[Mb-civic] Norman Mailer: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0123-10.htm

  Published on Sunday, January 23, 2005 by The Sunday Times 
(UK)  

Empire Building
America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of 
Satan

The US wants world domination, but its people are heedless 
pleasure seekers. What’s needed is a morality tale to scare 
them in the shopping malls. 9/11 came just in time
 
by Norman Mailer 
  
Good novelists and good journalists are engaged in a parallel 
search. We are always trying to find a better approach to the 
established truth. For that truth is usually skewed by the needs of 
powerful interests. 

Journalists engage in this worthy if tricky venture by digging into the 
hard earth for those slimy creatures we call facts, facts that are 
rarely clear enough to ring false or true. 

Novelists work in a different manner. We begin with fictions. That is 
to say, we make suppositions about the nature of reality. Put 
another way, we live with hypotheses which, when well chosen, can 
enrich our minds and - it is always a hope - some readers - minds 
as well. Hypotheses are, after all, one of the incisive ways by which 
we try to estimate what a reality might be. Each new bit of evidence 
we acquire serves to weaken the hypothesis, or to strengthen it. 
With a good premise, we may even get closer to reality. A poor one, 
sooner or later, has to be discarded. 

Take the unhappy but super-excited state that a man or woman can 
find themselves in when full of jealousy. Their minds are quickened, 
their senses become more alert. If a wife believes her husband is 
having an affair, then every time he comes home she is more aware 
of his presence than she has been in previous weeks, months, or 
years. Is he guilty? Is the way in which he folds his napkin a sign of 
some unease? Is he being too accommodating? Her senses 
quicken at the possibility that another woman - let us call her 
Victoria - is the object of his attention. Soon, the wife is all but 
convinced that he is having an affair with Victoria. Definitely. No 
question. But, then, on a given morning, she discovers that the lady 
happens to be in China. Worse. Victoria has actually been teaching 
in Beijing for the last six months. Ergo, the hypothesis has been 
confuted. If the wife is still convinced that the husband is unfaithful, 
another woman must be substituted. 

The value of an hypothesis is that it can stimulate your mind and 
heighten your concentration. The danger is that it can distort your 
brain. Good hypotheses depend on real questions, which is to say 
questions that do not always generate happy answers. 

What intrigues me most about good hypotheses is that they bear a 
close relation to good fiction. The serious novel looks for situations 
and characters who can come alive enough to surprise the writer. If 
he or she starts with one supposition, the actions of the characters 
often lead the story some distance away from what was planned. In 
that sense, hypotheses are not only like fictions but can be 
compared to news stories - once the situation is presented, 
subsequent events can act like surprisingly lively characters ready 
to prove or disprove how one thought the original situation would 
develop. The value of a good hypothesis, like a good fiction, is that 
whether it all turns out more or less as expected, or is altogether 
contrary, the mind of the reader as well as the author is nonetheless 
enriched. 

A good novel, therefore, like a good hypothesis, becomes an attack 
on the nature of reality. (If attack seems too violent a notion here, 
think of it as intense inquiry.) But the basic assumption is that reality 
is ever-changing - the more intense the situation, the more 
unforeseeable will be the denouement. No good novel ever arrives 
at total certainty, not unless you are Charles Dickens and are writing 
A Christmas Carol. Just so, few hypotheses ever come to closure. 


On the road to Iraq, we were offered more than a few narratives for 
why we were so obviously hell-bent for war. 

One hypothesis which soon arose was that such a war would be 
evil. Shed no blood for oil. That became the cry. Others offered a 
much more virtuous reason than America's oil interests: conquering 
Iraq would democratize the Middle East. Problems between Israel 
and Palestine could be happily settled. In the event, this proved to 
be nearer to a fairytale than a logical proposition. 

In its turn, the Administration presented us with weapons of mass 
destruction. That lived in the American mind like an intelligence 
thriller. Would we locate those nightmares before they blew us up? 
It became the largest single argument for going to war. 

