9/11: Speaking out: Norman Mailer (Part I)
mark dawkins
Norman Mailer, the distinguished American writer and polemicist, is known
for his controversial views on everything from wars and assassinations to
presidents. He talks frankly to Dotson Rader about the devastating effect
September 11 has had on the national psyche, how people in power failed
their country, and how greed may be the root of their problem - not
terrorism.
'There's just too much anger, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too
much identity crisis. And worst of all, too much patriotism. Patriotism in a
country that's failing has a logical tendency to turn fascistic'
DOTSON RADER: I was at home in my apartment on East 85th Street in
Manhattan when the first of the twin towers was hit by one of the planes.
Where were you on September 11?
NORMAN MAILER: I was in my house, up here in Provincetown [Massachusetts].
I remember a phone call, someone telling me to turn on the TV. While I was
watching I called my daughter Maggie. I have an apartment in Brooklyn
Heights, and she was staying there with a friend. You can see lower
Manhattan and the twin towers from it: you just look across the East
River. So Maggie had witnessed the first attack and was terribly affected by
it. Then, while on the phone, the second plane hit the other twin tower.
That was a considerable shock.
Why? Because the one thing TV always promises us is that, deep down,
what we see on television is not real. It's why there's always that subtle
numbness to TV. The most astonishing events, even terrifying events
nonetheless, have a touch of nonexistence when on the tube. It's why we
can watch everything on TV.
Now, there are exceptions. The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald was one; the
second plane striking the second twin tower; the collapse of the towers.
Those events suddenly get real, but TV is supposed to be a coat of
insulation between us and the horrific. When broken, the impact is enormous.
All the same, I didn't get a real sense of the impact of events of 9/11
until days later. Being up here in Provincetown, 300 miles away, the bit
of my blood that's still journalistic felt wistful. You know, I wish I'd
been in New York.
I had mixed feelings. Here were all these people dead, and New York was
injured, but I couldn't mourn the twin towers. They violated that
incomparable rising slope from the Battery up to Chambers Street. The
skyline of lower Manhattan used to look like the needles of the Alps.
Suddenly we had two huge teeth at the tip of Manhattan.
RADER: What do you think was the initial effect of 9/11 on our country?
MAILER: I think an unbelievable identity crisis hit just about everybody who
lived in Manhattan - and then it went out in widening circles until all
of America was affected.
Ever since the second world war, there has always been this tacit notion
that we Americans were impregnable. For 50 years we've had more in the way
of armament than the rest of the world, and the wars we have had, with the
notable exception of Vietnam and Korea, were easy, rather stupid wars, and
were never fought on our soil. There was a feeling that the country could
take care of anything and everything. Now, suddenly, this monumental symbol
of American capitalism, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, had been
destroyed. Plus an attack on the Pentagon. In all, over 3,000 people had
been killed - at the time we thought the count was 7,000 dead. And those
events brought on an identity crisis for America.
I'm fascinated by the term 'identity crisis', because when I was young I had
one myself. I went from being an unknown young man from Brooklyn to a
celebrity overnight. I was totally unequipped for it. As I said more than
once, it was as if there was somebody named Norman Mailer, but to meet him
people had to meet me first. That's the size of an identity crisis for one
person; now multiply it by millions.
RADER: Why did the FBI and CIA fail so badly?
MAILER: The day after 9/11, a journalist called from Sweden and asked: 'Why
did they fail?' The remark I made was to a degree facetious, but
nonetheless, thinking back, I'm not ashamed of it. I said: 'Well, you know,
we Americans are very bad at foreign languages.' It is hard to be an
effective spy if you don't speak the language. Simple as that.
Also the CIA, in particular, became very bureaucratic in the last 25 years
and the FBI was always so under Hoover's imprimatur. Ambitious people in the
CIA soon began to discover that spy work was not the place to be if you
wanted to have a good career in the agency. Better to install yourself in
the CIA bureaucracy. So, over time, the CIA came to depend on technology,
not on its human assets.
RADER: There was a bombing of the twin towers in 1993 that wounded and
killed people. Why did this earlier attack have so little effect, while 9/11
was so devastating to the American psyche?
