Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays

by Norman Mailer

  I would assert that inflexibility is not actually at the root of the president’s character. Inflexibility serves, instead, to cover any arrant impulses that still smoke within. Of course, to keep all that stuff to oneself is not a happy condition for a commander in chief.

  If we contrast George W. to his parents, it is probably fair to say that his father was manly enough to be president but seemed unable to escape his modesty. Indeed, for all one knew, it was genuine. While at Andover, he must have sensed that he was not quite bright enough for the job. Barbara Bush had, doubtless, more than enough character to be First Lady, yet so long as she was obscured by the obliterative shadow cast by Nancy Reagan, she was seen as not elegant enough. In turn, their oldest son, George, in contrast to his father, was neither an athlete nor a fighter pilot. While at Andover he was a cheerleader. That, in itself, might have been enough to drain some good part of his self-respect. It is not easy to be surrounded by football players when you are just as tall and large as most of them, but are not as athletic. The son, out of necessity perhaps, developed his own kind of ego. He turned out to be as vain as sin, and as hollow as unsuccessful sin.

  If this sense of Bush’s character is well based, then one must accept the increment of strength that victory offers to such a man. He now feels as entitled to national respect as the dry-drunk screen star after a box office smash. One can see the magnitude of George W.’s personal happiness now. The smirk is gilt-edged these days.

  In contrast, the woe one encounters among Democrats is without parallel. Just as no president, not even Richard Nixon, was so detested, so was the belief implicit, just the week before the election, that no matter how deadlocked the polls, it was inconceivable that Bush could triumph. This conviction was most intense among the young. Now, the prevailing mood among many young Democrats is not unlike the disbelief that attends the sudden death of a mate or a close friend. One keeps expecting the deceased to be sitting at the table again. Or, the doorbell will ring and there he will be. But, no, he is not there. Bush is the victor, not Kerry. It is analogous to the way people who have been kidnapped by the intensity of a dream have to keep reminding themselves on awakening, “I am not in Katmandu. I am in my own bedroom. There will be no deliverance from George W. Bush. I will have to see his face for the next four years.”

  Of course, if Kerry had won Ohio and so had become president despite a deficit of several million votes, the situation down the road could have proved disastrous for Democrats. Kerry, given his 50-50 stand on the war, would have had to pay for all of Bush’s mistakes in Iraq. He would then have inherited what may yet be Bush’s final title: Lord Quagmire.

  The truth is that neither candidate proved ready to say why we are really there. Indeed, why? Why, indeed, are we in Iraq? It is likely that a majority of Americans are looking for that answer, no matter whom they voted for.

  Undeniably, I am one of them. I have probably spent a fair part of the last two years brooding over this question. Like most large topics which present no quick answers, the question becomes obsessive.

  Let me make one more attempt. I would ask, however, that you allow me to do it through the means by which I think. I do not come to my conclusions with the mental skills of a politician, a columnist, a journalist, an academician in foreign relations or political science—no, I brood along as a novelist. We novelists, if we are any good, have our own means.

  What may establish some mutuality with this audience, however, is that we do have one firm basis in common. Good novelists and good journalists are engaged, after all, in a parallel search. We are always trying to find a better approach to the established truth. For that truth is usually skewed by the needs of powerful interests.

  Journalists engage in this worthy if tricky venture by digging into the hard earth for those slimy creatures we call facts, facts that are rarely clear enough to be classified as false or true.

  Novelists work in a different manner. We begin with fictions. That is to say, we make suppositions about the nature of reality. Put another way, we live with hypotheses which, when well chosen, can enrich our minds and—it is always a hope—some readers’ minds as well. Hypotheses are, after all, one of the incisive ways by which we try to estimate what a reality might be. Each new bit of evidence we acquire serves to weaken the hypothesis or to strengthen it. With a good premise, we may even get closer to reality. A poor one, sooner or later, has to be discarded.

