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expressing support for colleague Salman Rushdie in the wake of the
fatwa
calling for Rushdie's
assassination issued by Iran's Islamic government for his having authored
The Satanic Verses
. In 2003, in
a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer said:
"Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy
into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.
Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not
only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. From 1980 until his death
in 2007, he contributed to Democratic Party candidacies for political office. Norman Mailer, pace the
other reviews, is not a one-sided racist. Mailer's description makes the Negro out to be "hated from
outside and therefore hating himself." Thus, "the Negro was forced into the position of exploring those
moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns as delinquent or evil or
immature or morbid or self-destructive or corrupt." So he makes them out to be a demeaned, forsaken
group who, with nothing else to turn to, created a counter culture. This is absolutely a stereotype, but it
contains something true. At the same time, this is labeled "Superficial Reflections on the Hipster".
Superficiality and stereotyping practically imply each other. And since Mailer likens the Hipster with the
Negro, we should pause before dismissing his work as patently "racist." But as a superficial reflection --
superficiality is not necessarily a bad quality -- this essay does fall slightly short. For one, the author does
not necessarily acknowledge the limits of such a superficial tact, a failure evidenced by the "omniscient
voice" of his narrative. He treats "the Negro" and "the Hip" as Platonic forms, something he can access by
plumbing the psychoanalytic depths of their alleged earthly manifestations. But as Mailer correctly states
about Hipsters, there is nothing remotely metaphysical (Mailer says "a priori") about the hip intellect. A
priori metaphysics can crack. In fact, as society scrutinised "the Negro" more, as has been done since
1957, society began to discover that it was nothing at all -- there is no thing that is "Negro." Therein lies
the danger of the a priori metaphysician of culture: you might be analysing some concept that has no
application. We already knew this from Kant: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind." Nevertheless, this is worth the read and thoroughly interesting.
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