Murphy,robert,praise the lord at antistate.com
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.
On a crystalline day in October, Taki, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell
met at Logan Airport and drove up the Cape to Norman Mailer's home in
Provincetown, Mass. Taki is an old friend of Mailer's; McConnell and
Hopkins knew his writing well but had never met the man.
The vagaries of literary reputation are not the main beat of The American
Conservative, but we were struck by how many people told us how important
Mailer was at a certain time of life and how invariably that time was young
adulthood somewhere between 18 and 21. Perhaps that is the moment in life
when readers are most receptive to a certain kind of bold writing.
What follows is a conversation about what most interested the four of us on
that day, as well as an addendum Mailer wrote later. We spoke of the
present and future more than the past: a mixture of politics (Iraq, the
imperial urge, styles of conservatism) and more typically Maileresque
themes (the problem of technology). After several hours of talk and the
gracious hospitality of Norris Church Mailer we made our way back to normal
life, not doubting that we had spent an extraordinary afternoon with the
greatest living American writer.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: You're just back from Europe
NORMAN MAILER: My wife, Norris, and I went with George Plimpton and his
wife Sarah. We did George's play, Zelda, Scott & Earnest (Terry Quinn,
co-author) in six capitals over two visits.
We were in Paris and Amsterdam in June, then at end of summer, in Vienna
and Berlin and Moscow and London. It is the most amazing play. There is not
one original word in it. It is all taken from Scott's writings, Zelda's
writings, and Hemingway's, plus their letters back and forth. The first
time we did it, I said to John Irving, Can you imagine how good this will
be with top-flight actors? He said, no, no, no. The fact that you people
are doing it makes it interesting because sitting in the audience, you go
back and forth between the originals and the people who are doing it on
this night.
I think that is a part of it. Americans need mythos, certainly, in the
literary world. Nationally, we have Abraham Lincoln and George Washington
and FDR and Camelot, and in some quarters I fear there is Ronald Reagan,
but nonetheless, in the literary world, it is probably Hemingway and
Fitzgerald and Zelda, the nearest thing to a literary mythos within living
reach. People take to it.
AC: Why do you think so? Because they are good, but not necessarily the best.
NM: Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Well, they are arguably the best. Who would
you call on in that period? Going back, you could certainly argue that
Melville's a greater writer or Emerson or a few others. But who would you
name for now?
AC: I would put Henry Miller there with them.
NM: Yes, Henry Miller I would put there. Maybe a century from now, people
will decide he was greater. But a myth doesn't depend on who is greatest.
It needs figures who are extremely well known and yet not quite understood.
That lends itself to myth. Why we need mythos may be the real question. I
would assume it is the counter-weight to technology.
AC: Technology has been a theme you've written and spoken about for 50
years. Do you think in terms of sensory deadening or soul deadening, that
the impact is much worse now than 40 or 50 years ago? I am not sure whether
you do the Internet and all that
NM: I don't. That would use up what I have left. Not long ago, I said that
what technology promises is less pleasure and more power. Part of the
crisis of modern times is that there is a tendency for all of us to become
more and more narcissistic and power-driven. (And icy within.)
AC: Are you gloomy about the looming power of the state, of American
totalitarianism? You've said you've been wrong about that many times and
have been cheerful about having been wrong.
NM: I am more worried this time than ever. Did you see a piece in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a marvelous piece by a man named Jay Bookman?
If you want to talk about Iraq, I'm ready to get into that.
AC: Our little magazine has been talking a lot about Iraq.
NM: I, too, am not for going to war, so we certainly meet there. What I
thought from the beginning is that there is a most peculiar subtext under
the Bush administration's approach on what has to be done with Iraq. Some
time ago, they began by suggesting that Iraq was an immediate nuclear
threat. It is now generally agreed that they are not. The Bush people then
began to carry on about the huge danger of a biochemical assault on us. But
they've not made the case that Iraq is on the ready for such a dire
possibility. Then, another big accusation Iraq is a harbor for terrorists.
