[Reader-list] Norman Mailer on the US Elections

[Vivek Narayanan]

 From a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, mostly for 
enjoyment's sake: this is the best piece of writing I've seen from 
Mailer in a long while.

V.

*NORMAN MAILER*
/Provincetown, Massachusetts/

A victory for Bush may yet be seen as one of our nation's unforgettable 
ironies. No need to speak again of the mendacities, manipulations, and 
spiritual mediocrity of the post–9/11 years; the time has come to 
recover from the shock that so abysmal a record (and so complete a 
refusal to look at the record) looks nonetheless likely to prevail. Who, 
then, are we? In just what kind of condition are the American people?

A quick look at our movie stars gives a hint. The liberal left has been 
attached to actors like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. They spoke to 
our cynicism and to our baffled idealism. But the American center moved 
their loyalties from the decency of Gary Cooper to the grit and 
self-approval of John Wayne. Now, we have the apotheosis of Arnold 
Schwarzenegger. He captured convention honors at the Garden in the 
course of informing America, via the physicality of his presence, that 
should the nation ever come to such a dire pass as to need a dictator, 
why, bless us all, he, Arnold, can offer the best chin to come along 
since Benito Mussolini. Chin is now prepared to replace spin.

In 1983, during the formative years of spin, 241 Marines were blown up 
by one terrorist blast in Beirut. Two days later, on October 25, Reagan 
landed 1,200 marines in Grenada, which is 3,000 miles away from Beirut. 
By the time that the invasion force grew to 7,000 Marines, the campaign 
was over. The US lost 19 dead, while 49 soldiers in the Grenadian army 
perished on the other side, as well as 29 Cuban construction workers. 
Communism in the Caribbean was now kaput (except for the little matter 
of Castro and Cuba). After this instant victory over a ragtag foe, 
Reagan was stimulated enough to accept his supporters' claim that 
America had now put an end to our shame in Vietnam. Reagan understood 
what Americans wanted, and that was spin. It was more important to be 
told you were healthy than to be healthy.

Bush-and-Rove enlarged this insight by an order of magnitude. They acted 
on the premise that America was prodigiously insecure. As an empire, we 
are nouveaux riches. We look to overcome the uneasiness implicit in this 
condition by amassing mega-money. The sorriest thing to be said about 
the US, as we sidle up to fascism (which can become our fate if we 
plunge into a major depression, or suffer a set of dirty-bomb 
catastrophes), is that we expect disasters. We await them. We have 
become a guilty nation. Somewhere in the moil of the national conscience 
is the knowledge that we are caught in the little contradiction of 
loving Jesus on Sunday, while lusting the rest of the week for 
mega-money. How can we not be in need of someone to tell us that we are 
good and pure and he will seek to make us secure? For Bush-and-Rove, 
9/11 was the jackpot.

The presidency is a role, and George, left on his own, might have become 
a successful movie actor. Kerry's task by now is to scourge Bush's ham 
machismo. But how? Kerry's only real opportunity will come as he steps 
into a most constricting venue—the debates. Kerry has to dominate Bush 
without a backward look at his own dovish councils—"Don't be seen as 
cruel, John, or you will lose the women!" To the contrary—Kerry must win 
the men. He has to take Bush apart in public. By the end of the debates, 
he has to succeed in laying waste to Bush's shit-eating grin and present 
himself as the legitimate alternative—a hero whose reputation was 
slandered by a slacker. That will not be routine. Bush is the better 
actor. He has been impersonating men more manly than himself for many 
years. Kerry has to convince some new part of the audience that his 
opponent is a closet weakling who seizes on inflexibility as a way to 
show America that he is strong. Bush's appeal is, after all, to the 
stupid. They, too, are inflexible—they also know that maintaining one's 
stupidity can become a kind of strength, provided you never change your 
mind.

There is a subtext which Kerry can use. Bush, after all, is not 
accustomed to working alone in hostile environments. He has been 
cosseted for years. It is cruel but true that he has the vulnerability 
of an ex-alcoholic.

People in Alcoholics Anonymous speak of themselves as dry drunks. As 
they see it, they may no longer drink, yet a sense of imbalance at 
having to do without liquor does not go away. Rather the impulse is 
sequestered behind the faith that God is supporting one's efforts to 
remain sober.

Giving up booze may have been the most heroic act of George W.'s life, 
but America could now be paying the price. George W.'s piety has become 
a pomade to cover all the tamped-down dry-drunk craziness that still 
stirs in his livid inner air.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

These gloomy words were written before the first debate on September 30. 
They were followed by an even gloomier final flourish: "Through this era 
of belly-grinding ironies, the most unpalatable may be that we have to 
hitch our hopes to a series of televised face-offs whose previous 
history has seldom offered more than a few sound bites for the 
contestants and apnea for the viewer. God bless America! We may not 
deserve it, but we could use the Lord's help. Bush's first confidence, 
after all, is that the devil will never desert him in his hour of need. 
His only error is that he thinks it is the Son who is speaking to him."

The debate, however, offered surprising ground for optimism. Kerry was 
at his best, concise, forceful, almost joyous in the virtuosity of his 
ability. He was able to speak his piece despite the Procrustean bonds of 
the debate. And Bush was at his worst. He looked spoiled. He was out of 
his element. He was tired from campaigning. There are times when a man 
has campaigned so much that he is running on hollow. Even Bush's face 
had become a liability. He looked cranky and puckered up. For years, he 
had been able to speak free of debate, always able to utter his homey 
patriotic gospel without interruption. Now in the ninety minutes of 
formalized back and forth, with the camera sometimes catching his 
petulant reactions while Kerry spoke, he looked unhappy enough to take a 
drink.

Most of this was seen on a big state-of-the-art television set, and the 
verdict seemed clear. Kerry had won by a large margin. Bush's only 
credit was that he had gone the distance without making any irremediable 
errors. Kerry's poll numbers seemed bound to increase.

Only one caveat remained. The first twenty minutes of the debate had 
been seen on the kind of modest-sized set that most of America would be 
using. On that set, one saw a somewhat different debate. Karl Rove had 
scored again. However it had been managed, the placement of the cameras 
favored Bush. His head took up more square inches on the screen than 
Kerry's. In television, that is half the battle. Kerry looked long and 
lean as he spoke out of what seemed to be a medium shot, whereas Bush 
had many a close-up.

This advantage partly disappeared on the large set. There, each man's 
expression was clear, and their relative strengths and weaknesses were 
obvious. On a small set, however, some of the cinematographic advantage 
went the other way.

We will have to wait for the polls. Will they be as skewed as the camera 
angles? We seem to be living these days in a kaleidoscope of ironies. Is 
the worst yet to come? If it is a close election, the electronic voting 
machines are ready to augment every foul memory of Florida in 2000. 
Perhaps it is no longer Jesus or Allah who oversees our fate but the 
turn of the Greek gods to take another run around the track. When it 
comes to destiny, they were the first, after all, to conceive of the 
Ironies.