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An Evening with Norman Mailer and George W. Bush
By Sarah Stodola
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Last night I saw Norman Mailer speak at Barnes & Noble in Union Square in promotion of his new book on writing, The Spooky Art. When it was over, I hopped on the subway and walked through the door of my apartment just in time to watch the State of the Union Address be delivered by President Bush. This, my friends, was shaping up to be an evening of contrasts.
Before Mailer arrived, I sat for nearly an hour (you have to get to these things really early if you hope to snag a seat) trying to read Notes From Underground for the second time in three months – for two different classes. I was distracted, however, by a couple of conversations unfolding around me, the most notable one being between a man and a woman sitting behind me. I listened to them speak of their careers for several minutes, finally becoming curious enough to turn and pretend to be looking for someone behind me, then sneak a couple of glances at them before turning back around. I was surprised to see that they were both over fifty, for they had young voices, and they spoke so enthusiastically about their careers. I didn’t know that non-youths did that.
Mailer will turn eighty on Friday, and he did look a bit feeble as he walked down the side aisle and up onto the stage. As soon as he opened his mouth, though, it became clear that this man has lost nothing intellectually. He opened with some questions for the audience, calling for a show of hands of those audience members who were writers or “would-be writers” (his phrase). I didn’t raise my hand, even though I am a writer. I suppose I didn’t want to give myself up to the possibility of being classified as a “would-be.” Then he asked for a show of hands of those who wanted to have nothing to do with writing. Again, I kept my hands in my lap. Then he asked if there was anyone who did not know what "first person" and "third person" meant. One person raised her hand, but he missed it, declaring, “You all know what they are? I don’t believe you!” And then he explained the difference and began reading from his new book – a very nice passage on the advantages and limitations of writing in both the first and third persons.
A couple of hours later, George W. Bush made his entrance with considerably
more hoopla, spending at least three or four minutes shaking hands with
a bunch of eager onlookers as if he were a young athlete returning to
his hometown with an Olympic medal, and “wearing a blue tie,”
as Tom Brokaw seemed to think it was important to note.
When he finally made it to the podium, Bush launched into his usual sentimental rhetoric, explaining that we “serve our country in a time of great consequence.” He’s gotten better at this speech-making stuff over the past couple of years, I will certainly acknowledge. Now, at least, one gets the sense that he has some sort of grasp of what he’s talking about. Before, I always felt that his staff had made him memorize a bunch of words and phrases that he’d never heard before.
Mailer read for a few minutes, then opened up the floor to questions.
The first questioner asked Mailer about how he was quoted as saying something
about Iraq and China and Greece and Rome, and could Mr. Mailer please
explain what he meant by that quote. Mailer answered that the question
was a bit off topic, and that he wanted the night to be about writing,
not politics and war, but he would answer this one question anyway. He
went on to say that the war didn’t make any sense to him because
whether Iraq has all of these weapons or not, if they ever used them,
that would be the end of Iraq, and they know it, and so why would they
ever use them? He also said that anyone who used the word “evil”
fifteen times per minute was not to be trusted, just as a drug dealer
who says he “makes a fair cut” fifteen times per minute is
not to be trusted. Imagine Bush using such an analogy!
Bush covered most of the predictable topics, including the economy, national
security, healthcare, abortion, the environment, taxes, and education.
He also proposed that America designate $15 billion to alleviating the
AIDS epidemic in Africa (which, for me, was a surprise), and $1.2 billion
to “developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.”
He saved his Iraq bit for last, perhaps hoping that viewers would be sick of hearing him talk by then and nod no matter what he said, just to get the thing over with. Bush claimed that the purpose of this war effort is to achieve “the end of terrible threats to the civilized world.” He painted a picture of a raving, scheming, madman in Iraq. He made a lot of accusations that I have never heard or seen substantiated. He said nothing about oil. Oil clearly has nothing to do with it - he’s building oil-free cars, remember?
The moods of these two events didn’t actually feel much different.
While Bush was speaking to a bipartisan audience, the applause of the
Republicans gave the speech an air of celebration and gratitude, at least
in half of the chamber. Similarly, Mailer’s audience showed an overabundance
of appreciation, nearly giving him a standing ovation before he even found
his seat on the stage. Both speakers had to pause periodically in order
to wait out applause – although Bush’s applause was clearly
more obligatory than Mailer’s. If one didn’t know who George
W. Bush or Normal Mailer were, though, it may have been difficult to distinguish
at a glance which event was literary and which one was political.
If one was listening to them speak, though, then telling the literary from the political would have been a no-brainer. Literary types generally despise sentimentality, and I imagine that Mailer is no exception. Politicians, on the other hand, never have seemed to be able to get enough of their own thinly imagined, schmaltzy expressions. While Mailer made such statements as “the odds against the novel have become greater over the years,” and had a wealth of observations to provide in support, Bush made statements like, “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity,” a statement which no one can accept as true without a leap of faith, because there simply is no basis of fact behind it. Here we have reality vs. mysticism, fact vs. myth, supportable statement vs. wishful thinking. Saying that God bestowed this gift on America while other countries suffer is like the Bucs thanking God for helping them win the Super Bowl. But to say that the great epic novel has become harder to write because the world in which we live has become more complicated and more fragmented - well, that just makes sense. These are both only one example of each speaker’s words, and they aren’t really comparable statements. But that’s just the point – these two men don’t talk the same way.
Mailer, for whatever reason, made me trust him, while Bush made me skeptical. Perhaps Mailer has more room to be honest, because things he says are not matters of national security. But Bush just has this expression on his face – the same expression that my father gets when he’s telling a story he knows isn’t true just to tease me. That expression tips me off to the fact that I’m not supposed to be taking any of this seriously. When Mailer doesn’t want to answer a question, he just says so – like when an audience-member asked him which of today’s novels he thinks are best, and which of his own novels he thinks is best. Mailer answered that he once wrote a book about his contemporaries, and he pissed a lot of people off, and it turned out that he was wrong about a lot of the things he wrote, so he didn’t want to make such statements publicly anymore. And the same went for his own novels, “I might change my mind tomorrow,” he said, and then something to the affect of, “and as soon as an author names one of his books as his favorite, the literary Ph.D.s go crazy.” Bush could never have the luxury of answering a question in such a manner (nor would he likely possess the wit to).
I didn’t like everything Mailer said (and I certainly didn’t like everything Bush said), but I did trust him, and enjoy hearing him speak, and appreciate him. I couldn’t wait for him to show up and start talking. With the State of the Union Address, on the other hand, I sat at my kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and wondered how many times in the next half an hour I would have to hear the word “evil.”
Then,
as Bush's speech began, I started to feel pretty good about my career
choice.
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Sarah Stodola is the managing editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at sstodola@methree.net.
© 2003 Me Three