Those who oppose him in both parties are attacking Barack Obama with a double-barreled cultural stereotype, the old film noir thesis that good looks can be deceptive combined with a Jim Jones analogy about followers suicidally drinking in hope with laced Kool-Aid.
In today's New York Times, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and Clinton supporter, observes, "What is troubling about the campaign is that it’s gone beyond hope and change to redemption.” He claims that Obama is "posing as a figure who is the one person who will redeem our politics. And what I fear is, that ends up promising more from politics than politics can deliver.”
Earlier this week, Paul Krugman wrote that "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality."
Today's Times piece quotes Norman Mailer describing JFK's arrival at the Democratic convention in 1960, “the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street.”
The reporter should have gone further into Mailer's musings on Kennedy. Substitute "African-American" for "Catholic" in this passage:
"With such a man in office, the myth of the nation would again be engaged, and the fact that he was a Catholic would engage the mind of the White Protestant. For the first time in our history, the Protestant would have the pain and creative luxury of feeling himself in some tiny degree part of a minority, and that was an experience which might be incommensurable in its value to the best of them."
It's understandable that detractors would try to equate Obama's emotional appeal to lack of substance. In the 1960s, when I was editing McCalls, an advertiser told me, "Your competitors say the magazine looks so good that readers don't get to the ads."
"If I had to sell a dull magazine," I answered, "I might make say that too, but if you can't get people to pay attention, they won't respond to anything."
This year, Obama is getting voters to pay attention, and his opponents are reduced to finding fault with that.
Showing posts with label Norman Mailer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Norman Mailer. Show all posts
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Mailer
He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.
Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the printed page, he poured out opinions and indelible impressions for half a century. An early collection of essays was aptly titled, "Advertisements for Myself."
His World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," made him famous but he will be remembered, along with Tom Wolfe, for the New Journalism of the 1960s. Coming to it from opposite directions, Wolfe, a reporter by trade, and Mailer the novelist created something as different from traditional journalism as "Moby Dick" is from a tract on whaling.
In 1968, Harper's turned over a full issue to Mailer's account of the Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon, which later as a book titled "Armies of the Dead" won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
The next year, after a beery lunch and boozy dinner with a few New Journalist friends, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York and, in a put-on campaign, drew over 40,000 votes.
A decade later, he won another Pulitzer for "The Executioner's Song," about the last year in the life of Gary Gilmore, a remorseless killer. In between and afterward, he wrote ambitious novels, feuded with Feminists, stabbed one of his wives and fathered nine children.
A contemporary of mine, he was the ultimate opposite in temperament. A year ago, on a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, I was interviewed about my experiences in working with and getting to know her in the 1950s, but much more of PBS' time was devoted to Mailer who never met her but whose fantasies had filled a book and were vividly fascinating.
He never wrote The Great American Novel, but he did change the way several generations of us see the world.
Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the printed page, he poured out opinions and indelible impressions for half a century. An early collection of essays was aptly titled, "Advertisements for Myself."
His World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," made him famous but he will be remembered, along with Tom Wolfe, for the New Journalism of the 1960s. Coming to it from opposite directions, Wolfe, a reporter by trade, and Mailer the novelist created something as different from traditional journalism as "Moby Dick" is from a tract on whaling.
In 1968, Harper's turned over a full issue to Mailer's account of the Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon, which later as a book titled "Armies of the Dead" won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
The next year, after a beery lunch and boozy dinner with a few New Journalist friends, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York and, in a put-on campaign, drew over 40,000 votes.
A decade later, he won another Pulitzer for "The Executioner's Song," about the last year in the life of Gary Gilmore, a remorseless killer. In between and afterward, he wrote ambitious novels, feuded with Feminists, stabbed one of his wives and fathered nine children.
A contemporary of mine, he was the ultimate opposite in temperament. A year ago, on a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, I was interviewed about my experiences in working with and getting to know her in the 1950s, but much more of PBS' time was devoted to Mailer who never met her but whose fantasies had filled a book and were vividly fascinating.
He never wrote The Great American Novel, but he did change the way several generations of us see the world.
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