Why Are We at War? (8 page)

They speak of pre-cancerous conditions in bodies, and I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now. I hope we’ll muddle through, provided there are no more large disasters. There are pro-democratic forces in America that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.

But the situation is serious. If we have a depression or fall into desperate economic times, I don’t know what’s going to hold the country together. There’s just too much anger here, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism. Patriotism in a country that’s failing has a logical tendency to turn fascistic, just as too much sentimentality will corrupt compassion. Fascism in America is not going to come with a political party. Nor with black shirts or brown shirts. But there will be a curtailing of liberties. Homeland Security has put the machinery in place. The people who are running the country, in my opinion, simply do not have the character or wisdom to fight for the concept of freedom if we suffer
horrors; no, not if we suffer dirty bombs, terrorist attacks on a huge scale, virulent diseases. The notion that you’re going to have your freedom saved by people who work for security agencies is curious at best. They’re on a one-way street. Anything bad of that sort is very bad for them. So they’re going to do their utmost to restrict the freedom of people during critical situations. In the final analysis, democracy is inimical to security. Americans have to be willing to say at a certain point that we’re ready to take some terrorist hits without panicking, that freedom is more important to us than security.

Let’s suppose ten people are killed by a small bomb on a street corner in some city in America. The first thing to understand is that there are 285 million Americans. So, there’s one chance in 28.5 million you’re going to be one of those people. By such heartless means of calculation, the three thousand deaths in the Twin Towers came approximately to one mortality for every ninety thousand Americans. Your chances of dying if you drive a car are one in
seven thousand each year. We seem perfectly ready to put up with automobile statistics.

DOTSON RADER
: What is dangerous about what you are saying is that it implies there is a tolerable level of terror, and we have to accept it.

NORMAN MAILER
: That’s what I fear I am ready to say. There is a tolerable level to terror. Let’s relieve ourselves of the idea that we have to remove all terror. Let’s learn to live with the anxiety.
    What scared the hell out of me was a recent poll that indicated half the people in America are willing to accept a certain curtailment of their liberties in return for more security. If, already at this point, 50 percent of the people are ready to give up some of their liberties in return for that dubious security, then what’s going to happen if something truly bad ensues? Our belief that Americans are free individuals has suffered erosion in the last ten years from too much stock market and the greed it inspired. You know, Marx
and Jesus Christ do come together on one fundamental notion, which is that money leaches out all other values. Those ten years have done a lot of damage to the country’s character. It’s not as nice a place as it used to be.
    I must say it again: In a country where values are collapsing, patriotism becomes the handmaiden to totalitarianism. The country becomes the religion. We are asked to live in a state of religious fervor: Love America! Love it because America has become a substitute for religion. But to love your country indiscriminately means that critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends upon these distinctions.
    A good Englishman has a certain sense of the complexity of his national life. Even if he rides to hounds. The British have memory in a way we don’t. That is the scariest single thing about American democracy to me: We don’t have roots the way other countries do. Relatively, we are without deep traditions. So the transition from democracy to totalitarianism could happen quickly.
There could be fewer impediments here, those brakes and barriers that true conservatives usually count upon. But without the stops and locks, a nation can swing from one extreme to the other.

DOTSON RADER
: Is there anything about this country that you love dearly?

NORMAN MAILER
: Freedom. The freedom that I’ve had in my life. Who has ever had the opportunities I’ve had, the extraordinary freedom to be able to think the way I think, for better or worse? No, the best thing in America is that freedom. I had the great good luck that very few people have, to be a writer and earn a relatively independent income by the age of twenty-five. It didn’t continue to be always that simple, but generally speaking, I’ve had more time to think than most people. I’ve had that advantage, that luxury. I can hardly hate the country. I don’t want to make this a sentimental journey, but I have been treated very well.
    You know, I once attacked J. Edgar Hoover on television in 1959, when he was still director of
the FBI. I said he had done more damage to America than Joseph Stalin. Years later, under the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained my FBI file (which came to three hundred pages) and eighty pages of it were devoted to my remarks on that one TV show. Most of the FBI’s comments were on the order of, Oh well, Mailer is just an arrogant fool. Yet the fact is that no matter how angry those people were, they didn’t take me off in chains.
    I have had great freedoms here in America, and I don’t want to see them lost to the people who come after me. But I repeat: Freedom is as delicate as democracy. It has to be kept alive every day of our existence. So, yes, I do love this country. If our democracy is the noblest experiment in the history of civilization, it may also be the most singularly vulnerable one.
    When you scratch an American he always says, “This is God’s country.” Well, I would suggest that the United States is God’s most extreme and heartfelt experiment. So I lean toward thinking
that the best explanation for 9/11 is that the Devil won a great battle that day. Yes—Satan as the pilot who guided those planes into that ungodly denouement.

DOTSON RADER
: It’s cinematic, isn’t it?

NORMAN MAILER
: Yes. As if part of the Devil’s aesthetic acumen was to bring it off exactly as if we were watching the same action movie we had been looking at for years. That may be at the core of the immense impact 9/11 had on America. Our movies came off the screen and chased us down the canyons of the city. It makes sense to me that the Devil pulls off such a coup. I’m a great believer in Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation that covers a set of facts is bound to be the correct explanation. If you can tell me why God wanted 9/11 to succeed, then I’ll give way. But until then let me rely on the supposition that this was the Devil’s big day.

TO NORRIS

  
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  

I want to thank David Ebershoff, Veronica Windholz, and Judith McNally for their quick and incisive contributions to this book.

By Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner’s Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Harlot’s Ghost

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

Modest Gifts

The Castle in the Forest

On God
(with J. Michael Lennon)

Mind of an Outlaw

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.