Well, as far as I can see, and this is from a novelist's point of view, if
I were Saddam Hussein, the last people I would want to have in my country
are terrorists from other countries because I am interested in total
control over my own land. Terrorists are loose cannons. Why would Hussein
want to pay an unforeseen price? Then, on the other hand, if I were a
terrorist, going along the underground railway that I assume runs from
Pakistan through Iran and has to pass through Iraq to get to Syria and
Jordan and Lebanon and Palestine, the worst place on this trip would be
Iraq because I'd probably be put in a compound. So what is the subtext? Why
does the White House want to have that war, why? What do they want? One can
name access to oil as the motive, but is that a large enough reward for
what could be the unforeseen and immense dangers of such a war?
Then I saw that piece in the Journal-Constitution, printed on Sept. 29, a
piece to which no attention was paid in American newspapers. I was
surprised by that. It is a powerful piece. Bookman remarks that everybody
has been asking, why is there no plan for what is to be done in Iraq after
the war is won? Bookman's firm suggestion is that there has been a plan all
the time. We are going to occupy Iraq and occupy it for a long time. Then
it all does begin to make its own kind of sense. Because that means we are
inaugurating the commencement of the American World Empire. Right there is
the subtext. Incidentally, the political seat from which I speak is as a
Left-Conservative.
AC: It was much more clean when you were an anarchist. We knew what that
meant. But Left-Conservative?
NM: I have to redefine the term for myself every day because on its face,
we have an oxymoron. But, it does have meaning for me. I think there are
elements in the remains of left-wing philosophy (which has not had all that
many new ideas for the last 30 years), that are worth maintaining.
AC: Such as?
NM: The idea that a very rich man should not make 4,000 times as much in a
year as a poor man. On the other hand, I am not a liberal. The notion that
man is a rational creature who arrives at reasonable solutions to knotty
problems is much in doubt as far as I'm concerned. Liberalism depends all
too much on having an optimistic view of human nature. But the history of
the 20th century has not exactly fortified that notion. Moreover,
liberalism also depends too much upon reason rather than any appreciation
of mystery. If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal,
he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. In that sense, since
I happen to be I hate to use the word religious, there are so many heavy
dull connotations, so many pious self-seeking aspects but I do believe
there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also
believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence (and is all
too often successful). So, I can hardly be a liberal. God is bad enough for
them, but talk about the devil, and the liberal's mind is blown. He is
consorting with a fellow who is irrational if not insane. That is the end
of real conversation.
On the other hand, conservatism has its own deep ditches, its unclimbable
walls, its immutable old ideas sealed in concrete. But lately, there are
two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in
their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917,
yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call value
conservatives because they believe in what most people think of as the
standard conservative values family, home, faith, hard work, duty,
allegiance dependable human virtues. And then there are what I call flag
conservatives,of whom obviously the present administration would be the
perfect example.
I don't think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative
values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words
like evil. One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that
cornucopia) is to use the word evil as if it were a button he can touch to
increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to
feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush
uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ
that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value
conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on
manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they
do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel
that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but
on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution
for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the
desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping
stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first
century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into
the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the
entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but
the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.
AC: Who in American politics is a value conservative?
NM: Someone like Taft would be a good example of a value conservative.
Eisenhower, probably, a gentle value conservative. More recently? Reagan, I
think, was not. I will say that I don't think Reagan ever had an original
idea in his life. I once sat next to him, as near as I am sitting to you,
at a lunch for eight people. This was in 1972 at the convention that
nominated Nixon for the second time. I spent the entire meal trying to
figure out a tough question to ask him. I always found that if you meet
someone's eyes, a good question can come to mind. And for two hours he sat
there, perfectly calm and pleasant and kept making jokes and talking. It
was a lightweight conversation. The physical impression of him was that he
had about as much human specific density as, let's say, a sales manager for
a medium-sized corporation in the Midwest. That kind of modest, mild,
well-knit heft was in his bearing. During those two hours, he chatted with
all six Time reporters at the table, and his eyes never met mine. I found
myself unable to come up with that tough question as a result. It became a
matter of decorum. The mood was too genial. It occurred to me after he
became president that he probably, if he could help it, never spent time
talking to anyone who was of no use to him. An instinctive climber who
scaled the face of success with great skill: that was his gift, if you
will. He was surrounded by people who had many powerful ideas and who
illumined him to the point where they could wind him up and then he could
do his special stuff. At the time, he had an enormous impact on value
conservatives because they thought he was one of them. I suspect he had
about as much to do with them as a screen star does with an agricultural
laborer.
