"Kim Cooper" <scram@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:7ad4b170.0406111154.77c30e27@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> JUST BEFORE THE WAR WITH THE ESKIMOS, OR:
> TUCKER CARLSON MARKED FOR DEATH
> (With apologies to J.D. Salinger and Lester Bangs, and none to anyone
> else) by Joe Goldberg
>
> A few months ago, the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal contained
> a piece by Dennis Miller denigrating Norman Mailer, who had just
> published an article against the Iraq war in the London Times, so, of
> course, the WSJ sicced an attack dog on him. Mr. Miller wondered why
> it should be he, since he had never written an Op-Ed piece before and
> didn't know much about Mr. Mailer. But modesty is strange, unfamiliar
> territory for Mr. Miller, and he didn't stay there long. Like Ken
> Burns deciding to do a 19-hour film about jazz or George W. Bush
> deciding to become President, he forged ahead, and stumbled right
> away, by calling Mailer "the Father of the Non-Fiction Novel." I'm not
> surprised that Miller doesn't know better, but you'd think that
> someone at the WSJ would know that it was Truman Capote who claimed
> the title, and perhaps even a few there who knew that it really
> belonged to Ernest Hemingway. But displaying contempt for people and
> things of which they are ignorant is virtually a job requirement of
> conservative punditry. Not by accident does the word ignorant contain
> the word rant.
>
> Dennis Miller started out on Saturday Night Live and since he left
> there has preached to an ever-smaller choir (with one brief,
> inglorious stopover on Saturday Night Football), his ego increasing in
> inverse pro****tion to the size of his audience. Somewhere along the
> way, he decided he was a conservative. It happened just about the time
> he lost his job on HBO along with his sense of humor. (Some people
> say, because of his brother, Miller will never be out of work. His
> brother is Miller's personal manager and is also the personal manager
> of Jim Carrey, with whom any number of entertainment conglomerates
> would be delighted to do business. Anyone thinking that idea
> far-fetched might reflect on the fact that a man was made head of
> Tri-Star Films because he had once been Robert Redford's attorney. In
> Hollywood, relation****ps trump everything. It's even possible that
> Miller's family situation has influenced his admiration for George W.
> Bush, who has had to struggle through life as the son of a President
> of the United States.) ...
>
> continued at
> http://www.catalog-of-cool.com/editorial1.html
Where it get more telling about the author:
Norm: Not the Big Daddy of Non-Fiction
Miller will probably end up with seven followers and a bull horn,
harassing
concertgoers on their way to Disney Hall from across the street "Hey,
don't
you know who I am? I used to be Dennis Miller!" But, to employ a trope of
Mr. Miller's, before he winds up like Andy Griffith in A Face in the
Crowd,
exhorting an applause machine, he will continue to think he's the equal of
anyone.
He called the respected newscaster Jim Lehrer "Jimmy" on the air the other
night. More egregiously, he said to the absent president of Mexico,
"Vincente, don't be an idiot," insulting Vicente Fox and getting his name
wrong in the process. He is always coming down hard on people who aren't
there, especially O.J. Simpson. I am no fan of O.J.'s, but I would bet Mr.
Miller's weekly salary that he wouldn't dare say any of those things if
Mr.
Simpson were within three football fields' length of him. He has mocked
the
senior Senator of my home state of West Virginia, Robert C. Byrd, who
carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his jacket pocket, and then
mocked the state itself, for its proletarian cuisine ("It's not the possum
that makes you fat. It's the sauce"). I have even heard him denigrate the
Constitution itself, on the grounds that it's more than 200 years old and
you wouldn't drive around in a horse and buggy. So let's chuck it, along
with Bach and Shakespeare.
Like most bullies, Miller is a coward. He may also have written his own
epitaph. Here is what he says about Mailer and Mary Quant in the WSJ.
Change
it to Miller and Britney Spears and our own troubled times and see what
you
get: "They were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s." And, of
course, even before he began speaking in public, Miller was perfectly
described by Bob Dylan: "You just want to be on the side that's winning."
But maybe not for long.
I'm certainly no Miller fan. I never really thought he was funny on SNL
and
didn't find his work on Monday Night Football added anything except
distraction from the games. His work on HBO is pretty much like everything
made for premium cable, largely second rate only with cursing, ****ity and
fx
blood violence, (oh yeah like we all need more explicitness to coarsen
every
aspect of modern consciousness. No wonder a panicked academic
establishment
imposes PC rules of language and behavior on undergrads in many colleges.
Outside the realm of basically left-of-center political protest, the
academic establishment realizes our so-called free speech, which is even
constitutionally guaranteed is so abused by various media and commercial
entertainment forms solely for the purpose of making profits off human
beings most base instincts. They feed it to a public grown so accustomed
to
consuming sludge entertainment that they've become so inured to esthetic
subtlety that the can no longer be entertained unless it's tits and ass or
guts, gore and various forms of blasphemy, (religious and patriotic
offence
taken the right and ethnic, gender and political hypersensitivity and odd
notions of personal freedoms on the left) The taste of the public has
largely been reduced to that of sniggering schoolboys trying to out shock
or
out gross each other.
