Norman Mailer: The Pontius Pilate genius of hand-wringing Democrats
By Michael Moriarty
web posted November 28, 2005
Norman Mailer did it best. With his torturously self-involved, third person coverage of himself in the New Journalism of the post-Dead Kennedy era, the Harvard/Sorbonne Intellectual Supremacist painted a villainous America even before Dr. Strangelove was released to movie theatres in 1964. Basically, if Mailer could show how much pain he endured from the corrupt Democratic Party he endorsed, he would perform the act of contrition that would allow him to still point his finger at the Conservative White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as embodied in the character of General Cummings from his masterpiece The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. Since then, this finger-pointing dance of Mailer's has never stopped.
Meanwhile, creeping up behind his back, in his own party and now wearing the Liberal's imperial robes of primacy, William Clinton poses more of a threat to all the freedoms the leftist literati claim to defend. His is a more insidiously flowering evil than any right-wing hawk could possibly engender, even with two terms in the Oval Office.
Mailer, with his very closeted hero worship of France's Jean Genet and the Francophile James Baldwin, wanders drunkenly around his hotel room while bemoaning the fascism of Mayor Richard Daley Democrats. Mailer refuses to admit the existence of a cruel Leninist fist beneath the velvety glove of American Liberalism and the Democratic Party's good intentions.
John F. Kennedy's assassination was more than just the sins of father Joseph Kennedy being visited upon the sons. Kennedy's Catholicism stood directly in the way of the Democrats' aims of installing full Socialism in America. JFK wanted to get America out of Vietnam, but even with the bloody protests at the 1968 Chicago Convention, Hubert Humphrey was picked to carry on Lyndon B. Johnson's pro-Vietnam War policies.
To what extent mainstream America read Mailer's works is debatable. However, my Dartmouth College curriculum and Ivy League peer pressure mandated that I "stay with the times." This was why the name of Norman Mailer began to carry the weight of a Herman Melville (or at least of a Henry Miller) with me.
More would-be Whitman than Melville, Mailer sang his tortured arias of veiled contempt for almost everything in mainstream America for decades. He's Pontius Pilate wringing his hands over an Empire that has to move forward. The inner crises that Mailer is determined to share with us make the unspeakably bloody nature of ongoing Communist Revolution look humane. With Liberal Humanists like Mailer wielding such influence, it's no wonder the Big Bad Wolf in Granny's clothing eats American naiveté and simplicity alive in its own bed.
In the United States, nationalism is now a thing of the past. Internationalism rules the day.
Mailer's pained cries of "why doesn't America wake-up to its evil?" are worthy of John Wilkes Booth who took the same attitude into the Ford Theater and blew out the brains of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest U.S. President ever.
There are legions of American students whom Mailer led to intellectual hell. That alone demands retribution.
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law and Order, the mini-series Taken, and the TV-movie The 4400. He is now filming Pick Me Up, an episode of the Showtime TV series Masters of Horror, in Vancouver.
 Printer friendly version |
|