AC: Returning to the question of empire
NM: One of the most interesting remarks in the Journal-Constitution piece
was that after this excellent explanation of what the subtext probably is,
Bookman wrote that if it is true that America is going towards empire, that
should be made public to the American people. Let them, at least, have some
say on that because it is one of the largest issues we face in the future.
I agree wholly with that.
You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I'm not in
accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view,
America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are
licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can't read, but
they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if
America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee
all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will
have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become
necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag
conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary. In the last decade,
there have been many blows to the psychic integument of conservatism. And
the last half-year has been horrific. We have all had to recognize the
outsize chicanery and economic pollution of the corporations, we have had
to deal with the great blow the Catholic Church took, not to mention 9/11,
which was a shock, if not an outright chasm at our feet. I think Americans
took a hit that is not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the
Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental
German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your
money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is my belief Hitler could
never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By
the same measure, I think 9/11 did something comparable to the American
sense of security.
AC: What would the empire builders have done with out 9/11?
NM: I don't think they would have proceeded this way at all. There is such
a thing as luck in human affairs. Without 9/11, I don't think they could
have exploited this push to have a war with Iraq. I think, rather, the
administration would have been in trouble. The attention of the media was
fixed on the bad market, the increase in joblessness, the Church and
corporate scandals, the high school serial killers, the drugs, new and old.
AC: Do you think we may be in al Qaeda's script or Osama bin Laden's
script? Is there really a war of civilizations, which will, if it starts in
earnest, not bode well for American globalism?
NM: I think there is a good deal of reality to this. From a radical Muslim
point of view, America is absolutely the Great Satan, and this is a war to
the death. But in terms of military realities, I don't think it is
necessary for us to build an empire to be able to contain Muslim rage. For
one thing, apart from anything else, it would take Islamic extremists,
what? A hundred years to overthrow us? Systematic terrorism for 100 years?
Fifty years? Their all-out rage is not likely to last that
long.
Historic moods shift. Temperaments grow old. The point I want to make is
that let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view
back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their
opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew
how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the
reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted.
That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992,
was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This
attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years
of the Clinton administration. I don't know if White House principals talk
to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present
thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of
necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected
positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of
the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who
can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new
emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their
inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and
over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks
of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These
are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World
Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.
What they don't take into account is the exceptional perversity of human
affairs. At the least we could become a species of totalitarian country,
dominating the world, with very little freedom of speech. Moreover, the
entire scheme could fail. The notion itself has an overweening hubris to it.
AC: This could very easily fail especially if China and Europe were opposed
to it.
NM: One of the messages that the flag conservatives are trying to send to
China is, I expect: Hear this! You Chinese guys are obviously very bright.
We can tell. We know! Because your Asian students in our universities get
better marks than our people do. They are more serious. They were born for
technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don't
get any pleasure anyway, so they do like the notion of personal,
right-at-your-desk power. Technology is ideal for them. All right, goes the
unspoken message of the flag conservatives, you guys can have your
technology, but you had better understand, China, that you will be the
Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well because you will be most
important to us, eminently important. But don't try to rise above your
future station in life. The best you can ever hope to be is Greeks.
There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we
Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to
handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles.
They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it
must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a
new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the
drain. That, I am fully ready to speculate, is the subtext beneath the
Iraqi subtext, and they may not even be wholly aware of it themselves, not
all of them.
AC: What now?
NM: I'm not sure anything can be done. I think America is in pretty bad
psychic shape. If it really is, then many people may turn to the idea of
Empire as a transcendent solution, a way to get rid of our ongoing guilt. I
would argue that there has always been a tremendous guilt in our lives, at
least as long as I know. I can go right back to my World War II days in the
Army. We were all convinced then that when peace came, we'd return home to
a depression. We G.I.'s were bitter about that and we enjoyed our
bitterness. We were maybe going to lose our lives, but if we got through
this, we'd probably go back to depression. Good luck! But after we
returned, the country took off on an economic ascent. A lot of Americans
were very happy to be prosperous, but they also felt secretly guilty. Why?
