Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”
—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”
—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”
—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”
—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”
—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”
—The Cincinnati Post
2013 Random House eBook Edition
Copyright © 2003 by Norman Mailer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in trade paperback in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, in 1997.
Portions of this work were originally published in interviews that appeared in the following publications: “I Am Not for World Empire: A Conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the Perils of Technology and Why He Is a Left-Conservative,” from The American Conservative, December 2, 2002, and an interview with Dotson Rader from The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), September 19, 2002. In addition, portions of this work were originally given as a speech delivered by Norman Mailer at the Commonwealth Club on February 20, 2003.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Copyright Clearance Center for permission to reprint an excerpt from “US Technological Supremacy Is in Danger” by Scott A. Bass from The Boston Globe, February 1, 2003, copyright © 2003 by Globe Newspaper Co (MA). Reproduced with permission of GLOBE NEWSPAPER CO (MA) in the format Trade Book via Copyright
Clearance Center.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-8602-0
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PART I: IX/XI
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART II: WHY ARE WE AT WAR?
APPENDIX: NOTES ON A LARGE AND UNANCHORED UNEASINESS
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Part I
IX/XI
PREFACE
As you will see by turning the page, this book begins with an account by my old friend Dotson Rader of his experiences during the morning and afternoon of 9/11.
One year later, we got together to do an interview for the London Sunday Times Magazine about the reverberations of that event upon American life. I remember the stimulation, the kick-start if you will, that was provided by Dotson’s eloquence on the subject. Before it was over, I talked a great deal that day, and much of it is reprinted here, as well as a number of remarks I have added to what was said then and have been thinking about since.
9/11 is one of those events that will never fade out of our history, for it was not only a cataclysmic disaster but a symbol, gargantuan and mysterious, of we know not what, an obsession that will return through decades to come.
Indeed, this book, which looks to give some fresh notion of why America is in a state of war with Iraq, would have no existence without the fall of the Twin Towers, and so it seemed appropriate to begin with Dotson Rader’s description of what must have been the most surrealistic morning in the archives of New York’s history.
1
DOTSON RADER: I was at home in my apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in Manhattan when the first of the Twin Towers was hit by one of the planes. But at the time I didn’t know it had happened. Later that morning I tried to make a phone call, and my phone was dead. So I got dressed and went outside. I live four blocks from Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor. None of the pay phones on the street worked. People were wandering oddly about, sort of dazed, as if kind of lost. It was very strange. I started walking downtown—it was a bright, almost hot day in New York. I was supposed to have lunch with a friend on Fifty-seventh Street, and I was walking down Third Avenue to meet him at the restaurant. When I reached Sixty-fourth Street, I noticed this huge, bubbling cloud in the sky above Manhattan south of me. The rest of the sky was blue and clear. I didn’t know what it was. And then, looking down Third Avenue, six or seven blocks away, as far as I could see, I suddenly noticed a vast throng of people, a flood of humanity, like a slow wave rolling north up the avenue. Many of them were men in white shirts. They were the office workers from Wall Street, fleeing the disaster. This quiet mass of people, tens of thousands, was walking up the island like a funeral procession and turning at Fifty-seventh Street and then moving as one toward the 59th Street Bridge to cross over out of the island. And I thought, “Jesus! Is this Christ’s Second Coming?” Because they were in white, covered in dust, and they looked stunned, and they were speaking in whispers, like kids in church. I thought it was the Rapture and Jesus was calling his saints home, and that I was being left behind. That was my initial feeling.
NORMAN MAILER: Wouldn’t that be it? Jesus had come and everybody has gone to meet him by crossing the bridge from Manhattan to Queens. That does capture my pessimism concerning cosmic matters. [laughter]
DOTSON RADER: Okay. Where were you on September 11? How did you learn about the terrorist attacks, and what was your initial reaction?
NORMAN MAILER: I was in my house up here in Provincetown. I remember a phone call telling me to turn on the TV. While I was watching I called my youngest daughter, Maggie. I have an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and she was staying there with a friend. You can see lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers from that apartment. Our windows look across the East River. So Maggie had witnessed the first attack and was terribly affected by it. Then, while we were on the phone, the second plane hit the other building. I’m still watching on TV. In Brooklyn, Maggie and her friend are both seeing it through the window as well as viewing it on TV. That was a considerable shock. Why? Because the one thing TV always promises us is that, deep down, what we see on television is not real. It’s why there’s always that subtle numbness to TV. The most astonishing events, even terrifying events, nonetheless have a touch of nonexistence when seen on the tube. They don’t terrify us. We see something that’s hideous, but we’re not shocked proportionally. It’s why we can watch anything on TV.
