Subject: 9/11: Speaking out: Norman Mailer (Part II)
mark dawkins
MAILER: Wait a minute. Cult of death? You're going too far. For every Muslim
who believes in your cult of death, thousands don't. People who are ready to
sacrifice their lives form a very special group. They don't need big
numbers.
RADER: But millions cheer them in the streets.
MAILER: Oh, it's easy to cheer. I can cheer athletes who score winning
touchdowns when I don't know the first thing about them. I'm cheering for an
idea. That's one thing. It's another to shed your own blood. There's a gulf
between the two.
I'm sure they [Muslims] have as many sons of bitches and hardheads as we
have, and maybe more. They probably have more, in that they have lousier
living conditions and they're under more tension. Muslims also bear a huge
sense of shame because they were a superior civilisation around AD1200,
1300, the most advanced culture then, and now they lag behind. There is a
deep sense of failure among them. Think of those periods in your life when
you felt you were a failure, and really recall the bitterness,the anger, the
disturbance.
Multiply that by the followers of a faith; that gives some sense of how bad
it can get.We in the West have this habit of looking for solutions. Part of
the spirit of technology is to assume that there's always a solution to a
problem, or something damn close to one. There may be no solution this time.
This may be the beginning of an international cancer we cannot cure. What's
in the mind of a cancer cell? It's not unlikely that the basic desire is to
kill as many cells and invade as many organs as it can. So, too, the greater
number of people the terrorists can wipe out, the happier they're going to
be. Before you feel too righteous and outraged, however, let me ask: 'Did
Harry Truman shiver in his bed at the thought that 100,000 people had been
killed in Hiroshima and another 100,000 in Nagasaki two days later, or was
he proud that he had won the war?'
RADER: Why did the British respond immediately with such generosity to
American distress and vulnerability after 9/11 when other allies, like the
French, were less forthcoming?
MAILER: There are superficial answers I can give you. One is that the
British have lived closer and longer with terrorism than the French. France
did suffer terrorists during the bad years of the Algerian war, but the
British had a much more difficult situation with Palestine. In fact, the
roots of a resurgence of a certain amount of anti-semitism in Britain can be
traced back to British soldiers being killed by Jewish terrorists like the
Stern gang in the early 1950s. And then there are the long troubles in
Northern Ireland. Bitterness about Irish terrorism often got very intense. I
remember the English feeling against Irish Catholics in London years ago. It
was very strong.
Another element, of course, is the common language we share. That is a
profound bond. If you live with the English language, you love it. And the
English have more right to enjoy that language than we do. Their literature
enriches more of their people than ours does.
RADER: What I also sense about the British is they have a feeling toward us
that is almost familial. When the outside world hits us, they're not about
to join in with everybody else in jumping on us.
MAILER: Well, there is a final bond, don't forget, which is that if things
ever got bad enough, the two countries would probably join. That would be
interesting, yes.
RADER: Among the unhappy results of 9/11 has been the extra legal detention,
without access to counsel, of thousands of suspects in the US and the
imprisonment of 'enemy combatants'. More importantly, unique in our history,
is the creation of a single, unified national police/security bureaucracy,
the new Department of Homeland Security, headed by a cabinet secretary, a
policing mechanism through which one man can potentially control the entire
nation. This consolidation of police power, with a budget in excess of $30
billion and as many as 170,000 employees, was created without any real
political debate. What do these post-9/11 developments portend for the
future of our democracy?
MAILER: Because of this intense feeling I have about the fragility of
democracy, I've been predicting one or another kind of totalitarianism for
America over a good many years now. And I've been wrong every time. If I
were to go back and read old interviews I'd be embarrassed. About 10 years
ago, I remember saying that I was happier now than I used to be because,
having a profoundly pessimistic nature, but discovering I was wrong a lot of
the time, it has made it easier over the years. All the same, here I go
again. I'm still concerned. They speak of pre-cancerous conditions in
bodies, and I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now. I expect
we'll muddle through, despite homeland security, provided there are no more
large disasters. There are pro-democratic forces in America that assert
themselves when you don't expect them to.
