An honest liberal

Solid Nixon supporters

It's been ages. It's not that I don't have plenty that I want to say, plenty that I want to write about, but, for a change, I am trying to concentrate on one thing at a time. And the one thing that I must concentrate on is my novel. This novel concerns, among other things, the changes that have taken place in New York City in the decades in which I have lived here. I have experienced the transformation, but I was not here in the bad old days of the 1970s. And since one of the characters in my novel came to Manhattan in the late 1960s and experienced the 1970s, I have been reading writers from that time. One of them is Norman Mailer.

When I came to New York in the early 1980s, Mailer was still a vivid presence, but for all kinds of reasons I did not read much of his work. His themes at that time did not interest me, e.g., The Executioner's Song or Ancient Evenings. And then there was his defense of a criminal who then turned around and murdered someone. I recall, however, that I liked his take on feminism: The Prisoner of Sex. He seemed, however, a man who was wasting his talents on too many things, who was too happy to have his photo in the newspaper, to be quoted on the subject of the day. He seems an object lesson in how not to be a really great writer.

An example of how good Mailer could be, what a wonderful writer he was, can be found in Miami and the Siege of Chicago or, as per the subtitle, An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, which I have been perusing as background on the mood of the so-called Sixties for my novel. It is an example of the expansive, personal journalism of the time. I suppose Tom Wolfe's books would fit in there as well. Mailer casts himself in the role of "the reporter," and the account is told from that third-person perspective. Thus, it is not an "objective" account of those two political conventions, for "the reporter" is also constantly revealing the effect of the happenings on him. Norman Mailer was of course a good liberal in the 1968 sense of that word, and "the reporter" succumbs to the thrill of possessing revolutionary sentiments. He feels the youthful fire in his loins. Yet, he cannot go the whole hog, especially after seeing the disturbances in Chicago wreaked by "youth." By 1968, of course, Mailer was forty-five years old, a man with "six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good booze." And, as he concedes, he has even come to enjoy wine: "A revolutionary with a taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke ..." Besides, he also doesn't want to get beat up by the police.

He is pretty disturbed by the radical goings-on that tore up Chicago, but what impressed me was his even-handedness concerning the Republicans. Mailer had come of age with disdain toward Richard Nixon, who would receive the Republican nomination in Miami, but having aged, acquired children, a taste in wine, and so on, he was able to regard Nixon as a more complex character than generally perceived, even to feel a certain admiration for him.

McCarthyites in 1968

His characterization of the McCarthyites, however, the supporters of Eugene McCarthy, is a good foreshadowing of the current oppositional nature of American politics. He describes their gathering at Chicago's Midway Airport in anticipation of McCarthy's arrival in the city. The faces of the crowd, he writes, "gave glimpses of faces remarkably homogenous for a political rally":

One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a 50-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippy allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals -- suggestions of vitiated blood in their complexion -- to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left.

He finds in this cadre a species of "parsimony," represented by their "thin nostrils." But the parsimony of the McCarthyites was not simply financial, as they had not been mean with funds to support the Senator:

No, like all crusaders, their stinginess could be found in a ferocious lack of tolerance or liaison to their left or right -- the search for Grail seems invariably to proceed in a straight line. It was no accident that an extraordinary number of McCarthyites seemed to drive Volkswagens (or was it that an extraordinary number of Volkswagens bore the white and blue psychedelic flower? -- if psychedelic it could truly be called, since the blue was too wan and the white too milky for the real sports of psychedlia land).

One gets a sense of where Maureen Dowd might have picked up her journalistic chops Although she is a big lib, she is also able to ridicule liberals where they deserve to be ridiculed. In another gem from Mailer concerning the McCarthyites, he remarks on the "disproportionate number of babies in mother's arms -- sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work!" And then he makes this astute observation:

The middle-class left would never learn that working men in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe -- the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schooteachers they used to hate!

Take that Hilary Clinton. And here is a question for you: Is there a connection between the righteous attitudes of the McCarthyites, the McCarthyism that liberals today find to be such a disturbing feature of the 1950s, and the current oppositional political currents?

 Picture credits: Florida Memories; U.S. Election Atlas