That wager has remained alive through the two centuries and twenty-odd years of our national existence, and often it has seemed that the result was affirmative. Now doubt is with us again. In 2004 we will face what could become the most important election in our history. Since our candidate will never have funds to equal the bursting coffers of an opposition inflamed by power, bad conscience and all the virtual reality of religious fundamentalism itself, the election will be a most furious contest between their money, self-righteousness, and mental rictus scalding down on us, versus our hope that moral revulsion still exists in more than half of our voting public, enough to let us succeed, despite all our own impurity, in overthrowing the corporate colossus on the other bank. May our wit be clean, our indignation genuine, and our ideas new enough and fine enough to pierce the caterwaul of political advertising that will look to flood our campaign down the river and over the falls.
The Election and America’s Future
(2004)
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 United States 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 megamoney. The sorriest thing to be said about the United States, 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 megamoney. 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, a
fter all, to conceive of the Ironies.
Comment on the Passing of George Plimpton
(2004)
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE for George Plimpton at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine proved memorable. There were something like ten speakers and most of us—I do include myself—were good. It was all George’s fault. He was one man it was easy to talk about, and we had known him for decades. If the best speech of all was given by his son Taylor, that was as it should have been—a father would want and expect just that while listening from the other side. If there is anything to such a notion, I am sure George had his ear well cocked.
When it came my turn—I confess to being surprised by what I said. It was as if my voice was leading my thoughts. Obviously, since I had not put it on paper, there is no written record, but I believe I can recall most of what I said. It centered on the notion that George had represented a part of New York which many in the audience knew well. There were few people, after all, who were acquainted with that many large and small figures in the city. Moreover, given the several generations at Paris Review alone, George was on good terms with the old, the young, and every variety in between. So this became the core of what I discovered myself saying. I declared that there may have been no one in the city who was loved so much by so many people. I spoke then of the shock when Sarah Plimpton called on the morning following the night of George’s end to tell us the news. My wife and I felt close to Sarah, perhaps closer than we felt to George. Ergo, I was stunned by the pain I felt. By God, I realized, I loved George, I really did.
So many such reactions are only felt after the fact. That opened a perception for me. I began to think of how we love each other in New York. Over the years, there are so many people with whom we have social relations, hundreds, certainly, over the decades, and for some we do feel a kind of love, a limited love that I would call New York love. Yes, exactly. It is there as a full sentiment of love yet it is wholly circumscribed. Which is to say that when we encounter this kind of old friend or acquaintance, the moment can feel as good, pure, and sweet as love, we are so pleased to be with them. Yet it is a love without a present history. Nothing further is given to it, nothing exceptional comes out of it, we are just happy to see that person again and know that they are there. I repeat: it is New York love. In this city, we all know so many people that it is impossible to have deep relations with more than a few. So we love in capsule a good fifty or a hundred of our friends, and that even becomes one more nourishment one can offer and receive from love.
George must have inspired that kind of feeling in countless people. How we all felt good on running into George, so many of us, and the best is that he was worthy of it, for he never took anything from anyone I know without giving back more with his charm, his exceptionally good and subtle manners, his anecdotes, his brio, his verve, and his rare talent—there was so much in life he was able to enjoy. More than anyone I knew. So, yes, three cheers. Maybe in the old rich sense of the word, he was a gentleman, the best gentleman most of us ever got to know.
On Sartre’s God Problem
(2005)
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great philosopher of existentialism and a definitive model of the intellectual engagé. The Paris-based daily Libération asked a group of writers to comment on the philosopher’s legacy. Norman Mailer was among the contributors. His remarks are reprinted below.
—ADAM SHATZ
I WOULD SAY THAT SARTRE, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, talent, and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a berth to Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy’s buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his tropism toward the nonrational.
