[Peace-discuss] Good comment on Norman Mailer...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[...because it's not really about Mailer.  But I don't know if it's 
right.  --CGE]

...in 1975, Mailer wrote about Vietnam:

     "The resistance of the left in America broke the will of the 
establishment to wage a serious war. One by one, influential members of 
the military-industrial complex and the higher enclaves of finance came 
to decide that the war would wreck America morally, economically, and 
finally technologically. They did not decide this because secretly they 
admired the militancy or ideology or principles of the left. They 
detested all that. But about the time students began to destroy valuable 
equipment and burn university buildings -- even a minority of students 
in a minority of universities -- the perspective was clear. Those 
students were America's future technological experts. (I obviously 
include the soft technologies of communications, sociology, et al., 
which center around social planning.) So members of the establishment 
came to recognize each by himself -- will a novelist ever capture their 
long dark night? -- that America could never run its industrial and 
media complex if even a fraction of its brightest people were determined 
at sabotage."

And so in recent years, Mailer both stopped drinking while writing and 
set aside much of his battling -— despite minor incidents with the likes 
of Wolfe -— in the service of politics, because what he had written 
about Vietnam and its protests was not going to be true for this war. 
More and more, he and his former enemies, particularly Vidal, found 
common ground in their believe that the United States was beginning to 
exhibit nearly all the hallmarks of fascism in its operations both 
internationally and at home. Less fun than literary dust-ups, to be 
sure, and yet.  --Choire Sicha

http://gawker.com/news/and-now-he.s-dead/norman-mailer-is-dead-321257.php