of Jewish nature—irony, wit, the love of truth, the love of wisdom and justice—suffered internal depredations.
The prevailing attitude over the decades demanded that they become good farmers, good technicians, good soldiers. No need to use the minds for fine-tuning anymore. Do not even speak of hearts. “Be there. You’re needed,” became the overriding virtue.
Since it was a matter of saving their country, everything changed. Quantity changes quality, which may be the best three words Engels ever wrote. Quantity changes quality. As the Israelis became tougher, so they lost any hard-earned and elevated objectivity, any high and disinterested search for social value. The logo became Israel, my Israel. That was inevitable. It is also tragic, I think. Israel is now one more powerhouse in the world. But what they’ve lost is special. Now they treat the Palestinians as if they, the Israelis, are the Cossacks and the Palestinians are ghetto Jews. You know, the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, turn itself inside out.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Do you think there is any way they can escape that dilemma with the Palestinians?
NORMAN MAILER: I don’t see how. Not right now. It may be that what they feel is that if they don’t gamble now, they will be destroyed later. If a war with Iraq ends with Americans installed there, Israel could feel more secure for decades to come. But it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neocons may feel this is their best shot, this is the moment when they have to take a chance because if they don’t now, Israel is likely to be doomed ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.
But again, I say, You don’t gamble that way. I’ve always been thoroughly opposed to gambling with your last thousand bucks. Especially if you have a family. That is one reas
on I am a Left-Conservative. That is the conservative part of me.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: What’s your opinion of Ariel Sharon?
NORMAN MAILER: He is what he is. A brute. A powerhouse general. I think his defense would be: “I am what fate has made me.” If he had lived in the ghetto, he would have been one of the stronger men there and probably one of the more disliked. But now he is an Israeli. What is obvious, what stands out in most Israelis, is that they are patriots. My God, they are. After Hitler, how could they not be? In that sense, I am sure Sharon thinks he is doing the only thing he can do, that he is doing the right thing. Just as I was going on earlier about Christians having this great unspoken guilt that they are not compassionate but greedy, so I think there is a similar inner crisis in Israel. I think they are ready to say: We are no longer humanists. We’ve become the opposite of ourselves. Still, we protect the country. We dare the unknown. If Saddam unloads on us? If a large part of Israel is lost to such a war? Well, sometimes one must undergo serious surgery. I think the Sharons are ready for that. Of course, the neocons here will not be losing their own arm or leg or lungs.
I would add that it is indeed a prodigious gamble for Israel. America could win easily over Iraq, but if Saddam has a Samson complex, what would his last act be? Might he hit Israel at the end with everything he’s still got? At that point, he is a very dangerous man, since he has nothing more to lose. He would never dare to attack Israel first. That would certainly destroy him. He wouldn’t even dare, I think, to allow terrorists to do it for him, because of the obvious reason that it would be too easy to trace it to him. But if Saddam has lost everything, then the likelihood is that he will pull down the columns of the temple: He will be ready to rest as history’s superterrorist.
A NOTE PRECEDING THE END NOTE
The title of this publication was decided upon before we knew whether the United States would be at war by the time this appeared in print or whether, for that matter, the war might already be over.
I must say that the choice of title occasioned no hesitation. War is a state of mind as well as a series of martial events, and in that sense we have certainly been at war with Iraq for many a month and probably will continue to be at war after the immediate hostilities end.
The point I am trying to make is stated in the title. Why? Why are we at war? Why are we living with a state of mind that knows we are at war and there is nothing we can do about it? Not now, not at this juncture.
Enough. Since this all began with 9/11, let us conclude with a thought or two on that.
END NOTE
Once, in the Democratic primary of 1969, I ran for mayor of New York in the hope that a Left-Right coalition could be formed and this Left-Right pincers could make a dent in the entrenched power of the center. The best to be said for our campaign was that it had its charm. I am not so certain, however, whether the basic idea must remain eternally without wings. It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center. Back then, our notion was built on the premise that we did not really know the elements of a good, viable society. We all had our differing ideals and morals and political desires but rarely found a way to practice them directly. So, we called for Power to the Neighborhoods. We suggested that New York City become a state itself, the fifty-first. Its citizens would then have the power to create a variety of new neighborhoods, new hamlets, villages, and townships, all built on separate concepts, core neighborhoods founded on one or another cherished notion of the Left or the Right. One could have egalitarian towns and privileged places or, for those who did not wish to be bothered with living in so detailed (and demanding) a society, there would be the more familiar way, the old way of doing things—the State of the City of New York, a government for those who did not care, just like old times.