  Take the unhappy but superexcited state that a man or woman can find themselves in when full of jealousy. Their minds are quickened, their senses become more alert. If a wife believes her husband is having an affair, then every time he comes home, she is more aware of his presence than she has been in previous weeks, months, or years. Is he guilty? Is the way in which he folds his napkin a sign of some unease? Is he being too accommodating? Her senses quicken at the possibility that another woman—let us call her Victoria—is the object of his attention. Soon, the wife is all but convinced that he is having an affair with Victoria. Definitely. No question. But then, on a given morning, she discovers that the lady happens to be in China. Worse. Victoria has actually been teaching in Beijing for the last six months. Ergo, the hypothesis has been confuted. If the wife is still convinced that the husband is unfaithful, another woman must be substituted.

  The value of a hypothesis is that it can stimulate your mind and heighten your concentration. The danger is that it can distort your brain. Thoughts of revenge are one example. The first question may be: Am I too cowardly to exercise this revenge? One can wear oneself down to the bone with that little suspicion. Or, one’s moral sense can be activated. Does one have the right to seek revenge? Hypotheses on love usually prove even more disruptive. The most basic is, of course: Am I really in love? Is this love? How much am I in love? What is love, after all? To a family man, the question can become: How much do I love my children? Am I ready to sacrifice myself for them? Real questions. Questions that have no quick answer. Good hypotheses depend on real questions, which is to say questions that do not always generate happy answers.

  Patriotism offers its own set. For some, it is not enough to wave a flag. The people in fascist countries always wave flags. So, some Americans are still ready to ask whether it is false patriotism to support our country under any and all conditions. Others, a majority, no doubt, seem to feel that one’s nation demands an unquestioning faith, and so you must always be ready to believe that the people of our nation are superior—by their blood alone—to the people of other nations. In that sense, patriotism is analogous to family snobbery. Indeed, one can ask whether patriotism is the poor man’s equivalent of the upper-class sense of inbred superiority.

  These questions can provoke us to ask: What is the nature of my country now? Do we have the right to be in Iraq? Why are we there?

  Before we look at the familiar answers that have been given to us by the administration, the media, and the opposition, allow me an excursion. What intrigues me most about good hypotheses is that they bear a close relation to good fiction. The serious novel looks for situations and characters who can come alive enough to surprise the writer. If he or she starts with one supposition, the actions of the characters often lead the story some distance away from what was planned. In that sense, hypotheses are not only like fictions but can be compared to news stories—once the situation is presented, subsequent events can act like surprisingly lively characters ready to prove or disprove how one thought the original situation would develop. The value of a good hypothesis, like a good fiction, is that whether it all turns out more or less as expected, or is altogether contrary, the mind of the reader as well as the author is nonetheless enriched.

  A good novel, therefore, like a good hypothesis, becomes an attack on the nature of reality. (If attack seems too violent a notion here, think of it as intense inquiry.) But the basic assumption is that reality is ever changing—the more intense the situation, the more unforeseeable will be the denouement. Reality, by this logic, is not yet
classified. The honor, the value of a serious novel rests on the assumption that the explanations our culture has given us on profound matters are not profound. Working on a novel, one feels oneself getting closer to new questions, better ones, questions that are harder to answer. It’s as if in writing novels, you don’t assume there are absolutes or incontrovertible facts. Nor do you expect to come to a firm or final answer. Rather, the questions are pursued in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions.

  Let me then repeat the point. Novelists approach reality, but they do not capture it. No good novel ever arrives at total certainty, not unless you are Charles Dickens and are writing A Christmas Carol. Just so, few hypotheses ever reach verification. Not every Victoria teaches in China.

