Norman Mailer - From Father to Son

[Comrade]

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/rnc/9574/index.html

Father to Son: What I've Learned About Rage

A conversation between a man of legendary fury and his son preparing to go to the barricades at the RNC, about the uses and abuses of Bush hatred.

Severe fisking ahead!

John Buffalo Mailer: Let’s start with Fahrenheit 9/11. I’ve seen it three times, and with each viewing I became more aware of Michael Moore’s tricks. I would say about 50 percent of the film is indisputable; particularly the portion on Iraq, but in the first half he uses too many needless tricks.

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.

So much for 'dumb Bush'.

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.

Bring on the ‘Evil Bush’!

Norman has even made up a new word to describe his impression of Bush, a study of smugsmanship.

So Bush the Smugmiester!

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?

Maybe a bit of projection on his part.

NM I would say they are hoping for ugly attacks. If I were a voice in top Republican circles, I might be offering this advice: “What we need for New York is a large-scale riot. Some of those activist kids will be crazy enough to do a lot on their own, but we can do better with a few of our guys, well-placed, ready to urinate on the good American flag. Let us recognize that if we lose, all we’ve been doing since 2000 is bound to come out. Back a couple of years ago, Karl Rove was saying that we could gain a twenty-year hegemony by winning the next election. He hasn’t said it lately, not since the worst of Iraq came through. Because now we could be out of power for those same twenty years. So I recommend that we put as many of our people into the protest movement in New York as we can find.” Or so, at least, speaks the cool Republican planner I envisage in my mind.

Ha! The Smugmeister’s master plan, of course! The protestors engaging in riots and violence are useful idiots of the right, not the left!

JBM I feel we’ve entered a realm where the question is, whose propaganda is better? The left is beginning to figure out that they can’t beat the right with intelligent argument. They need punch phrases that get to the heart of the average American. If that’s the case, what is the future for our country?

When the average American is now too dumb to understand the left, the left is probably screwed.

NM I’d say they demonstrated their tactics during the July convention. They will look to catch the swing voters and those conservatives who are repelled by the Bush cabal but are still loyal to the Republicans.

Kind of a red flag to moderate voters, to hear pretentious things like “Bush cabal”.

To do that, the Democrats will present themselves as the good, sensible, highly patriotic, serious party of the middle class, resolute about terrorism, strong for peace, reliable for war, and passionately loyal to the working class and the disadvantaged because—this may be their subtlest claim!—they are the true compassionate conservatives.

Maybe a bit too subtle for public consumption, ya think?

These tactics do not fill me with joy, but given the brunt of my argument, I confess that I am obliged to go along. The Republicans, in turn, will do all they can to make the street protesters look like the disruptive, concealed, and explosive heart of the Democratic Party.

Whatever the protestors do is a Republican distortion now? WoW!

The only thing more asinine is to claim any act reflecting unfavorably upon the anti-Bush leadership is based upon Republican plants, working to undermine the serenity and sanity of what would otherwise be a perfectly rational, non-disruptive protest. I mean, hell, why not go that one step further into denial?

You know, I can’t remember an election when the stakes were so high. There has been, after all, such mendacity about the entrance into Iraq. It sits like an incubus over the first week of November.

(In plain English without the flowery rhetoric)

Like a male demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women, the lie of Iraq sits over the first week of November. Ahh… poetry.

NM A couple of years ago, New York may have seemed like the perfect place to go; the event had been so traumatic. And there is a large political profit in offering emotional closure to a national nightmare like the fall of the Twin Towers. Nine-eleven felled the two most opalescent pillars of the American economy. It also attacked the implicit assumption that if you worked for the corporation, you were part of a new upper class.

Huh? I don’t get how everyone in the WTC was promised ‘upper class’ success or how their companies ‘failed’ them. Norman almost seems to blame corporations for 9-11.

To offer an analogy, let us suppose that in the seventeenth century, Versailles had been razed and sacked overnight by latter-day Huns. France would have been emotionally gutted. So it was with us. After all, those Twin Towers spoke of America’s phallic hegemony in the world

So basically they are like giant, hegemonic, towering, twin penises.