Now, there are exceptions. The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was one; the second plane striking the second Tower; the collapse of the Towers. TV at that moment was no longer a coat of insulation between us and the horrific. When broken, the impact is enormous.
DOTSON RADER: What struck me, what I’ll never forget, is the silence. Everyone was just silent. Or if they spoke, they whispered. It was like everyone was at a funeral. And this went on for hours and hours. Occasionally, the silence was broken by an ambulance or police siren. And what I’d never seen i
n New York before—military jets started flying over the island, because they started closing Manhattan down. The military started showing up in the streets. I thought, What in God’s name is happening?
2
What in God’s name was happening? It is one thing to hear a mighty explosion. It is another to recognize some time after the event that one has been deafened by it. The United States was going through an identity crisis. Questions about our nature as a country were being asked that most good American men and women had never posed to themselves before. Questions such as, Why are we so hated? How could anyone resent us that much? We do no evil. We believe in goodness and freedom. Who are we, then? Are we not who we think we are? More pressing, who are “they?” What does it all mean?
Simple questions. Blank as white and empty pages. We were going through an identity crisis, and that is an incomparable experience. The ego has been disrupted. It has been pre-empted. Most of us look to command an ego that will keep us reasonably efficient while we carry out our personal projects. We see ourselves as husbands or wives, as brave or prudent, reliable or decent, or certain egos may depend on the right to excuse themselves—as flighty, or in search of friendship, which, once found, will take care of all else.
In that sense, it hardly matters what kind of firm notion the ego attaches to itself. That, from the need of the ego, is less important than the ongoing expectation that the notion will rest reasonably stable. Upon that depends our identity, that firm seat which offers the psyche an everyday working notion of who we are (good-looking or good-looking enough—whatever serves).
An identity crisis builds slowly, or it can strike like a thunderclap, but the effect is unmistakable. One can no longer offer a firm declaration of who one is. The seat upon which the ego depends has been slipped out from under. The psyche is in a sprawl. The simplest questions become difficult to answer.
A mass identity crisis for all of America descended upon us after 9/11, and our response was wholly comprehensible. We were plunged into a fever of patriotism. If our long-term comfortable and complacent sense that America was just the greatest country ever had been brought into doubt, the instinctive reflex was to reaffirm ourselves. We had to overcome the identity crisis—hell, overpower it, wave a flag.
We had had a faith. The ship of the United States was impregnable and had been on a great course. We were steering ourselves into a great future. All of a sudden, not to be able to feel like that was equal to seeing oneself as a traitor to the grand design. So we gathered around George W. Bush. That he had not been elected by a majority even became a species of new strength for him. The transient, still-forming, fresh national identity could not for a moment contemplate the fact that maybe Bush should not even be in the White House. Why? Because now the country had to be saved. A horror had come upon us. There were people on earth so eager to destroy us that they were ready to immolate themselves. That went right to the biblical root. Samson had pulled down the pillars of the Temple. Now there were all these Muslim Samsons. A ripple went through the country, a determining wind. In its wake, flags rippled everywhere. Nearly everyone in America was waving a flag.
For a few of us, this great indiscriminate wave of patriotism was not a joy to behold. “Patriotism,” after all, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” So said H. L. Mencken, or was it Samuel Johnson? One could argue over the source but not the sentiment.
3
DOTSON RADER: Are they even waving flags up in Provincetown?
NORMAN MAILER: They are. We had a parade in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, 2002. A rather nice looking, pleasant fellow—he looked to me like a young liberal lawyer—came up and smiled and handed me a small American flag. And I looked at him and just shook my head. And he walked on. It wasn’t an episode in any way. He came over with a half-smile and walked away with a half-smile. But I was furious at myself afterward for not saying, “You don’t have to wave a flag to be a patriot.” By July 2002, it bothered me a good deal. Free-floating patriotism seemed like a direct measure of our free-floating anxiety.
Take the British for contrast. The British have a love of their country that is profound. They can revile it, tell dirty stories about it, give you dish on all the imperfects who are leading the country. But their patriotism is deep. In America it’s as if we’re playing musical chairs, and you shouldn’t get caught without a flag or you’re out of the game. Why do we need all this reaffirmation? It’s as if we’re a three-hundred-pound man who’s seven feet tall, superbly shaped, absolutely powerful, and yet every three minutes he’s got to reaffirm the fact that his armpits have a wonderful odor. We don’t need compulsive, self-serving patriotism. It’s odious. When you have a great country, it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater. But culturally, emotionally, we are growing more arrogant, more vain. We’re losing a sense of the beauty not only of democracy but also of its peril.