  This much laid out, I am almost ready to leave this substantial introduction to what I am yet going to say. Before I do, however, let me present a lagniappe, not necessary for my argument, but there for its flavor. So, I would claim that the most interesting bond between hypothesis and serious fiction is that they both have something to say about sex and the social forms it takes. For a long time, I’ve amused myself with the notion that the poem, the short story, and the novel can be compared to phases of sex. The short poem, certainly, is analogous to a one-night stand. It may come off as brilliant, or it can be a bummer. A love affair of reasonable duration is, all too often, like a short story. What characterizes most short stories is that they look to suggest something forthright by the end. In their crudest form, when young men write their early pieces, the last sentence almost always has its echo of “He felt old, and sad, and tired.” By analogy, it may be fair to say that few affairs come to an end without being characterized—usually uncharitably—by the participants. Marriage, however, like a novel, is closer to a metamorphosis of attitudes. The end of one chapter may leave the husband and wife ready to break up; they cannot bear each other. In the morning, which commences the next chapter, they discover to their mutual surprise that they are back in the sack. Reality varies from chapter to chapter.

  I expect I have used this little excursion to suggest that those of us who do not hold fundamental beliefs often approach our sense of reality by way of our working hypotheses, or by our various literary forms. It is certainly true that on the road to Iraq, we were offered more than a few narratives for why we were so obviously hell-bent for war.

  In the beginning, some said that George W. Bush was trying to validate his father by occupying Baghdad—others argued that he wished to appear superior to George H. W. Two opposed hypotheses. Each made a neat one-page article for one or another magazine.

  Another hypothesis which soon arose was that such a war would be evil. Shed no blood for oil. That became the cry. Quite likely, it was correct in part, at least, but it was as harsh in argument as the prose of any ill-written tract. Others offered a much more virtuous reason: conquering Iraq would democratize the Middle East. Problems between Israel and Palestine could be happily settled. In the event, this proved to be nearer to Grimm’s fairy tales than a logical proposition.

  In its turn, the administration presented us with weapons of mass destruction. That lived in the American mind like an intelligence thriller. Would we locate those nightmares before they blew us up? It became the largest single argument for going to war. Colin Powell put his political honor on the chopping block for that assertion. He is still holding his head in his hands.

  There were other hypotheses—would we or would we not find Osama bin Laden? Which became a short story like “The Lady, or the Tiger?”—no ending. On the eve of war, there was a blood-cult novel in the night. It was Shock and Awe—had we driven a quick stake through the heart of Saddam Hussein? Good Americans could feel they were on the hunt for Dracula.

  Vivid hypotheses. None held up. We did not learn then and we still do not begin to agree why we embarked on this most miserable of wars. Occam’s Razor does suggest that the simplest explanation which is ready to answer a variety of separate questions on a puzzling matter has a great likelihood of being the most correct explanation. One answer can emerge then from the good bishop’s formula: it is that we marched into a full-sized war because it was the simplest solution the president and his party could find for the immediate impasse in which America found itself. (Besides, a war would authenticate his Florida presidency.) Yes, how much we needed a solution to our developing problems.

  The first problem, which could yet become the most worrisome, was that the nation’s scientific future, and its technological skills, seemed to be in distress. American students at STEM studies—S-T-E-M: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—no longer appeared to be equal to those Asian and European students who were also studying advanced courses at our universities. For pleasure-loving American students, STEM subjects may have seemed too difficult, too unattractive. Moreover, the American corporation was now ready to outsource its own future, even eager to do so. Given drastically lower factory wages in Third World countries, there may have appeared no alternative to maintain large profits. All the same, if American factory jobs were now in danger of disappearing, and our skills at technology were suffering in comparison to Europe and to Asia, then relations between American labor and the corporation could go on tilt. That was not the only storm cloud over the land.

  Back in 2001, back before 9/11, the divide between pop culture and fundamentalism was gaping. In the view of the religious right, America was becoming heedless, loutish, irreligious, and blatantly immoral. Half of all American marriages were ending in divorce. The Catholic Church was suffering a series of agonizing scandals. The FBI had been profoundly shaken by moles in their woodwork who worked for the Soviets and a Mafia killer on close terms with their own agents on the scene.

  Posed with the specter of a superpower, our own superpower, economically and spiritually out of kilter, the best solution seemed to be war. That would offer an avenue for recapturing America—not, mind you, by unifying the country, not at all. By now, that was close to impossible. Given, however, that the country was deeply divided, the need might be to separate it further in such a way that one’s own half could become much more powerful. For that, Americans had to be encouraged to live with all the certainties of myth while bypassing the sharp edge of inquiry demanded by hypothesis.