Which brings me back to Miller and Mailer. Odd Joe Goldberg, author of
the article takes offense at a Miller dismissing of Norman Mailer as
someone
not hot anymore. Particularly odd hen one considers the largely critical
free ride which Mr. Mailer has been afforded for the last almost sixty
years.
Now, I'm sure this might offend some but having read almost everything
Mailer has published I think I know from where I speak. Norman Mailer has
long outlived and out ****ned most of his contem****aries, and in doing so
has
not only created countless volumes of work but a carefully crafted macho
public persona with a cynical eye for American eye and other topics that
was
meant to draw comparison to and make him heir to the Hemingway seat of
male
writers. But while Hemingway was admired in some quarters for pulling the
image of writer out of the paneled rooms and professors offices and
putting
the writer in hunters garb or war re****ters uniform, he is most highly
regarded for stripping away the excessive, flowery nineteenth century "pay
by the word" prose from fiction and for creating a new twentieth century
way
of writing, whereas Mailer has at least following the publication of his
war
epic The ****d And The Dead been better known for his posturing, his
seemingly always too little too late views on politics and creative
writing
methods, such as the above alluded to Do***entary Novel, which was used
with
far superior effectiveness by Capote in In Cold Blood than in Mailer's
evocation of the endlessly over-analyzed loser Gary Gilmore, The
Executioners Song.
Mailer is a man who followed fad and fa****on as only an intellectual
Harvard Educated social climber from Brooklyn can, his movement in and out
of almost every counter-cultural group and idea in the thirty years or so
following his return from the Pacific War is well do***ented. No
unaccustomed to criticism for his views, (his late 1940's break with the
intellectual and political American and European hard left (the Soviet
perpetrated atrocity deniers) caused much ire and rancor among which many
in
the left establishment some of whom never forgave Mailer even after his
anti-Soviet views(largely were gleaned from others, Jean Malaquais,
Antoine
Du St Exuprey, etc, at least on the matter of Communist expansionism and
underlying intentions) were proven correct. A spokesman against the
Vietnam
was in the sixties, Mailer rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the
irrelevance of the Beatnik era which had largely come and gone without
making a ripple outside cities and a few campuses, to become a wild
haired,
ranting macho commentator on virtually every event and concept of that
raucous and divisive era. He again got in trouble when he ran afoul of the
rising feminist movement, and had several harsh confrontations with
feminists, Germaine Greer, in particular, and for a time seemed to have
been
left behind by fad and fa****on. But as feminism unsuccessfully struggled
for
years to find a sustaining common voice and set of precepts, Mailer moved
on
to find a new role, a new image, and platform on which to posture. There
were several peculiar side trips, an awkward, silly defense of New-Age
religion when he decried the hitting of a golfball on the moon by
astronaut
Alan Shepherd(sp) with statements, I paraphrase, "To many people the moon
is
a sacred place. You wouldn't hit a golfball in Saint Patrick's cathedral,
would you?" Or his basically duels with shambling drunk bully poet James
Dickey, of Deliverance fame who ridiculed Mailers labored attempts at
writing about rednecks as being rather mawkish and girly.
Mailer also delved into the world of the most macho s****t, boxing. After
writing articles with mentions of the Sweet Science" for years, a middle
aged Mailer hired Jose Torres, one time Light Heavyweight champion of the
world to teach him, in return Mailer taught Torres to write. Mailer even
made an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show and boxed a round with his
teacher. His coverage of Muhammad Ali was occasionally insightful, though
much of it suffered with the same weaknesses as all of Mailers later work,
in that he wrote more about himself than his topic.
For people involved in the self (me,me,me) 19060's and 1970's Mailer's
internalized ruminating was enchanting, particularly to many young men and
especially to young Jewish men in college creative writing classrooms,
from
which , I suspect, the writer of the above article, emerged. it was a time
of fa****onable leftism, trendy social and personal movements and
experiments, drugs, ***, rock and roll, collective commune life, and
throwing off the old order.
But of course times change and fa****on changes but the old order
always
survives, and the revolutionaries always become tired gray eminences and
their youthful ranting about causes and issues fade away when time itself
steals away their relevance.
