The Naked and the Daft: MAILER’S CHRONICLE OF CHICAGO ’68 By THOMAS FRANK

[laststeamtrain]

The Naked and the Daft
NORMAN MAILER’S CHRONICLE OF CHICAGO ’68 POINTS UP THE PITIFUL STATE OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL COMMENTARY.
By THOMAS FRANK

First time tear gas, second time robo-polls: If Karl Marx were on hand today to record the progress of our long cultural civil war, one suspects this would be the law of history he would coin to describe its bewildering phases. The novelist Norman Mailer was physically present for the tear-gas part—which is to say, at the famous “police riot” during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His classic account of the proceedings, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, has been reissued in a fortieth-anniversary edition this year, and in it we can find him sneering at the Republicans, whom he regarded as the party of “the Wasp”; cheering on the hipster left, the culture war’s original instigators; and booing the old-style machine Democrats, who would soon defect to the right. The certainty that we were heading into many decades of political idiocy grows larger and larger in Mailer’s consciousness until by the end he is in a funk of resignation and dread. “We will be fighting for forty years,” he writes on the book’s final page. As indeed we have been.

Here at our end of the forty-year war there are no Norman Mailers. Only pollsters. And consultants. And political scientists. The interpretation game is theirs now, and with the solemn mystifications of their profession, they guard it from befouling by mere “reporters,” as Mailer always referred to himself. The pollsters’ findings and the scientists’ graphs are what we are to consult should we wish to make some portentous comparison of this year’s mood to, say, that of 1976 or of the odds facing this year’s Republican standard-bearer to the chances of the one nominated in 1988.

It is a facile thing to say that the evolution from Mailer-style reporting to the works of these present-day wise men represents a decline, or even a catastrophic plunge, in the nation’s understanding of itself, but it has the virtue of being true. We are accustomed to thinking of history as a story of progress, but the replacement of observers like Mailer by superstar pollsters and consultants engagés is something very close to the opposite. Yes, Mailer was unbearably egotistical, given to exaggeration, and forever fleshing out a pet theory of history—the war of the hip and the square—that seems farcical in retrospect. But in his description of virtually any person, scene, building, or event, or even in his casual comments about the decor of a room where an event is about to take place, we learn more about what it’s like to be an American than we do from all the pollsters’ statistics put together.

Here, for example, is Mailer introducing us to the foot soldiers of the GOP, which he conceives as the political arm of “the Wasp,” assembling at a Miami Beach party as they prepare to nominate Richard Nixon:

"Here they were, the economic power of America (so far as economic power was still private, not public) the family power (so far as position in society was still a passion to average and ambitious Americans) the military power (to the extent that important sword-rattlers and/or patriots were among the company, as well as cadres of corporations not unmarried to the Pentagon) yes, even the spiritual power of America (just so far as Puritanism, Calvinism, conservatism and golf still gave the Wasp an American faith more intense than the faith of cosmopolitans, one-worlders, trade-unionists, Black militants, New Leftists, acid-heads, tribunes of the gay, families of Mafia, political machinists, fixers, swingers, Democratic lobbyists, members of the Grange, and government workers, not to include the Weltanschauung of every partisan in every minority group). No, so far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellations of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendent of finance, and heroic of sport, transports of medicine, hygiene, and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world’s ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this Gala willy-nilly the leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of patriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some."

Indeed, by the time Mailer has described the chaos at the Democratic Convention, the act of reporting itself has become his central consideration. He is no longer observing the action; he is participating, or at least debating with himself about doing so. He tells us about his struggle to understand what is going on, mulls his own conflicted class position (“a revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke), describes his abundant recourse to alcohol and the peculiar thoughts that occur to him while he is under its influence. He longs to join the protestors in some kind of violent action, even goes to the park where they have gathered to give a speech, but finally chooses not to because he doesn’t want to get beaten or arrested while he’s on deadline. When eventually he does get hauled in by the police—there is simply no way Norman Mailer could show up at a world-class beat-down like Chicago ’68 and not get arrested—it’s for trying a little too hard to take down the details of a Jeep that is festooned with barbed wire, a move that looks suspicious to the adrenaline-happy Chicago cops.

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http://bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2720

[boomerbust]

1. Want to see Recreate 68?

Have the Republican machine steal just one more election and 68 will look like a high school wrestling match.