MAILER: Because the first attack, while it did damage, did not seize the
American imagination. One of the problems always when you're talking about
the US is that there are those rare times when the country can almost be
seen as a creature, reacting with a unanimity that's staggering, especially
for a country that has so many odd and disassociated elements, enclaves and
regions - and is so large, diffuse and contradictory.
But in 1993 there was relative indifference to the attack on the twin
towers. It only affected New York. There was a lot of outrage in the city
but, once you crossed over to the mainland, people didn't give a damn, just
as people in New York don't necessarily wear sackcloth and ashes if there's
a dreadful flood in Kansas. Out of New York the general feeling could have
been: 'Well, New York's an ugly, rotten city and probably deserves it.'
While many people were somewhat outraged by the 1993 bombing, the terrorists
who did it were caught, and although there was a lot of havoc and people
were killed, it was not a catastrophe.
This attack on 9/11, however, dwarfed those proportions. The entire nation
saw the towers crumbling, saw bodies flying through the air, because men and
women chose to plunge into the implacable surface of the earth rather than
be roasted alive where they stood - all the elements of a nightmare.
Moreover, the terrorists had gotten away with it. They had chosen to die in
the attack. That was also staggering.
Other shocks that followed 9/11 also changed our notion of ourselves. The
corporate shocks - that some of the most powerful corporations had built
their fortunes on lies. And all the hideous stuff about the Catholic Church
and paedophilia. The church won't be the same in America for years to come.
I think of friends who are priests, and how difficult it is for them now to
walk the street and know that half the people looking at them are saying:
'I wonder if he ever had anything to do with a child.' It's no easy matter.
Part of the core of American self-sufficiency has always been the dedicated
Catholics in the working class. One of the reasons there's never been a
revolution in America since the civil war is precisely because of that
closeness of the church to the American working class.
So the American reaction to all this has been all too human, which is: we
have to protect what we are in danger of losing. And that reaction, I think,
accounts for the enormous popularity of President Bush through the year that
followed.
What we have today is the peculiar business of living with a president who
was not elected by a majority, and who gives every evidence when he's
speaking on his own that he cannot bear any question which takes longer than
10 seconds to answer. What saves him is that he keeps changing his mind a
little every week. It's as if somewhere early in life, Bush decided that in
talking to most Americans you don't have to reason, just try to press the
right buttons. Normally a president like him would become a laughing stock.
RADER: And he hasn't?
MAILER: No. Americans are wondering, why are we hated? Our complacency as
been weakened. Our sense that America is just the greatest country ever is
brought into doubt. We are torn. There's a reluctance to go against this
huge faith that the ship of the United States is impregnable and on the
right course, steering us into a great future. So every time you find
something to show that America may not be on target, anxiety is created in
average citizens. They feel like traitors to the grand design. That's the
reason they gathered around Bush. The fact that he had not been elected by a
majority became exactly his strength in a perverse way. Certainly after
9/11, the new majority could not for one moment contemplate the fact that
maybe Bush shouldn't even be in the White House. Why? Because now the
country had to be saved. A horror had come upon America, the horror of
knowing that we are so hated that there are people on Earth perfectly
willing not only to destroy us, but to immolate themselves. Goes right to
the biblical root. Didn't Samson pull the pillars down? So what you've got
now are all these Muslim Samsons.
Every American has to ask himself: 'Am I ready to die for my ideas?' Well,
there's a number of professional army men who are ready to do so. But for
what? To kill some Afghans, when they really can't know for sure who are the
good guys and who the bad? That doesn't help the identity crisis.
RADER: President Bush defines the world as white or black, good or evil.
There is no ambiguity with him. You're either with us in the war against
terror or you are with the terrorists who hate us. And President Bush says
the reason they hate us is because they are evil.
MAILER: That's the 10-second answer. He can use the word 'evil' 15 times in
three minutes. But evil is an exceptional element in human affairs. Evil
is - whether we like it or not - immensely interesting. And elusive. It is
not banal.
RADER: But that doesn't answer why we're so hated.
MAILER: Obviously to some degree it's envy. Some human emotions are simple.
We're also hated for more intrusive reasons. Corporate capitalism does have
this habit of taking over large parts of the economies of other countries.