Sartre, however, was comfortable as an atheist even if he had no fundament on which to plant his philosophical feet. To hell with that, he didn’t need it. He was ready to survive in midair. We are French, he was ready to say. We have minds, we can live with the absurd and ask for no reward. That is because we are noble enough to live with emptiness, and strong enough to choose a course which we are even ready to die for. And we will do this in whole defiance of the fact that, indeed, we have no footing. We do not look to a Hereafter.
It was an attitude; it was a proud stance; it was equal to living with one’s mind in formless space, but it deprived existentialism of more interesting explorations. For atheism is a cropless undertaking when it comes to philosophy. (We need only think of Logical Positivism!) Atheism can contend with ethics (as Sartre did on occasion most brilliantly), but when it comes to metaphysics, atheism ends in a locked cell. It is, after all, near to impossible for a philosopher to explore how we are here without entertaining some notion of what the prior force might have been. Cosmic speculation is asphyxiated if existence came into being ex nihilo. In Sartre’s case—worse. Existence came into being without a clue to suggest whether we are here for good purpose, or there is no reason whatsoever for us.
All the same, Sartre’s philosophical talents were damnably virtuoso. He was able to function with precision in the upper echelons of every logical structure he set up. If only he had not been an existentialist! For an existentialist who does not believe in some kind of Other is equal to an engineer who designs an automobile that requires no driver and accepts no passengers. If existentialism is to flourish (that is, develop through a series of new philosophers building on earlier premises), it needs a God who is no more confident of the end than we are; a God who is an artist, not a lawgiver; a God who suffers the uncertainties of existence; a God who lives without any of the prearranged guarantees that sit like an incubus upon formal theology with its flatulent, self-serving assumption of a Being who is All-Good and All-Powerful. What a gargantuan oxymoron—All-Good and All-Powerful. It is certain to maroon any and all formal theologians who would like to explain an earthquake. Before the wrath of a tsunami, they can only break wind. The notion of an existential God, a Creator who may have been doing His or Her artistic best but could still have been remiss in designing the tectonic plates, is not within their scope.
Sartre was alien to the possibility that existentialism might thrive if it would just assume that indeed we do have a God who, no matter His or Her cosmic dimensions (whether larger or smaller than we assume), embodies nonetheless some of our faults, our ambitions, our talents, and our gloom. For the end is not written. If it is, there is no place for existentialism. Base our beliefs, however, on the fact of our existence, and it takes no great step for us to assume that we are not only individuals but may well be a vital part of a larger phenomenon that searches for some finer vision of life that could conceivably emerge from our present human condition. There is no reason, one can argue, why this assumption is not nearer to the real being of our lives than anything the oxymoronic theologians would offer us. It is certainly more reasonable than Sartre’s ongoing assumption—despite his passionate desire for a better society—that we are here willy-nilly and must manage to do the best we can with endemic nothingness installed upon eternal floorlessness. Sartre was indeed a writer of major dimension, but he was also a philosophical executioner. He guillotined existentialism just when we needed most to hear its howl, its barbaric yawp that there is something in common between God and all of us. We, like God, are imperfect artists doing the best we can. We may succeed or fail—God as well as us. That is the implicit if undeveloped air of existentialism. We would do well to live again with the Greeks, live again with the expectation that the end remains open but human tragedy may well be our end.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the
way. Those are the poles of our existence—as they have been from the first instant of the Big Bang. Something immense may now be stirring, but to meet it we will do better to expect that life will not provide the answers we need so much as it will offer the privilege of improving our questions. It is not moral absolutism but theological relativism we would do well to explore if our real need is for a God with whom we can engage our lives.
Myth Versus Hypothesis*
(2006)
SINCE HIS REELECTION, George W. Bush has been more impressive in his personal appearances, more sure of himself, more—it is an unhappy word in this context but obligatory—he seems more authentic, more like a president.
I would warrant that before this last election he has always been the opposite of what he appeared to be, which is to say that he has worked with some skill to pass himself off as a facsimile of macho virtue. That is not unlike a screen star who has been alcoholic but is now, thanks to AA, a dry drunk who is able to look tough and ready on the screen. He never wavers when in peril. He is inflexible.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 60