There were other hypotheses - would we or would we not soon find 
Osama bin Laden? Which became a short story like The Lady or 
the Tiger? - with no ending. On the eve of war, there was a blood-
cult novel in the night. It was Shock and Awe - had we driven a 
quick stake through the heart of Saddam Hussein? Good 
Americans could feel they were on the hunt for Dracula. 

Vivid hypotheses. None held up. We did not learn then and we still 
do not begin to agree why we embarked on this most miserable of 
wars. Occam's Razor does suggest that the simplest explanation 
which is ready to answer a variety of separate questions on a 
puzzling matter has a great likelihood of being the most correct 
explanation. One answer can emerge then from the good bishop's 
formula: it is that we marched into a full-sized war because it was 
the simplest solution the President and his party could find for the 
immediate impasse in which America found itself. 

The first problem was that the nation's scientific future, and its 
technological skills, seemed to be in distress. American factory jobs 
were in danger of disappearing, outsourced to Third World 
countries, and our skills at technology were suffering in comparison 
to Europe and to Asia. Relations between American labor and the 
corporation threatened to go on tilt. But that was not the only storm 
cloud over the land. 

Back in 2001, before 9/11, the divide between pop culture and 
fundamentalism was gaping. In the view of the religious Right, 
America was becoming heedless, loutish, irreligious, and blatantly 
immoral. Half of all American marriages were ending in divorce. The 
Catholic Church was suffering a series of agonizing scandals. 

Faced with the specter of a superpower, our own superpower, 
economically and spiritually out of kilter, the best solution seemed to 
be War. That would offer an avenue for recapturing America - not, 
mind you, by unifying the country, not at all. By now, that was close 
to impossible. Given, however, that the country was deeply divided, 
the need might be to separate it further in such a way that one's own 
half could become much more powerful. For that, Americans had to 
be encouraged to live with all the certainties of myth while bypassing 
the sharp edge of inquiry implicit in hypothesis. 

The difference is crucial. An hypothesis opens the mind to thought, 
to comparison, to doubt, to the elusiveness of truth. Myths, on the 
other hand, are frozen hypotheses. Serious questions are answered 
by declaration and will not be reopened. The need is for a morality 
tale at a child's level. Good will overcome a dark enemy. For the 
Bush Administration, 9/11 came as a deliverance. We were 
encouraged to worry about the security of every shopping mall in 
America. The overriding myth was not merely the implacable danger 
of Islam, but its nearness to us. To oppose the fears we generated 
in ourselves, we would call on our most dynamic American myths. 
We must war constantly against the invisible kingdom of Satan. 
Stand at Armageddon and battle for the land. It was fortified by a 
conviction that America was exceptional, and God had a special 
interest in America. God wanted us to be a land superior to other 
nations, a realm to lift His vision into greater glory. So, the myth of 
the frontier, which demanded a readiness to fight without limit, 
became part of our exceptionalism. "Do what it takes." 

For American capitalism to survive, exceptionalism rather than co-
operation with other advanced nations had become the necessity. 
>From the point of view of the nation's leaders, there had been ten 
lost years of initiatives, ten years in the cold, but America now had 
an opportunity to cash in again on the great bonanza that had fallen 
its way in 1991 when the Soviet Union went bankrupt in the arms 
race. At that point, or so believed the exceptionalists, America could 
and should have taken over the world and thereby safeguarded our 
economic future for decades at least with a century of hegemony to 
follow. Instead, these exceptionalists had been all but consumed 
with frustration over what they saw as the labile pussyfooting of the 
Clinton Administration. Never have liberals been detested more. But 
now, at last, 9/11 had provided an opportunity for America to resolve 
some problems. Now America could embark on the great adventure 
of empire. 

