"A really great novel does not have something to say.  It has the ability to stimulate the mind and spirit of the people who come in contact with it." -- Norman Mailer

January 30, 2003, 1:00 A.M. -- A really great novel doesn't have anything to say?   You mean like Huckleberry Finn?  Or Les Miserables?  Or Moby Dick?  Or Great Expectations?

So on the program tonight Norman Mailer and Charlie Rose agreed the real danger of Bush taking Iraq is if he tries to recreate democracy there.  Both agreed that this is arrogance, and just can’t be done. You can’t push democracy on people.  It’s too subtle an idea.  Only people like Norman and Charlie, intellectual giants, really understand democracy.

The reason why these statements prove that both of these men should be put in the care of adults is that both are aware that there was a Second World War.  Norman was actually in the Second World War, as a soldier, and served in the Philippenes under General Douglas MacArthur, so even more than Charlie can be assumed to have heard about a place called Japan. 

He may have later spent too much time in the vicinity of French intellectuals,  which is a good excuse for being an idiot, but I cannot believe that having read Clavell's Shogun (or watched the film on television) he is unaware that Japan was a monarchical society (very different from a democracy)  for a really, really long time.  They had an heriditary emperor with the power of life and death over all his people right up to the end of WWII.  Then, after we defeated them in that war, a fellow who Mailer apparently never heard of even though he was in his army, one General Douglas MacArthur, became the boss of Japan and turned it into a democracy in about  three years.  It still is, more than half a century later, in fact.  One of the strongest democracies on Earth.

So, you see, clear historical evidence from Mailer’s own youth, evidence which took place right in front of his own face, has somehow been missed by him.  It’s just that kind of thing which causes some people to mistake the genius of Norman Mailer for so much dryrot between his ears.  That is the opinion I came away with after hearing him speak in Portland a couple of decades back.  Everything he said labeled him as the intellectual and political equal of Barbra Streisand.  That is the opinion I have after hearing him talk to Charlie, tonight.   The man is a liberal airhead, as arrogant and stupid as Ted Kennedy, as intellectually vapid and self-absorbed as Hillary Clinton and as useless and unaware of his surroundings as Robert Byrd. 

During this January 30 interview, Charlie said, “You say what you want to do is write a great novel, but also say that so far you haven’t.  Why haven’t you?”

It is a shame I wasn’t there, because I could have solved the mystery for both of them.  Mailer hasn’t written a great novel because, just like Charlie Rose, he didn’t notice that Douglas MacArthur turned a feudal society thousands of years old into a democracy in three years.

Not knowing things like that are credentials if you want to be a famous interviewer for PBS.  But if you want to write a great novel, you have to notice things like that.

And Mailer calls Bush stupid?  At first hearing, it seems like an insult.  But, when you think of it, being called stupid by a man as brainless as this is probably the highest praise Bush ever got. 

And people wonder why I say that PBS is an intellectual desert, just over there to the Left.

(LL)

© 2002 Oregon Magazine  The photo is a hotlink to its source, a Mailer bio page.