Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 105

Stranded in the Sixties

101

This testimony is all the more renuirkable for having issued from
such an alienated (and often inebriated) reporter as Norman Mailer,
a self-described "comic hero" on the fringes of the event under study.
Mailer himself questions the competence of such an "historian"
(.Armies 67).
Having duly noted the arbitrariness of his
interpretation. Mailer unabashedly offers an omniscient account of
American social reality. The absurdity of such a dual, self
deconstructing exercise is the real point, according to Zavarzadeh.
The comic futility of the drunken reporter is contraposed to the other
Mailer, the public man and realist "scribe," who would still
superimpose "grand patterns on the actual" (Zavarzadeh 157).
However, against those who would discard realism along with
totalism. Mailer sets about to save realism by defending the mystery
and contingency of actual experience. No small part of Mailer's
opposition to liberalism-as personified in Armies by Paul Goodman—
was its disrespect for the sheer complexity of life outside the
technological bubble. Indeed, the same is true of the Old Left, whose
conflict with liberalism, in Mailer's view, comes down to a "quarrel
among engineers" (qtd. Merrill, "Armies" 133). In some respects the
Pentagon represents for Mailer what the dynamo did for Henry
Adams (Merrill, "Armies" 128), though for Mailer it is not the
dynamism of the Pentagon that he most fears. Mailer's war on
technologism, as on the mass media, is prompted as much by the
apathy it engenders as by its distortion of reality (Solotaroff 223).
TTiis apathy was reflected in the indifference of liberals, as well as
the Old Left, toward the technological machine that produced the
war they claimed to oppose. Mailer considered it a toss up whether
Communism or liberal Capitalism would do the greater damage in
Asia: "In either case, the conquest would be technological, and so
primitive Asian societies would be uprooted" (Armies 210).
The hope, then, lay with the New Left which at least brought
the real issues into focus. In 1963 Mailer had seen America as a land
where opposing Armies never meet: The Right, the Center, and what
there is of the Left have set up encampments on separate hills . . ."
(qtd. Merrill, "Armies" 133). What Mailer admired about the New
Left was their determination to confront the real enemy—the
engineers as well as the generals—taking the conflict into "the womb
and cradle of technology land" (Armies 94). It was Mailer's fond
hope that the March on the Pentagon, the cradle of technology land.