Aside from the theoretically impossible act of Huns sacking France a full century after leaving Europe, an analogy is supposed to offer clarity or real life examples instead of some insane fantasy.

I suppose there were no massive penile erections in that place and age to bring down, either.

Sacking Versailles in 17th century France is like nuking all of D.C. and most of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, as opposed to what is simply a franction of NYC.

even as Versailles declared the divine right of kings. Many an American male felt gelded by the event.

CHOP!

And now they cut off our BALLS too!?!

Norman's 9-11 trauma is a bit too fixated on genitals, ya think?

Equally, the average American housewife was desolated by the terrifying possibility that one could work for years to build a family and lose it all in an hour. How could the Republicans not choose New York as the place to hold their convention?
Given the heroic deaths of the New York firemen and police, the site will also appeal to working-class votes. The Republicans will certainly not fail to make the connection that the protesters are besmirching the memory of 9/11.

Too late for the ‘dumb’ Bush theory, because the speakers for the RNC are way too smart to imply any such thing.

But a couple of years have gone by, and we’ve also learned that there are a few things wrong about the picture we’ve had of 9/11. A new set of conspiracy theories are building. There are just too many facts that are not readily explicable.

Not only inexplicable but uncountable and unidentifiable too. SWARMING FACTS!

There may well be room after the convention for the protest movement to look into 9/11 with some critical incisiveness.

Maybe room for ‘penetrating, icy, and knifelike reasoning’ to decipher 9-11 theories will be there but the odds are few readers know what ‘incisive’ actually means.

Old school leftist writers like to use the thesaurus to inject some rare word here an there, but it’s supposed to be pretentiously literate and not about communicating to their readers. Make a note!

I am no longer a conspiratorialist

Thesaurus equivalent to: Conspiracist.

—I spent too many years wandering around in the byways of the Warren Report. But there are elements here which are not easy to explain.

Too hard for him to explain, or too hard for us to understand?

I don’t believe for a moment there was direct complicity.

Without trying to sound out a conspiracy, of course,

I don’t believe for a moment that Bush stuck a gerbil up his ass, either.

But there may have been sentiment that Bush wanted a gerbil up his ass ----

In America, we don’t go in as yet for major political coups—there’s too much to lose for the powers that be, and we are still a democratic society. But there may have been a sentiment in the administration—

Wow, maybe!

let them scream and squeal over this one—that maybe the worst thing in the world might not be that we suffer a disaster. Pearl Harbor, after all, galvanized America. Without Pearl Harbor, we might never have been able to go to war in the company of the Russians.

Um, maybe! Maybe an attack on us from an asteroids by space aliens helping the Nazis would also not be the worst thing, and we might have still gone to war with the company of (Russians?) Britains. I could go all day.

Indeed, Roosevelt was accused of knowing about Pearl Harbor in advance and welcoming it.

Well so fucking what, Norman? If Bush is accused of welcoming 9/11 just say it.

I couldn’t go that far.

Why not shut up then?

I don’t think the administration knew that the World Trade Center was going to be attacked. Still, some odd things did happen that day. Immensely odd.

Sounds like a classic case of conspiratorialism denial.

“They seemed to want it but I couldn’t go that far”

“I’m sure it wasn’t but it’s so odd how it was.”

Norman is trying to be coy. Or is seriously confused. Whatever it is there is still zero facts.

There was more than unbelievable inefficiency.

More than unbelievable inefficiency is not enough. But Beyond more than unbelievable inefficiency is more than unbelievable.

I don’t know that the 9/11 Commission did all they could with that. They were determined, after all, to bring in a unanimous report. That always means that the radical ends are cut off. It’s like playing poker without the aces, kings, and queens, the twos, threes, and the fours.

More like a game of poker where the entire committee of a full deck chose to discard the Joker… guess who Norman is?

NM A good many people of the right, not flag conservatives but true conservatives, can feel in accord with men and women on the left concerning one deep feeling. It is that the corporations are stifling our lives.

Don’t hold you’re breath.

Not only economically, where corporations can claim, arguably, that they bring prosperity (and frankly, I’m certainly not schooled enough in economics to argue that point pro or con)

But still presumptuous enough to say corporations are ‘arguably’ prosperous, sure.