But the situation is serious. If we have a depression or fall into desperate
economic times, I don't know what will hold the country together. 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, just as too
much sentimentality will corrupt compassion. Fascism in America is not going
to come with a party. Nor with uniforms. But there will be a curtailing of
liberties. Homeland security has put the machinery in place. The people who
are running the country, in my opinion, simply don't have the character or
wisdom to fight for the concept of freedom if things get very bad here. And
by that I mean horrors: dirty bombs, terrorist attacks on a huge scale,
virulent diseases. The notion that you're going to have your freedom saved
by people who work for security agencies is curious at best. They're on a
one-way street.
Anything bad is very bad for them. So they're going to do their utmost to
restrict the freedom of people during critical situations. In the final
analysis, democracy is inimical to security. Americans have to be willing to
say at a certain point that we're going to take some terrorist hits without
panicking, that freedom is more important to us than security.
Let's suppose 10 people are killed by a small bomb on a street corner in
some city in America. The first thing to understand is that there are 280m
Americans. So, there's one chance in 28m you're going to be one of those
people. By such heartless means of calculation, the 3,000 deaths in the twin
towers came approximately to one mortality for every 90,000 Americans. Your
chances of dying if you drive a car are 1 in 7,000 each year. We seem
perfectly ready to put up with automobile statistics.
RADER: What you are saying implies there is a tolerable level of terror, and
we have to accept it.
MAILER: That's what I fear I am ready to say. There is a tolerable level to
terror. Let's relieve ourselves of the idea that we have to remove all
terror. Look what goes on in Israel. So far as I know, Israelis are not
fleeing the country en masse. They've learnt to live with the anxiety, and
their numbers are a good deal worse than ours per capita.
What scared the hell out of me was a recent poll indicating that half the
people in America are willing to accept a certain curtailment of their
liberties in return for more security. If, already at this point, 50% of the
people are ready to give up some of their liberties in return for more
security, then what's going to happen if something truly bad ensues? Our
belief that Americans are free individuals has suffered erosion in the last
10 years from too much stock-market greed. You know, Marx and Jesus Christ
do come together on one fundamental notion: money leaches out all other
values. Those 10 years have done a lot of damage to the country's character.
It's not as nice a place.
RADER: You're talking the Bill Clinton years.
MAILER: Yes. Well, I'm not an unbridled champion of Bill Clinton. In fact,
one of the things I've always found least attractive about Tony Blair was
his toadyish attitude toward Clinton. If you're searching for a good big
brother, don't look for Bill. On the other hand, if you're drawn to a very
attractive, exciting, immensely selfish big brother, then do go to him.
RADER: The Department of Homeland Security was created by George Bush
specifically in response to 9/11 and the perceived incompetence of the
intelligence community, especially the CIA, which his father once headed. Do
you think he will be comfortable with what he has created?
MAILER: Quite comfortable. Why wouldn't he be? What are his personal gifts?
First, he's fairly good-looking. Not outrageously, but good enough so that
the average American woman and man can find him attractive. That's his No 1
gift. The other element is that George Bush is very, very good at prepared
speeches. He's studied enunciation, articulation, emphasis, stress, and all
the other qualities you need for a speech, provided it's presented on a
prompter and he's gone through it a few times so he can read it. And he's a
college fraternity president, essentially.
He's also a bit of a civilised psychopath. They have a very good sense of
the present. Mind you, I'm a bit of one too. I rise to the moment, and get
into a lot of trouble for doing so. Many of us have a bit of it in us. The
way I define a civilised psychopath is that while they are not personally
violent, their sense of the present is much more intense than their grasp of
the past or future. Not to put him down again, but Bill Clinton had a hint
too much. Can you give me a better explanation for his personal troubles?
Ronald Reagan was a goody-goody with a good deal of the very civilised
psychopath in him. In his case it was all sublimated into politics and
soundbites and lies.
It's very hard to become president of the United States without having that
element in your make-up. Jimmy Carter, who's a wonderful, decent man,
suffered in his presidency terribly because he didn't have enough.Since
George W is not at all a profound student of politics itself, he is wise
enough to depend on his people. His psychopathology gives him a sharp sense
of when other people are trying to bullsh him. I would guess he can tell
when one of his experts knows what he's talking about and when he's only
pretending he knows.