Often we are the next thing to cultural barbarians. We don't always pay
attention to what we are trampling on. What intensifies the anger is how
often we are successful in these commercial invasions. You go into a
McDonald's in Moscow and there are marble floors. The Russian equivalent of
young corporate executives are phoning each other across the room on their
mobile phones. They're proud of that. I spoke once at Moscow State
University to a class that was studying American literature. One of the
students asked me: 'Is there anything in our economy that compares to
American economy?'
I said: 'Yes. Your McDonald's are better than ours.' And they loved it. They
were delighted. They had something they could do that was better than us. It
was as if Brooklyn College was playing the University of Nebraska in
football. The score had been 100-0, but then they kicked a field goal - it's
now 100-3. And the Brooklyn College stands went crazy. So, by the same
token, those are the people - and these are the young people in Moscow - who
are reacting positively to American corporate culture.
Now, think of all the other people in Russia who hate the very thought that
not only were they bankrupted by the United States, not only were they
betrayed by a communism that many of them had believed in, but now on top of
it they're being culturally invaded by these people with their
money-grubbing notions of food. And worse, the young love it. The young are
leaving them. So the hatred towards America intensifies.
Now take the West's cultural invasion into Muslim societies. Their reaction
is that Islam is endangered by modern technology and corporate capitalism.
They see everything in America as aiming to destroy the basis of Islam. The
huge freedom given to women in America is seen as an outrage by orthodox
Muslims. Our TV they find licentious in the extreme. They feel all that
Islam stands for is going to be eroded by our culture.
The core of the hatred of Muslims towards us is the fear that they're going
to lose their own people to western values. Maybe half the people in Muslim
countries want to be free of Islam. And so the ones who retain the old
religion become extreme in response. Many Muslims can put Christian
fundamentalists to shame by the intensity of their belief. There is one
fascinating element in Islam, which is the idea that all Muslims are equal
before God, a tremendous egalitarian concept. Like all religions, Islam ends
up being the perversion of itself in practice. Just as in Christianity,
compassion is supposed to be the greatest good, but its present exercise in
the world seems to be a study in military power and greed. In Islam, no
Muslim has the right to consider himself superior to another Muslim.What
happens in reality is that you have oppressive societies run for the
wealthy, with the poor getting less and less. There are tremendous
economic
inequalities in many a Muslim society. And tyrannical people in the seats of
power.
In Islam [there are] any number of countless movements to restore the
original religion. To restore the Koran with its beliefs. Now, of course,
the Koran, like the Old and New Testaments, has something in it for
everyone. You can run north, run south, blow east, you can blow west. But
there have been numerous revolutions within Islam over the centuries to
restore its original beliefs. There is no understanding of Islam until one
recognises that Muslims who are truly devoted feel they are in a direct
relationship with God. Their Islamic culture is the most meaningful
experience of their lives, and their culture is being infiltrated. They feel
the kind of outrage towards us that, let's say, a good Catholic would know
if a black mass were performed in his church.
There's no quick fix. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this is a war
between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for
human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a
century ago, two centuries ago, five centuries ago, and we've been going in
the wrong direction ever since. That the purpose of human beings on Earth is
not to obtain more and more technological power, but to refine their souls.
This is the deep divide that now goes on even with many Americans: what does
it profit me if I gain the entire world and lose my soul?
One thing must be said about technology. Live in a technological environment
long enough and you begin to feel as if your soul is frayed. A curious
process has been going on in America for many years. You could term it the
dumbing-down of Americans. The country seems to be getting more loutish
every year, as if we're reacting to a terribly uncomfortable time of coming
to grips with technology, which is essentially antipathetic to the part of
ourselves we love best - that creature who senses and can enjoy life. At
this point in existence we're being asked to substitute power for pleasure.
Technology says to you: 'Fellow, get it through your head, you're going to
have a little less pleasure from now on, but much more power.' That's
technology's credo. When you work in a technological environment, what do
you have under your fingertips? Plastic. We all know plastic doesn't feel as
good as wood or skin. Even metal offers more to the touch, but the aim of
technological society, ultimately, is to work everything over to plastic,
woods, metals, flowers; food if they can do it.
