‘“The White Negro” adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. It was, as David Horowitz notes in his autobiography Radical Son, “the seminal manifesto of New Left nihilism… . In New Left thinking, criminals were only ‘primitive rebels.’” Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay—if it feels good, do it!—was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro,” along with some of Mailer’s other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious abettors.”
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I read it too, He definitely belongs on the shelf with Tim Leary, Hugh Hefner, William Burroghs and others who basically glorified bad behavior and consequence-free living.
Norman Who?
Oh yeah, that one.
“He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking.”
He was the self prophasized darling of the glitterati and all his stuff is straight from “Mother Goose Marxist/Relativism for Beginnners 101” ie, the destruction of western civilization.
Yeah, all those “leaders” of the baby boom generation.
Mailer never got out of the year 1968, and then he helped that killer get free that murdered someone else a couple of months later.
William Burroughs hardly “glorified bad behavior and consequence-free living”. Have you actually read Naked Lunch?