Because we are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is
essentially a grace note. We are a Christian nation. And the idea, if you
really are a Christian and a great many people in America at that point
were significantly devout, was that you were not supposed to be all that
rich. God didn't want it. Jesus certainly didn't. You were not supposed to
pile up a lot of money. You were supposed to spend your life in reasonably
altruistic acts. That was one half of the collective psyche. The other
half: Beat everybody you are in a contest with because you've got to win.
To a certain extent, and this is a cruel, but possibly an accurate remark,
to be an American is to be an oxymoron. On the one hand, you are a good
Christian, and on the other, you are viscerally combative. You are supposed
to be macho and win. Jesus and Evel Knievel don't necessarily consort too
well in one psyche. Nonetheless, we moved forward, we became more and more
powerful, even as the guilt developed in all sorts of subterranean ways.
The communist Red Scare of the early Fifties, at a time when the Soviet
Union was still hugely ravaged by its war wounds, is one example of how we
reacted. When 9/11 occurred, there was an immense guilt mixed in with the
rage. I was here in Provincetown, 300 miles away at the time, and the
reality of it didn't hit me directly, but after a while I began to perceive
part of the key element in it. The terror of that act involved the TV
audience all over America. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For
years we've been seeing scenes just like that on the tube and enjoyed them
because we were so insulated. A hundredth of our psychic receptivity could
enter the box and share the fear while 99% of ourselves felt absolutely
safe. Now, suddenly, it was real. Gods and demons were invading the U.S.,
coming in right off the TV screen. That may account in part for the odd
guilt so many felt after 9/11 as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.
AC: Do you think there is any turning back? Or are we set on this course?
Or is there still a chance to turn prudently away from it?
NM: I think if Bush has to turn away from it, he will do so with great
frustration. He will have to go back and live with the old dull insolubles
again! I expect the White House feeling still remains that it doesn't
matter what the rest of the world thinks or feels. But, force majeure,
these flag conservatives are now obliged, nonetheless, to acknowledge the
fair amount of division in this country and the unhappiness of France,
Germany, Russia, not to mention China, Japan, we can keep naming them. It
had to get to the White House principals. They might not be able to bring
off this first big step. Were they really ready to do it against the
feelings of the rest of the world? Some of the administration who had been
all for it in the beginning might have begun to waver. Others, I expect,
argued that they had to stay on course. Suck it up! No room for weaklings
on this ship!
One of my favorite notions about Bush is that although he is not a bright
man, he does have what Ernest Hemingway used to call a bull-s**t detector.
Like Reagan, he doesn't have ideas of his own, but he does listen to his
experts. He has to. They know more than he does. Still, he can probably
tell fairly often when they are speaking with true authority and when they
are glossing over their own uncertainty. Sometimes an expert has to
maintain his or her position, even though inwardly dubious of its
authenticity. Perhaps Bush can hear who is speaking with inner conviction
on a given occasion and who is not. So he tacks with each yaw in the breeze.
AC: There is a lot being said in most of the journals of the American Right
about Islam being an essentially evil religion which somehow we have to
vanquish. Speak to your sense of Islam and where the Christian West or
post-Christian West is in relationship to it and how that could play out.
NM: Well, to begin with, I would say that flag conservatives are not
Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a
fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but
they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and
it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the
same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely
egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God.
But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders,
who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a
perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate
Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam.
Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of
war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may
prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and
the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse.
The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get
through this century. We could come apart piece by piece, disaster after
disaster, small and large.
AC: The conflict between communism and capitalism seems so much more
sensible and manageable in comparison.
NM: Looking back, it was kind of logical. Capitalism and communism had
clear and opposed objectives but neither was ready to destroy the world.
Certainly, the more that conflict ebbed into its conclusion, the less
danger was present that the big bang would come.
