Why Are We at War? Page 6
A good Englishman has a certain sense of the complexity of his national life. Even if he rides to hounds. The British 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 quickly. There could be fewer impediments 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.
DOTSON RADER: Is there anything about this country that you love dearly?
NORMAN MAILER: Freedom. 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? No, the best thing in America is that freedom. I had the great good luck that very few people have, to be a writer and earn a relatively independent income by the age of twenty-five. It didn’t continue to be always that simple, but generally speaking, 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 had done more damage to America than Joseph Stalin. Years later, under the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained my FBI file (which came to three hundred pages) and eighty pages of it were devoted to my remarks on that one TV show. Most of the FBI’s comments were on the order of, Oh well, Mailer is just an arrogant fool. Yet the fact is that 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 of our existence. So, yes, I do love this country. If our democracy is the noblest experiment in the history of civilization, 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 United States is God’s most extreme and heartfelt experiment. So I lean toward thinking that the best explanation for 9/11 is that the Devil won a great battle that day. Yes—Satan as the pilot who guided those planes into that ungodly denouement.
DOTSON RADER: It’s cinematic, isn’t it?
NORMAN MAILER: Yes. 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 had been looking at for years. That may be at the core of the immense impact 9/11 had on America. Our movies came off the screen and chased us down the canyons of the city. It makes sense to me that the Devil pulls off such a coup. I’m a great believer in Occam’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.
TO NORRIS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank David Ebershoff, Veronica Windholz, and Judith McNally for their quick and incisive contributions to this book.
By Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The Deer Park—A Play
The Armies of the Night
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Of a Fire on the Moon
The Prisoner of Sex
Maidstone
Existential Errands
St. George and the Godfather
Marilyn
The Faith of Graffiti
The Fight
Genius and Lust
The Executioner’s Song
Of Women and Their Elegance
Pieces and Pontifications
Ancient Evenings
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Harlot’s Ghost
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
The Gospel According to the Son
The Time of Our Time
The Spooky Art
Why Are We at War?
Modest Gifts
The Castle in the Forest
On God (with J. Michael Lennon)
Mind of an Outlaw
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.