, but I can say the corporation is bad for us aesthetically speaking, culturally speaking, spiritually speaking.

You just did. But when you say “Us’ it’s really YOU and the deep seated denial of the failure of communism.

Just contemplate their massive empty architecture, their massive emphasis on TV commercials, which are a seedbed for interrupting one’s conversation, and their massive complacency about their virtues. They tend to flatten everything. They are the Big Empty.

Question:

Who is big and empty, interrupts our lives, acts without virtue, and flattens things?

One of the strengths of Michael Moore’s movie

BINGO!

, if I can go back to it for a moment, is that you could see all the faces of the present administration, those empty faces, those handmaidens and bodyguards of the Big Empty.

RUN for your lives, it's the BIG EMPTY!

NM There’s one more point I’d like to make. I don’t sneer at people who enter protest movements.

Well he's made a living by sneering at everyone else.

Thank god he's allowing "Buffalo" to go protest without Daddy's sneering condensation! Good boy, yes, good boy.

At the least, it can be good or even necessary for their personal development. But I would like these kids to disabuse themselves of the idea that they are going to have some immediate, exciting political effect. If they have any, it could be negative. And if Bush wins, we’re a most divided nation.

And if Kerry wins then... no division? No, it's that Bush supporters simply don’t matter anymore.

The massive arrogance in this claim is obvious.

Kerry can put it together better than Bush.

Whatever it is he’ll need some crazy glue for that.

Bush can’t solve any of our problems.
He never was able to.

Which is the way of saying ‘your’ problem without saying anyone else matters.

That may be the main reason he looked to empire-building. He had nothing to offer but world conquest.

Seems to me that if we conquer the world, the problem is solved.

So, if he’s reelected, what will he do if things remain bad in Iraq?

As if when Kerry wins the same question is a non-issue, like some fantasy where nothing 'bad’ under Kerry can happen… pretty demented.

You’ll look back on the Patriot Act as being liberal and gentle.

JBM I will never look back on the Patriot Act as being liberal and gentle.

Sounds like a personal problem to me.

While the protests will not have a direct, political gain—

NM You agree with me on that?

JBM Yes, I feel confident in saying that given the parameters of how we will be allowed to protest, I don’t see any way it could have a direct political gain.

No don’t go. It’s Rove with his tricks. (Yes, Norman Jr. will go.)

It is better to remind ourselves that wisdom is ready to reach us from the most unexpected quarters. Here, I quote from a man who became wise a little too late in life:

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

That was Hermann Goering speaking at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Whatever seems to work, that’s it, huh?


http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=235519

1. A genuine attack to America and a reaction from it’s people, as if it's some kind of trick?
2. Hitler’s flunkies never ran a Democracy, WTF did Goering know about Democracy?
3. Actually not in the testimony at all, but rather a record from a psychologist.
4. Also said from Goering: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning."
5. An opiate junkie in the stages of withdrawal.
6. Under trial for his life, fallen from power and extremely stressed.
7. Committed suicide a few days after this discussion.

Yet he’s a genius about running a Democracy in the 21st century now.


Let’s go over the main points to date:

LESTISTS HATE BUSH WITH BOILING RAGE:

“Bush’s face does bring out the rage of the left, and that never before have I seen so many people’s blood boil at the sight of an American president.”

NORMAN SAYS KERRY IS HARDLY BETTER:

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.

NORMAN SAYS PROTESTING IS USELESS:

JBM What could the protesters do that would further the cause?
NM What they could do is not what they’re going to be allowed to do. It won’t all be their fault.

And the final question!

It is one thing to be forewarned. Will we ever be forearmed?

And armed how?


THE ONLY HOPE TO CHANGE IS:

NM I do feel that when you’re out there, and see all the different types of people who have come together—particularly now with the mixture of groups that will be there—you do get a sense that the spiritual revolution may be awakening. And that’s the only hope, I believe, against the total corporatization of America.

Norman Mailers' ‘spiritual’ standards:

, but I can say the corporation is bad for us aesthetically speaking, culturally speaking, spiritually speaking.

My friends in the USSR sure thought guys like him sucked ass, and felt he could die like Lenin and stay that way.