AC: You have cast the fight as Allah versus moolah Islam versus money. If
ours is indeed a post Christian society in which materialism is the highest
good, and it takes a faith to fight a faith, are they not better suited to
combat us?
NM: Are they better suited? No, I don't think so. The difficulty I have
when I speak about this is I don't know enough about Islam. But it does
seem to me, on the face of it, that if we did nothing in terms of attacking
them, that might delay such a war for 50 years. The next argument would be,
well, can we afford to delay? We can win it now and we might lose it in 50
years. But my notion is that this war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so
much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much
technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other. It is not that
complicated to be an effective terrorist after all. Pick up the phone, make
a call, and disrupt traffic for half a day. The real question is how
pervasive can terrorism get, not whether you can wipe it out. There will
always be someone left to act as a terrorist. If we try to become an
empire, the real question will become whether we are able to live with
terrorism at the level that the Israelis, let us say, are living with now.
To be an Israeli these days means that you can never make solid plans, and
Jewish people love to have such agendas and carry them out. Now, we are
already at the edge of not knowing when our children might be in danger.
AC: You have described the neoconservative support for the war as
potentially problematic for Israel. Why?
NM: America could win easily over Iraq, but if Saddam has a Samson complex,
what would his last act be? Might he hit Israel at the end with everything
he's still got? At that point, he is a very dangerous man. Nothing more to
lose. He would never dare to attack Israel first. That would certainly
destroy him. He wouldn't even dare, I think, to allow terrorists to do it
for him because of the obvious reason that it would be too easy to trace it
to him. But if Saddam has lost everything, if he is remotely as bad as they
paint him and he may well be then the likelihood is that he will pull down
the columns of the temple: He will be ready to rest as history's
super-terrorist. What I don't understand, therefore, is why the Sharon
government is so ready to gamble with Israel's aility to defend itself (or
be defended) against extreme attack.
AC: Perhaps because they think that if he is allowed to develop nuclear
weapons, then Israel will no longer have a nuclear monopoly in the Middle
East, and that is potentially risky.
NM: Immensely risky. But at that point, they can both destroy each other.
In miniature, it's analogous to the potentiality for instant destruction
that America had with the Soviet Union. So, time itself might bring a
species of peace. Have they thought it through?
AC: Can we address more generally Israel and its unavoidable existential
dilemma, which is the Palestinians? I don't think you've written a lot
about Israel
NM: No. I've never been there. For a basic reason, which is that I am
always writing a book. To go to Israel would mean another book to write,
and it would be an important book. It would take over all I am doing now,
and what I am working on now is more important to me.
AC: But you were never any kind of anti-Zionist
NM:No, I start with a set of simple, unsophisticated notions about Israel.
It was such a small country when it began. If the Arab leaders had had any
kind of human goodness in them, they could have said, these people have
been through hell. Let's treat them with Islamic courtesy, the way we are
supposed to treat strangers. Instead they declared them the enemy. The
Israelis had no choice but to become strong and to get allied with us. In
the course of doing so, some of the best aspects of the Jewish nature
irony, the love of truth, the love of wisdom and justice, suffered internal
depredations.
The prevailing attitude over the decades demanded that they become good
farmers, good technicians, and good soldiers. No need to use the minds for
fine-tuning any more. Do not even speak of hearts. Be there when you're
needed became the overriding virtue.
Once it was a matter of saving their country, everything changed. Quantity
changes quality, which may be the best three words Engels ever wrote.
Quantity changes quality. As the Israelis became tougher, so they lost any
hard-earned and elevated objectivity, any high and disinterested search for
social value. The logo became Israel, my Israel. That was inevitable. It is
also tragic, I think. Israel is now one more powerhouse in the world. But
what they've lost is special. Now, they treat the Palestinians as if the
Palestinians were ghetto Jews. It is one of the great ironies. You know,
the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last
human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, be
turned inside out.
AC: Do you think there is any way they can escape that dilemma with the
Palestinians?
NM:I don't see how. Not right now. It may be that what they feel is that if
they don't gamble now, they will be destroyed later. If a war with Iraq
ends with Americans installed there, Israel could feel more secure for
decades to come. But it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many
powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is
our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our
disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have
mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neo-cons may feel this is our
best shot, this is our best opportunity, this is the moment when we have to
take a chance because, if we don't now, we are likely to be doomed 10, 20,
30 years down the road.
