Norman Mailer: Closet Feminist
Thu Nov 29, 2007 at 01:11:53 PM PDT
The piece consists of Mailer’s ruminations on how to answer the question: "Why did we go to war?" It is written in a style reminiscent of his best non-fiction (except it doesn’t include himself as the main character, which many people would probably be glad to hear).
He spends several paragraphs discussing various matters and then comes to a typical Mailer pronouncement:
We could say we went to war because we very much needed a successful war as a species of psychic rejuvenation [after 9/11]. Any major excuse would do—nuclear threat, terrorist nests, weapons of mass destruction—we could always make the final claim that we were liberating the Iraqis. Who could argue with that? One could not. One could only ask: What will the cost be to our democracy?
Then, bringing up the symbolic nature of our military and its unquestionable superiority he goes on to say that our Armed Forces could do even more than rejuvenate those wounded by 9/11:
They could also serve an even larger group, which had once been near to 50 percent of the population, and remained key to the President's political footing. This group had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good average white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, nothing, in fact, unless he happened to be a member of the armed forces. There, it was certainly different. The armed forces had become the paradigmatic equal of a great young athlete looking to test his true size. Could it be that there was a bozo out in the boondocks who was made to order, and his name was Iraq? Iraq had a tough rep, but not much was left to him inside. A dream opponent.
Clearly, at this point Mailer has begun to start channeling his inner feminist. A paragraph later he starts sounding like Katha Pollitt:
And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark).
Mailer then proceeds with an analysis that would make heads explode if a woman said it:
If [Bush] had a covert strength, it was his knowledge of the unspoken things that bothered American white men the most—just those matters they were not always ready to admit to themselves. The first was that people hipped on sports can get overaddicted to victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that had developed many psychic connections with the military.
After all, war was, with all else, the most dramatic and serious extrapolation of sports. The concept of victory could be seen by some as the noblest species of profit in union with patriotism. So Bush knew that a big victory in an easy war would work for the good white American male. If blacks and Hispanics were representative of their share of the population in the enlisted ranks, still they were not a majority, and the faces of the officer corps (as seen on the tube) suggested that the percentage of white men increased as one rose in rank to field and general officers. Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and—one magical ace in the hole—the best air force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.
Whatever you want to say about Mailer and his faults (and he certainly had many), this seems to me to be a belated mea culpa, and a certain admission that the way forward for our nation might be a path that is different from the typical scenarios created by white men(pdf). Progressives would do well to think about this.
The piece closes out with Mailer’s disgust of George Bush strongly coming to the fore. Even in old age he was still the master of the meaningful epigram:
Be it said: the motives that lead to a nation's major historical acts can probably rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of its leadership.
And then later this:
Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum of honesty. Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself.
Mailer closes with the much mentioned staging of the "Mission Accomplished" spectacle, which he calls "a mighty fashion show." (Okay, that’s still male chauvinist, but he was an old dog and this is a new trick.) Yet, it’s impossible not to be impressed by this whiz bang of an ending:
Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.
Permalink | 26 comments