There is no Norman Mailer around today that I know of. Matt Taibbi has a bit of Mailer's dash, but nowhere near the authority supporting his prose. (And I haven't read him in years.) Mailer wrote about the peace march on the Pentagon in 1967 as if he were writing a novel, put himself in the third person, infused the text with enormous humor and self-deprecation (and self-aggrandizement), and spun tiny observations into encompassing philosophies. This is an achievement that far surpasses anything written about the current situation, where we see books like Peril by Bob Woodward that are nothing more than the emptying of a reporter's notebook.
Here, we have metaphor:
"For years he had been writing about the nature of totalitarianism, its need to render populations apathetic, its instrument – the destruction of mood. ... (M)ood was a scent which rose from the acts and calms of nature, and totalitarianism was a deodorant to nature. Yes, and by the logic of this metaphor, the Pentagon looked like the five-sided tip on the spout of a spray can to be used under the arm, yes, the Pentagon was spraying the deodorant of its presence all over the fields of Virginia."
We have timeless aphorism:
"Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia."
We have insights into mass psychology:
"The guards were here to work out the long slow stages of a grim tableau – the recapitulation of that poverty-ridden rural childhood which had left them with the usual constipated mixture of stinginess and greed, blocked compassion and frustrated desires for power."
We have lost a lot in this century. Perhaps what is missed more than anything is a Mailer to observe and warn.
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