But, again, I say, you don't gamble that way. I've always been thoroughly
opposed to gambling with your last thousand bucks. Especially if you have a
family. That is one reason I am a Left-Conservative. That is the
conservative part of me.
AC: What's your opinion of Ariel Sharon?
NM: He is what he is. A brute. A powerhouse general. I think his defense
would be: I am what fate has made me. If he had lived in the ghetto, he
would have been one of the stronger men there and probably one of the more
disliked. But now he is an Israeli. What is obvious, what stands out in
most Israelis is that they are patriots. My God, they are. After Hitler,
how could they not be? In that sense, I am sure Sharon thinks he is doing
the only thing he can do; that he is doing the right thing. Just as I was
going on earlier about Christians having this great guilt that they were
not compassionate, but greedy, so I think there is a similar inner crisis
in Israel. I think they are ready to say: We are no longer humanists. We've
become the opposite of ourselves. Still, we protect the country. We dare
the unknown. If Saddam unloads on us? If a large part of Israel is lost to
such a war? Well, sometimes one must undergo serious surgery. I think the
Sharons are ready for that. Of course, the neocons here will not be losing
their own arm or leg or lungs.
AC: Shifting course a bit, years ago in your writing, you created a kind of
antithesis between blacks and whites, writing not about civil rights but
about black and white attitudes towards life.
NM: Yes. Black and white with their separate geist.
AC: American has become much more complicated now with browns and yellows.
Does that lead to any of the sorts of generalizations that came out of The
White Negro?
NM: You've got to put more of a point on the question.
AC: Our side of the immigration debate generally feels that America is
getting transformed into something less like the country we understand and
are used to. It seems a kind of foreign place. It is not an argument we
often use, but that is in the back of it. Have you thought much about the
more multicultural America? What are its possibilities? What are its
limitations?
NM: I haven't thought about it for a very good reason, which is, I don't
like thinking about it. There are so many complexities to it and such a
collision with so many of my own values. On the one hand, at the time I
wrote The White Negro, I felt that America was very much in need of black
culture as such and that black culture had an understanding of life that
white culture didn't have. That is how I felt then. Since then I've come to
the conclusion that these remarks are so general, they don't appeal to me
but the collision I have in my mind and am trying to think it through and
can't is that I believe that the integrity of races and cultures is very
important. It is something you can't talk about. Hitler took care of
race-talk forever. Well, not forever, but for the next 100 years. But I do
think that there is such a thing as the integrity of each culture and that
cultures ought to be able to go in different directions, even collide.
Given the modern world of technology, I am not even sure, however, that the
race or culture question is even paramount any more. The long-term tendency
is to have no races. It is as if technology has become the dominant culture
in existence and may soon be the only real culture. In other words, the
similarities between computer experts all over the world is now far greater
than their differences in ethnicity.
AC: Go back to the integrity of races as very important. I know it is a
politically incorrect thought but it doesn't have to be expressed with
rancor. It might be interesting.
NM: I don't have any rancor about it, I just have a feeling there is a true
problem. To the degree that you lose your culture, you've lost what may be
irreplaceable. We can end up with a world that is totally homogenized. Of
course, the problem, which was never solved, is how can these different
races and cultures live together with some equity? Democracy has often made
vigorous attempts to solve this. But the tendency to homogeneity can go too
far. The answer is somewhere in the balance. And the immense difficulty is
keeping a viable balance, a lively balance.
Let me put it this way: I don't see immigration as a pressing problem other
than that it gets some white people so furious that they can't think about
more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, but
America is being lost and has been lost in ways that have nothing to do
with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being
lost is through television.
Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level
of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary
concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a 7- or 8-year-old could read
consecutively for an hour or two. But they don't do that much any more. The
habit has been lost. Every seven to 10 minutes a child is interrupted by a
commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to
be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well.
Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.