So without commiting a felony by directly advocating an armed overthrow of America's government, it's the only implication published here. What's more worrisome, is that 'Buffalo', that is, Norman Jr., must have the straight-up version which doesn't really dance around Dad's real dream for revolutionary change.

Norman Mailer is the author of, among other books, The Armies of the Night, about the 1967 march on the Pentagon.

While executive editor of High Times magazine, John Buffalo Mailer worked on an issue about protesting the Republican National Convention in New York.

 

[Annie]

Great fisk! Mailer has to be one of the most pompous members of the left, I mean 'way left of Kerry.' There is something very Chomsky/Robert Fisk in this piece, not to mention Marx.

 

[Merlin1047]

Great fisk! Mailer has to be one of the most pompous members of the left, I mean 'way left of Kerry.' There is something very Chomsky/Robert Fisk in this piece, not to mention Marx.

Hmmm. . . I can see that. But I was thinking more Fred Flinstone / Homer Simpson / Barney Fyfe (sp?)

 

[Annie]

Hmmm. . . I can see that. But I was thinking more Fred Flinstone / Homer Simpson / Barney Fyfe (sp?)

Yeah, I can see that!
:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

 

[Merlin1047]

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/rnc/9574/index.html

Father to Son: What I've Learned About Rage

A conversation between a man of legendary fury and his son preparing to go to the barricades at the RNC, about the uses and abuses of Bush hatred.

Norman Mailer - another waste of oxygen. I noticed that every time he referred to the demonstrators he fobbed off the responsibility for their actions onto the Republicans. This attitude typifies the far left's inability to accept personal responsibility for their actions. It's alway someone else's fault. How utterly pathetic that Mailer now seeks to blame Republicans for actions that he ANTICIPATES that the protesters MIGHT take in the future. Like those nasty, evil Republicans are out there tempting and tricking protesters into breaking the law or committing acts of vandalism like dirty old men tempting children with candy.

Anyway it was obvious that you did a lot of work on this piece. Enjoyed reading it. Watch out for carpal tunnel syndrome.

 

[Comrade]

Norman Mailer - another waste of oxygen. I noticed that every time he referred to the demonstrators he fobbed off the responsibility for their actions onto the Republicans. This attitude typifies the far left's inability to accept personal responsibility for their actions. It's alway someone else's fault. How utterly pathetic that Mailer now seeks to blame Republicans for actions that he ANTICIPATES that the protesters MIGHT take in the future. Like those nasty, evil Republicans are out there tempting and tricking protesters into breaking the law or committing acts of vandalism like dirty old men tempting children with candy.

Anyway it was obvious that you did a lot of work on this piece. Enjoyed reading it. Watch out for carpal tunnel syndrome.

Thanks! It's a save from a week ago, kind of a work in progress with so many edits my head spun from the effort!

But the Father/Son Mailer interview is worth twice the effort than any Chomsky or Fisk publication... we'll see John 'Buffalo' Mailer again, I'm almost sure of it.

Buffalo?

 

[Flying Duck]

Damn, that's funny stuff. When I read entertainment like that, I start praying for a "spiritually awakened" revolution that can provide that kind of humor on a daily basis. Yeah, I've got a sick sense of humor, I wanted Perot to be elected in '92 just for the endless amusement it would have provided - knowing that Congress would keep him in check of course.

At least now when I watch the convention riots, I'll be in the know - fully aware that those with "Bush=Hitler" signs breaking into McDonald's are actually clandestine Karl Rove operatives.

 

[Flying Duck]

And it's also good to know that at least daddy isn't bogarting the stash of Acid he has left over from the 60's.

 

[tim_duncan2000]

Huh? I don’t get how everyone in the WTC was promised ‘upper class’ success or how their companies ‘failed’ them.

I agree. What about the janitors and busboys and other people in minimum wage jobs?

And if Kerry wins then... no division? No, it's that Bush supporters simply don’t matter anymore.

The massive arrogance in this claim is obvious.

I agree. That's really stupid to say that. If the nation is so divided, then by definition there are plenty of people on both sides. Regardless of who is elected, there will be a large group of unhappy people.