It was a menu for social exploration and experiment. If we had been elected, we might have ended with everything in an abysmal mess. It was a wicked scheme, since we had (just like our nation’s current imperative to go to war with Iraq) no real notion of how it would all turn out, which is the essence of the wicked—up the ante and close your eyes while you wait for the turn of the card.
Nonetheless, some germ of the idea of a society open enough for people to live intense social lives still appeals to me. I repeat: We do not really know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow the exits and promote a single, central, secure point of view) may prove to be the least good answer of all. Until the Left and that part of the Right that is still loyal to its old values can come to recognize that no matter their essential differences, they also share one profound value they might look to protect in common—the vulnerable dignity of the human creation. At present, we are all obliged to travel willy-nilly into the vain land of corporate hegemony, with its self-serving notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any country anywhere, a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise of democracy, which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and learn from its own human errors.
By now, our nation has become a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements. Nobody ever said, so far as I know, that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest. Should the richest man in a town amass ten times more, even fifty times more, it is not hard to conceive of a reasonably decent society. When you get to the point where you’re speaking of thousands to one, something outrageous is taking place. The people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it. We don’t control our country. Corporate power is running this country now. The notion that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true. Was I ever able to vote on how high buildings could or should be? No. Was I ever able to say I don’t want food frozen? No. Was I ever able to say I want tax money to pay for political campaigns, not interest groups? Nobody’s ever been able to vote on many an item that truly matters in terms of how our lives are led. And, of course, we see the political process become more and more money-mechanized. We’re on a power trip in which only one small fraction of America manages to participate.
They speak of pre-cancerous conditions in bodies, and I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now. I hope we’ll muddle through, provided there are no more large disasters. There are pro-democratic forces in America that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.
But the situation is serious. If we have a depression or fall into desperate economic times, I don’t know what’s going to hold the country together. There’s just too much anger here, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism. Patriotism in a country that’s failing has a logical tendency to turn fascistic, just as too much sentimentality will corrupt compassion. Fascism in America is not going to come with a political party. Nor with black shirts or brown shirts. But there will be a curtailing of liberties. Homeland Security has put the machinery in place. The people who are running the country, in my opinion, simply do not have the character or wisdom to fight for the concept of freedom if we suffer horrors; no, not if we suffer dirty bombs, terrorist attacks on a huge scale, virulent diseases. The notion that you’re going to have your freedom saved by people who work for security agencies is curious at best. They’re on a one-way street. Anything bad of that sort is very bad for them. So they’re going to do their utmost to restrict the freedom of people during critical situations. In the final analysis, democracy is inimical to security. Americans have to be willing to say at a certain point that we’re ready to take some terrorist hits without panicking, that freedom is more important to us than security.
Let’s suppose ten people are killed by a small bomb on a street corner in some city in America. The first thing to understand is that there are 285 million Americans. So, there’s one chan
ce in 28.5 million you’re going to be one of those people. By such heartless means of calculation, the three thousand deaths in the Twin Towers came approximately to one mortality for every ninety thousand Americans. Your chances of dying if you drive a car are one in seven thousand each year. We seem perfectly ready to put up with automobile statistics.
DOTSON RADER: What is dangerous about what you are saying is that it implies there is a tolerable level of terror, and we have to accept it.
NORMAN MAILER: That’s what I fear I am ready to say. There is a tolerable level to terror. Let’s relieve ourselves of the idea that we have to remove all terror. Let’s learn to live with the anxiety.
What scared the hell out of me was a recent poll that indicated half the people in America are willing to accept a certain curtailment of their liberties in return for more security. If, already at this point, 50 percent of the people are ready to give up some of their liberties in return for that dubious security, then what’s going to happen if something truly bad ensues? Our belief that Americans are free individuals has suffered erosion in the last ten years from too much stock market and the greed it inspired. You know, Marx and Jesus Christ do come together on one fundamental notion, which is that money leaches out all other values. Those ten years have done a lot of damage to the country’s character. It’s not as nice a place as it used to be.
I must say it again: In a country where values are collapsing, patriotism becomes the handmaiden to totalitarianism. The country becomes the religion. We are asked to live in a state of religious fervor: Love America! Love it because America has become a substitute for religion. But to love your country indiscriminately means that critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends upon these distinctions.