Add to that our present-day classrooms. Does anybody ever say that one
reason our education is in such a blighted mess is that just about all
schools now use fluorescent lights? Why? Because they cost a little less. I
would say that in the final count of dollars and cents they cost more. What
characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer
than they do under incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent tubes offer an unhappy
livid light. Skin looks washed out and a bit sickly. If everybody seems
uglier than they are normally, why, then, everyone grows a little
depressed. They begin to think, what am I doing with all these
plain-looking people? Aren't I worth more?
That contributes to the deterioration of the powers of concentration. Bad
architecture, invasive marketing, ubiquitous plastic these deleterious
forces bother me much more than immigration.
* * *
I could go on about this. Our first problem is not immigration but the
American corporation. That is the force which has succeeded in taking
America away from us. It has triumphed in making the world an uglier place
to live in since the Second World War. I would cite 50-story high-rise
architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled
by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenize our landscapes,
and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses.
It is the front-runner in the competition to see what can make the world
more disagreeable. To the degree we have exported this crud all over the
globe, we wield already a punitive species of world hegemony. If I find
myself viscerally opposed to the notion of an American Empire, it is
because of the all-pervasive aesthetic empti-ness of the most powerful
American corporations. There are no cathedrals left for the poor only
sixteen-story urban renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like
jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a
left-conservative as a left-medievalist. I am, of course, not serious about
such a term, but we are all medieval in one fashion our movie stars,
musical entertainers, tycoons, and politicos are treated these days as an
awe-inspiring if rampant bunch of barons, counts, dukes, earls, princes,
princesses, queens and kings. It is a world we can live in, but let's not
forget those medieval ratios of difference in income between rich and poor.
I once spent a weekend with a wealthy Swedish publisher who lived near
Malmo, and he complained for all of a night how much of his wealth was
taken from him by income tax. Before we said goodnight, however, he did
remark: You know when all is said, I do sleep better because I know that in
Sweden we can say at least that no one goes to bed hungry or without a roof
over his head. A nice remark. I know that if I were an American making
several thousand times more than the poorest man in town, I would not only
be afraid of that poor man, but of my relatives and certainly of my
enemies, and I would toss at night wondering how to make more money so
everyone could recognize that I was the most splendid and exceptional
fellow around.
If such a man is not the bane of real conservatives, then I don't know why
we are in a dialogue. Once, in the Democratic primary of 1969, I ran for
mayor of New York in the hope that a Left-Right coalition could be formed
and this Left-Right pincers could make a dent in the entrenched power of
the center. The best to be said for that campaign is that it had its charm.
I am not so certain, however, that this idea must remain eternally without
wings. It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the
corporate center. Our notion was built on the premise that we did not
really know the elements of a good, viable society. We all had our
differing ideals, and morals, and political ethics, but rarely found a way
to practice them directly. So, we called for Power to the Neighborhoods. We
suggested that New York City become a state itself, the fifty-first. Its
citizens would then have the power to create a variety of new
neighborhoods, new townships, all built on separate concepts, core
neighborhoods founded on one or another of our cherished notions from the
Left or the Right. One could have egalitarian towns and privileged places,
or, for those who did not wish to be bothered with living in so detailed
(and demanding) a society, there would be the more familiar and old way of
doing things the City of the State of New York a government for those who
did not care just like old times.
It was a menu for social exploration and experiment. If we had been
elected, we might have ended up with everything in an abysmal mess. It was
a wicked scheme since we had (just like our flirtation to go to war with
Iraq) no real notion of how it would all turn out which is the essence of
the wicked up the ante and close your eyes while you wait for the turn of
the card.
Nonetheless, some germ of the idea of a society open enough for people to
live intense social lives still appeals to me. I repeat we do not really
know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a
society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow all exits and
promote a single central secure point of view) may prove to be the least
good answer of them all. Until the Left and that part of the Right loyal to
its old values can come to recognize that with all their differences, they
also have one profound value they might look to protect in common the
vulnerable dignity of the human creation we are all obliged to travel
passively into the vain and surrealistic land of corporate hegemony with
its basic notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any
country anywhere a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise
of democracy which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and
learn from its own human errors.
I see that I have ended by writing a small polemic. It could be said that
old polemicists never die.
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