By the eighties, Mailer was a tired fading voice, a town crier with a
sore throat, and as drugs, drink and life began to dull the edges on his
once scalpel sharp mind, he saw enemies and challengers where there were
none, he attacked and assailed opponents so far beneath his stature that
it
was seen as egregious and paranoid. Old friends were passing away, and
young
Turks were assuming the mantle of America's resident macho writer. New
styles and forms were coming to life like maggots in rotting meat. One can
only wonder what Mailer thought about some of the eighties most repulsive
contributions to art irrelevance, Performance Art. Imagine Mailer watching
some droopy angry woman smearing herself with chocolate while screeching
flowery rambling stream of consciousness drivel. If he commented on it I
failed to hear about it. In the eighties age was stealing even Mr. Mailers
vaunted illusions of grandeur, his movie making which had long been a
source
of amusement for as man as it was inspiration for his admirers descended
into embarrassment when he made "Tough Guys Don't Dance" which he had
intended as a hard boiled commentary of the drug and *** fixated post
Watergate 1970's but which, when after viewing rough cuts, he realized was
painfully brittle and goofy, re-described it as, a Black Comedy. Laugh at
yourself before they laugh at you, right Norman? Filmed in Provincetown,
MA,
Miler managed to pay for his own home there by using it as a shooting
locale
and then writing it off. Bad as it was, TGDD it was shown in some theaters
(usually not for long) and made it to multiple runs on cable and was even
released on video. Oh goody. Can I have mine autographed, Mister mailer? A
muddled mess of a novel, with Mailer's patented claustrophobic 1st person
narrative prose, and Mailer's supremely off-putting egotistic habit of
making every character who speaks dialogue sound exactly like Norman
Mailer,
it became an astoni****ngly dreary film, though it did give Lawrence
Tierney(sp)'s wonderful screen presence back to the audience.
Subsequently,
Mailer has drifted toward dotage, like a tired on drunk staggering slowly
toward home, making a few sad stops along the way, Mailer's bloated book
on
Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald failed to tread any new ground and
managed to make the topic which has fascinated more than a generation seem
almost, well dull. Mailer's quasi-mystical ruminations on the mind of
Oswald, have the gloomy, foot-heavy quality of a badly disillusioned
70something man trying to recall the first tender love in the spring of
his
youth. His later work on the Bible and religion, not only didn't break any
new ground, it didn't even leave plow marks to know he had been there.
Which brings me to Dennis Miller, a man, a comedian whose limited fame
such as it is is largely based on a smirking look into the camera, which
always seems to being saying, gee I'm quick and funny, and don't you wish
you were as wry and sarcastic as me? The problem is, Miller's skills are
largely elevated only in comparison with his generation and those younger,
a
largely lumpen, snide and sarcastic, short attention spanned group, who's
minds lack subtlety or nuance and yet who not only think they know it all,
but are to impatient to read and find out that they don't. Cellphone
talking, High Definition fixated, metro-***ual, X taking, **** justifying,
web browsing, slackers probably haven't even heard of Mailer, let alone
read
him. And insult to Mailer by Miller isn't even a chigger bite let alone a
serious wound, but to someone like Joe Goldberg, an obviously "not
conservative" is angry because the only comic on the news is"conservative"
Miller, whose new found conservatism might be sharp with Miller's stylized
sarcasm but which seems less than solid or founded in a complex
understanding of politics or understanding of human nature.
And yet Mr. Goldberg, in typical new jerk liberal fa****on can't resist
answering Miller's unim****tant slap at Mailer, thus giving more mileage to
Miller than he would have been able to buy, if he had the money to buy a
page in the New York Times, when unanswered, it would have been forgotten
quicker than last months Star Magazine headlines. Maybe what got Mr.
Goldberg, was that the juxtaposition of all but forgotten Brit designer
Mary
Quant, one of the founders of the monumentally silly 1960's fa****on looks
called Mod or Carnaby Street with only time 1960's leftist elder spokesman
Mailer, that by linking them together in datedness, they are also linked
in
irrelevance. In any even it was a joke, lukewarm funny by my standards,
but
just a joke. It wasn't like Miller was denying the holocaust or showing us
dirty pictures of Hillary Clinton.
The left is suffering for heroes at the moment and in an age of young
people with the attention spans on the order of field mice, it is
difficult
to sustain a focus on an issue of relevance to the group and extremely
difficult to build a movement. Perhaps that is why Mr. Goldberg reacted Or
perhaps Mr. Goldberg saw Mr. Mailer as a Jewish hero and felt that a smart
aleck Catholic neo-conservative like Miller had no right comment on an
icon,
such as Mailer. But again, it was a semi-funny joke. The odd thing is that
by flinching, it's like the old children's game "statues," the object of
which is to get the other person to react, to move. And by responding,
Goldberg and all those decrying Miller's ongoing attacks on liberal icons,
are giving Miller what he wasn't a reaction. It means they are listening.
"Ha, ha, made you move."
This is where I'm amazed by Liberals. They go out of their way to
listen
to Conservatives. Why do this. Since they are not going to agree with
anything they hear, why punish themselves. Conservatives don't seek out
Liberals, perhaps they aren't interested in counter points of view, or
maybe
they just don't care. Whatever the reason, I am always amazed at the
number
of my ultra-left friends who regularly drive their blood pressure up
listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Gordon Liddy. And they never
seem to realize that by making them mad the Conservatives win the
argument.
But nevertheless, Lib's can't resist answering ever slight or insult, or
point out origins of conservatives positions of influences, as if anyone
cares. Maybe if intelligent thoughtful Liberals would stop reacting like
hysterical children maybe they would be able to say something that the
mainstream public wants to hear. Because they have a message worth
hearing,
if someone would only say it in a language people could understand.
Ambrose
PS; Please if you would read for content and ignore my spelling or syntax
flaws or any historical inaccuracies regarding Mr. Mailer. Since this is a
newsgroup post, proofing takes too much time for writing when I'm not
being
paid.
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