So President Bush makes his decisions in opposite fashion to Bill Clinton.
He does the exact opposite of Bill Clinton. Clinton made a point of
surrounding himself with people who might be 90% as intelligent as himself,
but never his equal, and never, never more intelligent. Clinton, therefore,
was always the brightest guy in his circle. Whereas Bush is smart enough to
know that he couldn't possibly do the same, or the country would be run by
morons. So, in contrast, he looked to get bright people around him -
Rumsfeld, Chaney, Rice, Powell, able people with strong ideas who are not
necessarily all in agreement. And when they start arguing, Bush has an ear
for which is most incisive at a given moment.
He can pick up the hint of the inauthentic in a seasoned expert's voice. I'm
speaking as a novelist now. Bush has a bullsh-- detector. That's one of the
reasons he changes his mind so often. Different experts have days when
they're better than they are on other days. And so on a given morning he
listens to Expert A, and that voice sounds the best. Three days later,
Expert D comes in better. The result is that he's always tweaking his> policies.
His parents offer a more patrician quality, but he didn't want that for
himself. He knew it wouldn't play in Texas. He has now carried that snobbery
of the fraternity president up to his global assessments. 9/11 gave him
legitimacy. He didn't earn it. He depends on his luck.
RADER: Let's return to the question of whether in post-9/11 America there
exists the threat of a potential totalitarian state.
MAILER: All right. In a country where values are collapsing - as I keep
saying - patriotism becomes the handmaiden to totalitarianism. The country
itself becomes the religion. If you look at it on a scale of religious
fervour, consider our present cast: bullies, thugs, idiots and all these
good, decent people who are filled with love. They all love America. Love it
because America has become the substitute for religion. And to love your
country indiscriminately means that critical distinctions begin to go. But
democracy depends upon these distinctions. Simple devotion to your country
just because it is your country has to be, finally, irrational. Why is the
place that you were born more important than other places?
Go back to the British love of their country, which strikes me as better
founded. I believe that's due to the close and intimate texture of their
history. To know your history is to be nourished, not just by all the
positive things that Great Britain did, but all the bad and ugly things as
well. A good British man has a certain sense of the complexity of life. They
have memory in a way we don't. That is the scariest single thing about
American democracy to me - we don't have roots the way other countries do.
Relatively, we are without deep traditions. So the transition from democracy
to totalitarianism could happen rather quickly. There could be fewer
impedimenta here, those brakes and barriers that true conservatives usually
count upon. But without the stops and locks, a nation can swing from one
extreme to the other.
Look at our situation. Virtually everyone who came here was a reject from
their original country. It was certainly true of my people. The majority of
the immigrants were not winners. But they were ready to try something new.
That's why I don't want to call them losers. And many thrived. And did not
look back. But in the act of always looking forward, few traditions> survived.
RADER: Perhaps 9/11 was so shocking because we'd become a far less serious
people. Superficial. Self-indulgent. We got silly. We were serious about
money and acquiring stuff, yet most other things that took any thought or
required any passion bored us. So 9/11 brought a deadly, unavoidable
seriousness back into our public and private lives.
MAILER: Yes, and we're less equipped now to be serious. That's my fear.
Because we want palliatives, to be told how to live. And there are plenty of
powerful people around who are willing to tell us. The right wing of
America's in an ongoing, still-controlled rage, but they want to take over.
So 9/11 was a huge boon to the right wing, the military and security
organisations.
RADER: The 'war on terrorism', as President Bush christened it, the
government seems to believe will go on indefinitely. Do you agree?
MAILER: It's not a war, it's a police action. It is the most perfect 'war' a
country like ours can have, because nobody's bothered by it. We can feel
virtuous about being at war but not have to suffer directly for it. An ideal
condition. All the advantages of war, few of the liabilities, other than the
future taxes we'll have to pay. And the whole humungous question of
security.
RADER: Nevertheless, whether you call it a war or a police action, [doesn't
it] have to be won?