Take commercial aeroplanes, for example. Getting on one is always a hellish
experience. Not because you fear the plane is going to crash, but you are
put into a totally plastic environment, you are hermetically sealed, you are
engaged willy-nilly in the collective aura and psychic emissions of 60, 80
strangers in a confined space. So it is a specifically unpleasant
experience. And the airlines have been trying intermittently for the last 50
years to make the experience less unpleasant. The rest of the time they are
looking to reduce amenities and squeeze out more money.
RADER: The notion of American foreign policy being a cause of 9/11 has been
suggested by European and other critics. It is the observation that our own
policy has denied other nationalities hope and therefore made them our
enemies. This sort of criticism infuriates many Americans. To what degree
are we complicit in the causes of that hatred? How do we fix this thing?
MAILER: Like so many Americans, you really have this notion that there's got
to be a remedy for everything. Maybe there are problems that are not
solvable. Did you ever hear of tragedy? I would go so far as to say that
this century coming up is going to be the most awesome of all centuries to
contemplate. Because in my mind there is a real question whether humankind
will get to the end of it. We could destroy the world as we know it in such
a way that civilisation could be gone in 100 years. If not the globe itself.
Those potentialities are now there in a way they weren't before. They were
felt in the 20th century in the fear of a possible nuclear war. But
everybody was appalled by that possibility. We drew back in terror. Even the
warmongers took precautions so that no fool could ever get a finger on the
button.
Now it's almost as if we've gone into a new phase. There is a kind of
blindness to the ways in which the world could be destroyed bit by bit.
The indifference to the possibility of global warming is a very small
example of the kind of self-centredness of many of the power groups in the
world today. I expect their feeling is: 'Why should we carry the freight for
everybody else? After all, it's not certain that global warming is our
fault. So I'm not going to be the fall guy.' So speak the corporate men of
the oil world.
Or another modest example - extending life. Who's going to benefit from it?
It's going to be very expensive if it works. The very wealthiest people, the
ones who can never make enough money to satisfy themselves, will be the only
ones able to afford these procedures. That means we are doomed. Because we
all know enough about the wealthiest and most powerful people. We know their
terrible faults. We know them well. And extending their lives will extend
their strain.
RADER: Clearly, the towering symbol of that technological future is America.
MAILER: Look, America's an exceptional country. And I don't like being in a
position of always belabouring it. But on the other hand, it's so big, and
so powerful, and so vain, and so capable of doing marvellous things, that I
get angry when I see it being less than it can be.
When one suggests that these acts of terror, like 9/11, are America's fault,
there is a distinction lost. It assumes it's the fault of Americans. That
assumes implicitly that we all have the power to change America. We don't.
We're a democracy that has lost many of the essential elements. Nobody ever
said that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the
country earn 1,000 times more than the poorest. When the richest man earns
10 times more, even 50 times more, it's not hard to conceive of a reasonably
decent society. When you get to the point where it's 1,000 to 1, something
outrageous is going on. The people who feel this uneasiness probably make up
two-thirds of the country, but don't want to think about it because they
can't do a damn thing. We don't control our country.
I don't hate Americans, I don't hate the fundamental concepts of America: I
loathe the corporate power that's running this country now. Americans, many
people agree, can be the warmest humans you'll meet. But the notion that we
have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true. Was I ever able
to vote on how high buildings could or should be? No. Was I ever able to say
I don't want food frozen? No. Was I ever able to say I want aeroplanes to
have half as many seats? Nobody's ever been able to vote on anything that
really counts in terms of how our lives are led. And, of course, we see the
political process get more and more money-mechanised. We're on a power trip
in which only a small fraction of America manages to participate. We live in
a technological society we never voted for.
RADER: Ever since the events of 9/11, the Europeans have been complaining
about American unilateralism; that America doesn't consult with them; that
she bullies them; that she acts like an imperialist power. Is that true?
MAILER: Yes, it's got a great deal of truth in it.
RADER: Is there no patriotic defence here?
MAILER: We had a small parade in Provincetown on the Fourth of July. And a
rather nice-looking, pleasant fellow - he looked like a young liberal
lawyer - came up to me, smiled and tried to hand me a small American flag. I
looked at him and just shook my head. And he walked on. It wasn't an
episode. He came over with a half-smile and walked away with a half-smile.