Democracy is built upon a notion that is exquisite and dangerous. It virtually states that if the will of the populace is freely expressed, more good than bad will result. When America began, it was the first time in the history of civilization that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded on this daring notion—that there is more good than bad in people. Until then, the prevailing assumption had been that the powers at the top knew best; people were no good and had to be controlled. Now we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because we’ve been a great democracy, it doesn’t guarantee we’re going to continue to be one. Democracy is existential. It changes. It changes all the time. That’s one reason why I detest promiscuous patriotism. You don’t take democracy for granted. It is always in peril. We all know that any man or woman can go from being a relatively good person to a bad one. We can all become corrupted, or embittered. We can be swallowed by our miseries in life, become weary, give up. The fact that we’ve been a great democracy doesn’t mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. It’s ugly. You take a monarchy for granted, or a fascist state. You have to. That’s the given. But a democracy changes all the time.
4
The fear that waved the flag in every hand was our nightmare of terrorism. Nightmares tell us that life is absurd, unreasonable, unjust, warped, crazy, and ridiculously dangerous. Terorrism suggests that your death will have no relation to your life, as if your death will also produce an identity crisis.
Implicit in our attitude toward our own end is that, for most of us, there is a logic within it. We spend much of our lives searching for that logic. We live in a certain manner. We act out some of our virtues and vices; we restrain others. From the sum of all those actions and abstentions will come our final disease. That is our assumption, at least for most of us. It can even be seen as a logical conclusion. We pay with our bodies for the sins and excesses of our minds and hearts. It is almost as if we want it that way. Our psyches are jarred, even tortured, by absurdity, and confirmed, sometimes soothed even, by a reasonable recognition of consequence.
Terrorism, however, shatters this equation. The comprehension of our death that we have worked to obtain is lost. Our ability to find meaning in our lives is lost.
5
DOTSON RADER: So, do you hate terrorism?
NORMAN MAILER: I hate it; I loathe it. Since I believe in reincarnation, I think the character of your death is tremendously important to you. One wants to be able to meet one’s death with a certain seriousness. To me, it is horrible to be killed without warning. Because you can’t prepare yourself in any last way for your next existence. So your death contributes to absurdity. Terrorism’s ultimate tendency is to make life absurd.
When I consider the nearly three thousand people who died in the Twin Towers disaster, it’s not the ones who were good fathers and good mothers and good daughters, good brothers and good husbands or sons, that I mourn most. It’s the ones who came from families that were less happy. When a good family member dies, there’s a tenderness and a sorrow that can restore life to those who are left b
ehind. But when someone dies who’s half loved and half hated by his own family, whose children, for example, are always trying to get closer to that man or to that woman and don’t quite succeed, then the aftereffect is obsessive. Those are the ones who are hurt the most. I won’t call them dysfunctional families, but it’s into the less successful families that terrorism bites most deeply. Because there is that terrible woe that one can’t speak to the dead parent or the dead son or daughter or dead mate; one can’t set things right anymore. One was planning to, one was hoping to, and now it’s lost forever. That makes it profoundly obsessive.
DOTSON RADER: Would you define terrorism as wickedness, as an evil?
NORMAN MAILER: To me there’s a great difference between doing evil and being wicked. I don’t use the words interchangeably. People who are wicked are always raising the ante without knowing quite what they’re doing. Most of us are wicked to a good degree. Most of us who are game players or adventurous in any way are wicked. We raise the ante all the time without knowing what the results might be. We’re mischievous, if you will.
Evil, however, is to have a pretty good idea of the irreparable damage you’re going to do and then proceed to do it. In that sense, yes, terrorism is evil.
However, it’s worth trying to understand terrorism in the context by which the terrorists see it. They feel they’re gouging out an octopus that’s looking to destroy their world. They feel virtuous. The individual terrorist might be violating every single rule in Islam—he might, for example, be a drug addict or booze a lot—but at the end, he still believes he will find redemption through immolation. He is one small shard in the spiritual wreckage of the world right now. After all, in America there are a great many people on the right who are going around saying, Let’s kill all the Muslims; let’s simplify the world. You think Islam has a special purchase on terrorism?
Why Are We at War? Page 1