  The difference is crucial. A hypothesis opens the mind to thought, to comparison, to doubt, to the elusiveness of truth. If this country was founded in great part on the notion that enough people possessed enough goodwill, and enough desire for growth and discovery to prosper, and this most certainly included spiritual and intellectual discovery, then, or so went the premise, democracy could thrive more than monarchy or theocracy.

  Of course, all these political forms depend on their myths. Myths are tonic to a nation’s heart. Once abused, however, they are poisonous. For myths are frozen hypotheses. Serious questions are answered by declaration and will not be reopened. The need is for a morality tale at a child’s level. Good will overcome a dark enemy. For the Bush administration, 9/11 came as a deliverance. The new myth even bore some relation to reality. There was no question that Islamic terrorists were opposed to all we stood for, good or bad. They did call us the Great Satan. But even this was not enough. The danger presented by this enemy had to be expanded. Our paranoia had to be intensified. We were encouraged to worry about the security of every shopping mall in America. To oppose the fears we generated in ourselves, we had to call on our most dynamic American myths. We had had, after all, a lifetime of watching action films.

  The possibility of weeding terrorists out through international police action never came into real question. We needed much more than that. War is, obviously, a mightier rallying ground than a series of local police actions. Yet half of America was opposed to our advance toward war with Iraq. Half of us were asking one way or another: “How much goodness has America brought to the world? How much has it exploited the world?”

  The president, howeve
r, had his own imperatives. Keep America fixed on myth. So he went all the way back to Cotton Mather. We must war constantly against the invisible kingdom of Satan. Stand at Armageddon and battle for the land. This was fortified by a belief which many Republicans, some of the most intelligent and some of the most stupid, accepted in full. It was the conviction that America was exceptional, and God had a special interest in America. God wanted us to be a land superior to other nations, a realm to lift His vision into greater glory. So the myth of the frontier, which demanded a readiness to fight without limit, became part of our exceptionalism. “Do what it takes.” No matter how deeply one was embedded in near to inextricable situations, one would complete the job—“Bring ’em on.” The myth was crucial to the Bush administration. The last thing it needed was to contend with anything like a real approach to reality.

  This attempt to take over the popular American mind has certainly not been unsuccessful, but it does generate a new and major hypothesis which would argue that the people of the United States were systematically, even programmatically, deluded from the top down. Karl Rove was there to recognize that there were substantial powers to be obtained by catering to stupid stubborn people, and George W. Bush would be the man to harvest such resources. George W. understood stupid people well. They were not dumb, their minds were not physically crippled in any way. They had chosen to be stupid because that offered its own kind of power. To win a great many small contests of will, they needed only to ignore all evidence. Bright people would break down trying to argue with them. Bush knew how to use this tool. With a determination that only profound contempt for the popular mind can engender, we were sold the notion that this war would be honorable, necessary, self-protective, decent, fruitful for democracy, and dedicated to any and all forms of human goodness. I would suggest that there was close to zero sincerity at the top. The leaders of this country who forced the war through were neither idealistic nor innocent. They had known what they were doing. It was basic. Do what it takes. They had decided that if America was to be able to solve its problems, then the country had to become an empire. For American capitalism to survive, exceptionalism rather than cooperation with other advanced nations had become the necessity. From their point of view, there had been ten lost years of initiatives, ten years in the cold, but America now had an opportunity to cash in again on the great bonanza that had fallen its way in 1991 when the Soviet Union went bankrupt in the arms race. At that point, or so believed the exceptionalists, America could and should have taken over the world and thereby safeguarded our economic future for decades at least with a century of hegemony to follow. Instead, these exceptionalists had been all but consumed with frustration over what they saw as the labile pussyfooting of the Clinton administration. Never have liberals been detested more. But now, at last, 9/11 had provided an opportunity for America to resolve some problems. Now America could embark on the great adventure of empire.