But I was furious at myself afterwards for not saying, 'You don't have to
wave a flag to be a patriot,' because what bothers me terribly is the kind
of free-floating patriotism that's going on now in the United States. It is
a measure of our free-floating anxiety.
Take the British, for contrast. The British have a love of their country
that is profound. They can revile it, tell dirty stories about it, give you
dish on all the imperfects who are leading the country. But deep down, it's
their country. Their patriotism is deep.
In America it's as if we're playing musical chairs, and don't get caught
without a flag or you're out. Why do we need all this reaffirmation? It's as
if we're a 300lb man who's 7ft tall, superbly shaped, absolutely powerful,
and every three minutes he's got to reaffirm the fact that his armpits have
a wonderful odour. We don't need compulsive, self-serving patriotism. It's
odious. When you have a great country, it's your duty to be critical of it
so it can become even greater. But culturally, emotionally, we are growing
more loutish, arrogant and vain. We're not only losing a sense of the beauty
of democracy, but also of its peril.
Democracy is built upon a notion that is exquisite and dangerous. It
virtually states that if the will of the populace is freely expressed, more
good than bad will result. When America began, it was the first time in the
history of civilisation that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded
on this daring notion: that there is more good than bad in people. Until
then, the prevailing assumption had been that the powers at the top knew
best. So I would say we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because
we've been a great democracy doesn't mean we're going to continue to be one.
Democracy is existential. It changes all the time.
You don't take it for granted. It is always in peril. We all know how
individually anyone can go from being a relatively good person to a bad one.
We can all become corrupted or embittered. We can be swallowed by our
miseries in life, become weary and give up. All those things. That's the
peril. That's why I detest this totally promiscuous patriotism. Wave a
little flag and become a good person? Ugly. You take a ruling monarchy for
granted, or a fascist state. You have to. That's the given. But not
democracy.
RADER: What [to most Americans] appears to imperil democracy itself isn't
coercive patriotism or technological tyranny, it is the scourge of terrorism.
MAILER: I hate terrorism, I loathe it. Since I believe in reincarnation, I
think the character of your death is tremendously important to you. One
wants to be able to meet one's death with a certain seriousness. To me, it
is horrible to be killed without warning, because you can't prepare yourself
in any last way for your next existence. So it contributes to absurdity.
Terrorism's ultimate tendency is to make life absurd. And the element in
terrorism that I find profoundly offensive is that it's irrational.
When I consider the 3,000 people who died in the twin-towers disaster, it's
not the ones who were good fathers, and good mothers, and good daughters,
and good brothers, and good husbands or sons, that I mourn most. It's the
ones who came from families that were less happy. When a good family member
dies, there's a tenderness and a sorrow that can restore life to those who
are left behind. But when you have someone who dies who's half loved and
half hated by his own family, whose children, for example, are always trying
to get closer to that man or to that woman and don't quite succeed, then the
after-effect is obsessive. Those are the ones who are hurt the most. I won't
call them dysfunctional families, but it's into the less successful families
that terrorism bites most deeply. Because there is that terrible woe that
one can't speak to the dead parent, or the dead son or daughter, or dead
mate, one can't set things right any more. One was planning to, one was
hoping to, and now it's lost for ever. That makes it profoundly obsessive.
RADER: Would you define terrorism as wickedness, as an evil?
MAILER: To me there's a great difference between doing evil and being
wicked. I don't use the words interchangeably. People who are wicked are
always raising the ante without knowing quite what they're doing. Most of us
are wicked to a degree. Most of us who are game-players or adventurous any
way at all are wicked, because we do raise the ante all the time without
knowing what the results might be. We're mischievous, if you will.
Evil, however, is to have a pretty good idea of the irreparable damage
you're going to do, and then proceed to do it. In that sense, yes, terrorism
is evil. However, it's worth trying to understand terrorism in the context
by which the terrorists see it. They feel they're gouging out an octopus
that's looking to destroy their world. And this despite the fact that the
individual terrorist might be violating every single rule in Islam, as well.
He might, for example, be a drug addict, or booze a lot, but at the end he
still believes he will find redemption through immolation. He is one small
shard in the spiritual wreckage in the world. After all, in America there
are a great many people on the right who are going around saying: 'Let's
kill all the Muslims, let's simplify the world.' You think Islam has a
special purchase on terrorism?