MAILER: Well, it depends on the pervasiveness of terrorism. If terrorism
grows, there's no real way to protect against it. If I were a military man,
I suspect I would look at it as if I were facing viral wars on the health of
the public. Where's the cure for a virus? Is there one? The hard answer may
be that the cure for a virus is that the virus wears itself out. But if it
does go on and on, it can destroy the body politic. In any case, there are
many viruses besides terrorism attacking us. Greed may end up doing more
damage to the American psyche, and the American economy, than terrorists. We
just don't know their future strength. So far there's been only one large
attack in the United States - 9/11 - but the future may call on us to learn
to live like the Israelis. Obviously, they hate terrorism for good cause. At
its worst it can leave many half-demented. The majority learnt to live with
it because finally the chance of stopping any attempt at any given moment is
small.
RADER: The argument is advanced that Muslim terrorists hate us because we
support Israel and if we would only change our foreign policy, the terror
would stop.
MAILER: It is in the interests of the Arab nations to have Israel as the
great villain. Although I'm Jewish, bone and blood, I'm not a patriotic Jew
in the sense of Israel right or wrong, my Israel. I don't have those
feelings. But what I do think is that at the end of the Holocaust the real
example of how cruel, how definitely inhuman, the people are at the top of
each Arab nation, is that they could have said: 'Here's a modest piece of
land - let these people have it. It's not going to hurt us. We could even
use them.' They didn't. They chose to make them the enemy.
I suspect these other Arab nations are now using the Palestinians and
secretly despise them. High Saudi officials might well be content that the
Israelis have a Palestinian problem because if they didn't, the Saudis
would. To some extent the Palestinians, because of their unique history, are
perhaps less malleable than other Arab peoples to the various Arab and
Muslim establishments. For one thing, they're not even all Islamic. It's a
very difficult mixture for countries like Saudi Arabia to deal with
directly. So the Arab leaders have this wonderful ploy where they use the
Palestinians as their reason to hate Israel, when in fact they see Israel as
their safeguard against the Palestinians.
RADER: You've been critical of America and you've also spoken about American
generosity. You fought in the second world war for this country, and then
you opposed another war, Vietnam, because you love this country. What is it
about this country that you love?
MAILER: The freedom that I've had in my life. Who has ever had the
opportunities I've had, the extraordinary freedom to be able to think the
way I think? For better or worse, I had the great good luck that very few
people have, to be a writer. I've had more time to think than most people.
I've had that advantage, that luxury. I can hardly hate the country. I don't
want to make this a sentimental journey, but I have been treated very well.
You know, I once attacked J Edgar Hoover on television in 1959 when he was
still director of the FBI. I said he'd done more damage to America than
Joseph Stalin. Years later, under the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained
my FBI file and 80 pages of it were devoted to my remarks on that one TV
show. Most of the FBI comments were on the order of: 'Oh well, Mailer is
just an arrogant fool.' Yet the fact is, no matter how angry those people
were, they didn't take me off in chains.
I have had great freedoms here in America, and I don't want to see them lost
to the people who come after me. But, I repeat, freedom is as delicate as
democracy. It has to be kept alive every day. So yes, I do love this
country. If our democracy is the noblest experiment in the history of
civilisation, it may also be the most singularly vulnerable one.
When you scratch an American, he always says: 'This is God's country.' Well,
I would suggest that the US is God's most extreme and heartfelt experiment.
So I lean towards thinking that the best explanation for 9/11 is that the
devil won a great battle that day.
As if part of the devil's aesthetic acumen was to bring it off exactly as if
we were watching the same action movie we've been seeing for years. That may
be at the core of the immense impact that 9/11 had on America. It was as if
our movies were coming off the screen and walking into life, chasing us down
the canyons of the city. That makes sense to me, that the devil pulls off
such a coup. I'm a great believer in Ockham's razor: the simplest
explanation that covers a set of facts is bound to be the correct
explanation. If you can tell me why God wanted 9/11 to succeed, then I'll
give way. But until then let me rely on the supposition that this was the
devil's big day.
Source: Sunday Times.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-403507,00.html