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Mailer and me

Taki

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

New York

Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since the second world war, a country full of ‘50-storey high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses’. He told me he was opposed to the notion of an American empire because of the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful Americans corporations. ‘There are no cathedrals left for the poor â” only 16-storey urban-renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a left-conservative as a left-medievalist.’

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ILikeBush

November 15th, 2007 9:44pm

Unless Mr. Mailer said the Iraq War is America's worst foreign policy blunder in history, it is inappropriate to lead with your own stupid opinion.

Jay Wilson

November 16th, 2007 11:24am

Thanks for puncturing my sense that Mailer was only an empty act ( to a half-empty house). I am still not entirely convinced, but you actually sound like the guy could make sense at times. I am happy, for his son's sake, that somebody thinks this. I also went in the ring with my youngest son a couple of times and he helped me to remember what it was I didn't like about my five year school boxing career - getting hit in the head. Maybe Norman and Muhammad Ali have more in common than you realize. JW