These exceptionalists also happened to be hard-headed realists. 
They were ready to face the fact that most Americans might not 
have any real desire for global domination. America was pleasure-
loving, which, for exceptionalist purposes, was almost as bad as 
peace-loving. So, the invasion had to be presented with an edifying 
narrative. That meant the alleged reason for the war had to live in 
utter independence of the facts. The motives offered to the 
American public need not have any close connection to likelihoods. 
Fantasy would serve. As, for example, bringing democracy to the 
Middle East. Protecting ourselves against weapons of mass 
destruction. These themes had to be driven home to the public with 
all the paraphernalia of facts, supposed confirmative facts. For this 
to work, the CIA also had to be compromised. Most people in the 
CIA are career-motivated. Advancing one's career does not often 
have much to do with getting the right stuff in intelligence. 
Successful people in the agency, as in many another bureaucracy, 
get to where they are by knowing what is wanted at the top. They 
end up producing what they feel is needed for their country, for their 
own career, or just for their next step. When such factors are at 
odds with each other, Intelligence pays the price. So the CIA was 
abominably compromised by the move to go to war with Iraq. Most 
analysts who had information that Iraq had very little or nothing in 
the way of WMD gave it up. The need at the top of the agency to 
satisfy the President cut them off. So we went forward in the belief 
that Iraq was an immediate threat, and were told that hordes of 
Iraqis would welcome us with flowers. Indeed, it was our duty as 
good Americans to bring democracy to a country long dominated by 
an evil man. 

Democracy, however, is not an antibiotic to be injected into a 
polluted foreign body. It is not a magical serum. Rather, democracy 
is a grace. In its ideal state, it is noble. It is all but impossible to 
believe that men as hard-nosed, inventive, and transcendentally 
cynical as Karl Rove or Dick Cheney - to offer the likeliest two 
candidates at hand - could have believed that quick democracy was 
going to be feasible for Iraq. 

It is a crude assertion, but I expect Cheney, for one, is in Iraq for 
one reason: oil. Without a full wrestler's grip on control of the oil of 
the Middle East, America's economic problems will continue to 
expand. That is why we will remain in Iraq for years to come. For 
nothing will be gained if we depart after the new semi-oppressive 
state is cobbled together. Even if we pretend it is a democracy, we 
will have only a nominal victory. We will have gone back to America 
with nothing but the problems which led us to Iraq in the first place 
plus the onus that a couple of hundred billion dollars were spent in 
the quagmire. 



It seems to me that if the Democrats are going to be able to work up 
a new set of attitudes and values for their future candidates, it might 
not be a bad idea to do a little more creative thinking about the 
question for which they have had, up to now, naught but puny 
suggestions - which is how do you pick up a little of the 
fundamentalists' vote. 

If by 2008, the Democrats hope to come near to a meaningful 
fraction of such voters, they will have to find candidates and field 
workers who can spread the word down South - that is, find the 
equivalent of Democratic missionaries to work on all those good 
people who may be in awe of Jehovah's wrath, but love Jesus, love 
Jesus so much more. Worked upon with enough zeal, some of the 
latter might come to recognize that these much-derided liberals live 
much more closely than the Republicans in the real spirit of Jesus. 
Whether they believe every word of Scripture or not, it is still these 
liberals rather than the Republicans who worry about the fate of the 
poor, the afflicted, the needy, and the disturbed. These liberals even 
care about the well-being of criminals in our prisons. They are more 
ready to save the forests, refresh the air of the cities and clean up 
the rivers. It might be agonizing for a good fundamentalist to vote for 
a candidate who did not read the Scriptures every day, yet some of 
them might yet be ready to say: I no longer know where to place my 
vote. I have joined the ranks of the undecided. 

More power to such a man. More power to all who would be ready 
to live with the indecision implicit in democracy. It is democracy, 
after all, which first brought the power and virtue of good questions 
to the attention of the people rather than restricting the matter to the 
upper classes. 

Copyright 2005 Norman Mailer

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