NORMAN MAILER DECLARES: 'AMERICA IS SO VAIN' (yep...it's a BARF ALERT)

Drudge Report ^ | 9/6/02

[doug from upland]

The song is up and ready for mocking -- NORMAN

[No Left Turn]

If Mailer is trying to educate us dumb Americans about our faults, why does he publish his rant in a Brit newspaper? There's something classless about an American going to a European newspaper to insult other Americans. It's cowardly. And by the way, this guy's observations are so distorted and weak, I think even the Brits will think he's a jackass. Tolerable level of terrorism, really. What a dolt.

[Huck]

What a twit. There should be a picture of him next to the word in the dictionary.

Main Entry: twit
Pronunciation: 'twit
Function: noun
Date: 1528
1 : an act of twitting : TAUNT
2 : a silly annoying person : FOOL

[kcvl]

Norman Mailer says 11 September was "larger than the atom bomb". In a Newsnight interview, he tells Kirsty Wark how the aftermath of the attacks has affected America.

Mr Mailer believes people will be writing about 11 September for a long time. He has written about the horrors of war in Vietnam, and served in the US army during World War II.

But, he believes that nothing compares in magnitude to the attacks on New York and Washington. This includes the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which ended the Second World War.

Norman Mailer is not surprised that people are looking for answers. "The key element in it is that Allah is a concept that is absolutely foreign to Americans," he says.

He believes that there is a great divide coming across the world. But the Americans do not know who their enemy is. "What are we unifying against? The point is that's what makes me nervous," he says.

He argues that World War II was a definable war. The allies were unified against Hitler.

But in this war, the US were able to take out the Taleban quickly. But now they do not know who they are fighting. He goes on to say it could take on huge siginificance because half the world is Islamic.

Evil

Mr Mailer believes that this is the reason that George Bush speaks in terms of an axis of evil. He is highly critical of the President's political rhetoric.

"The fact is I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes," he says.

He tells Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark that America takes solace from having an evil enemy.

Mr Mailer says, "If you're half-evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person you are opposed to is totally evil."

[kcvl]

[kcvl]

In the late 1940s Mailer worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. He moved in 1951 to Greenwich Village in New York City. Mailer's third novel, THE DEER PARK (1955), was about the corruption of values in Hollywood. Several publishers refused to take the work; Mailer felt he was an outlaw, he listened jazz and smoked marijuana. In the thinly veiled story Mailer depicted his relationship with Adele Morales, an artist whom he married in 1954. Following years in the authors life were more or less chaotic, he was becoming more violent, and in 1960 he stabbed Adele at the end of an all-night party in Manhattan with "a dirty three-inch penknife". Mailer was given a suspended sentence because Adele refused to press charges, but she later publisher her book of memoir, The Last Party (1997).

In the 1980s Mailer had become tired of politics. However, he visited in 1984 the Soviet Union and realized that it was not "the evil empire" but it was a "poor, third-world country". In his writings Mailer had often compared the U.S. to the Roman empire, seeing himself perhaps as a Petronius or Apuleius.

Mailer supported in 1991 the Persian Gulf War for patriotic reasons - he felt that the U.S. was in a bad state and needed a war.

Mailer wanted to advise President Kennedy, but he did not like Lyndon Johnson's face. "Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision." (from The Presidential Papers, 1963)

Mailer has written on the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions since 1960. He has placed himself at the center of American political and cultural life and reported his observations on civil rights movement, political assassinations and other upheavals.

[kcvl]

[kcvl]

Testimony of Norman Mailer in the Chicago Seven Trial

MR. KUNSTLER: I call your attention, Mr. Mailer, to--let me withdraw that.
Did you have a conversation with Jerry Rubin after the Pentagon?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I did in December in my home. I had called Mr. Rubin and asked him to see me because I was writing an account of the march on the Pentagon. I was getting in touch with those principals whom I could locate. Mr. Rubin was, if you will, my best witness. We talked about the details of the march on the Pentagon for hours. We went into great detail about many aspects of it. And in this period I formed a very good opinion of Mr. Rubin because he had extraordinary powers of objectivity which an author is greatly in need of when he is talking to witnesses.

[kcvl]

NORMAN MAILER TO SALMAN RUSHDIE

author Normal Mailer

"So, my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced,
and may the muses embrace you."

author Salman Rushdie

Two months after the publication of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" in December 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared the book an offense to Islam and issued a fatwa that Rushdie should be killed. "Anyone who dies in the cause of ridding the world of Rushdie," the Ayatollah declared, "will be a martyr and will go directly to heaven." Rushdie, who was born in India but lived in England, was immediately placed under the protection of armed guards by the British government. The threat was genuine; bookstores that sold "The Satanic Verses were firebombed, riots ensued in areas where it was believed Rushdie was visiting, and two of the book's translators were stabbed -- one fatally -- by Muslim extremists. In the midst of it all, many prominent writers sent Rushdie letters of support and encouragement, including the following by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer.

(from "Letters of a Nation", edited by Andrew Carroll)

[kcvl]

'Machismo isn't that easy to wear'

Fistfights, headbutts, drunken brawls, attacks on feminism: Norman Mailer's reputation as a bruiser has overshadowed his life - and fuelled his writing. Oliver Burkeman meets the hard man of American letters

Tuesday February 5, 2002
The Guardian

"Would you like a drink?" asks Norman Mailer. There was a time when the way that you answered the question might have determined whether he would bother to carry on talking to you at all. Drinking - like writing, fighting and womanising - is a sport he has pursued with reckless force ever since he crashed on to the literary landscape at 25, and it has led to fistfights in the street, headbuttings of hostile reviewers, and a vicious clubbing from a policeman whose car he was trying to hail as a taxi. Well into his 60s, he stumbled drunk on to stages and television shows, all the time railing against feminism, friends and fellow writers; he famously helped sink his 1969 run at the New York mayoralty with a speech to unpaid campaign aides telling them they were "nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs" who should go fuck themselves.
Now, two days before his 79th birthday, in the sun-drenched living room of his redbrick house in Provincetown, Cape Cod, with its breathtaking view of sand dunes and the glistening Atlantic beyond, he hurriedly qualifies the question: "Coffee or tea?"

Mailer shares the house with his sixth wife, Norris, a painter and writer, though he has lived here with several of the others. Bright portraits decorate the walls and there are cut flowers everywhere, the remains of a birthday party they threw for a neighbour the night before. If you were to have a drunken brawl here, you would knock over tens of framed photographs of Mailer's nine children and countless grandchildren.

[chainsaw]

Obviously this guy mailer is suffering from:

a degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized especially by premature senile mental deterioration -- called Alzheimer's

From Merriam-Webster OnLine:

[Whilom]

I am ready to say there is a tolerable level to terror...

At last the Liberals unmask and come into the open: Terrorism is tolerable but (American) patriotism is not.

[willyboyishere]

Freud wouild call Mailer's rant projection . Mailer smoked too much dope in the postwar years, and he's never recovered. As he approaches 80 the wind has gone out of his sails, and he gears up for a last hurrah with the kind of "controversy" we expect from him. He's been a total waste for at least 40 years, always trying to keep up with his early notoriety.

[TheRedSoxWinThePennant]

I fear I am ready to say there is a tolerable level to terror...

hey norman I"ll give you a thousand dollars if you go down to ground zero on wed and repeat this speech

[Grig]

There are valid critisisms that could be made about the American people, and America itself, but none of them are to be found in this jerk's writing, and none of them are worse than the valid critisisms that can be made of any other nation.