[.ca] Why Are We at War? (ISBN 0812971116)

Why Are We Reading This Book?:
Does anyone care about the opinions of a senile pompous windbag like Mailer? The man is so longwinded. He couldn't tell a straightforward story if his life depended on it. Mailer should keep quiet and stick to what he knows, like writing unreadable tomes and stabbing his wife.

Still Stormin':
Norman Mailer has been a very public intellectual since "The Naked and the Dead", the best novel to come out of WWII, was published when he was twenty-five. He has spent a lifetime on the national stage, so there is some validity to the charge that his ego is immense. He also has a lot to say and what he says is worth listening to. "Why Are We at War?", thinner than most Mailer, shows all the Mailerian verbal pyrotechnics and adds to the debate that still rages a year after the United States invaded Iraq. Mr. Mailer is, beyond anything, an artist. "The Naked and the Dead" may be a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece it is. There have been fictional failures, like "Barbary Shore", and "The Gospel According to the Son", but Mailer's fiction has captured his times and has secured his position in American literature. Mailer is also a gifted essayist and journalist. He is, whether he likes the label or not, one of the original "New Journalists", a writer like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, John Sack (and an endless parade of vaguely talented imitators) who makes himself a part of the story. "The Executioner's Song", about the first execution in the United States after the Supreme Court resurrected capital punishment in the 1970's after its brief legal demise, and "The Armies of the Night", about the anti-war march on the Pentagon in 1967, are as good as that genre gets. "Why Are We at War?" is only a welterweight contender next to that pair of heavyweight champions but the writing is the same. There are also similarities to Mailer's brilliant and unique novel "Why Are We in Vietnam?". "Malignant and bristling with dots" is how Mailer once described TV. Mailer has been railing for years about the vapidity and soul-stultifying nature of the tube, how it destroys creativity, limits attention spans and inures viewers to all mannner of violence. But Mailer concedes that TV can't sanitize all violence; some televised violence is transcendent. Like Ruby shooting Oswald. Like a handcuffed Viet Cong being hauled into a Saigon street and shot in the head. And like the second plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. An existential moment-Mailer watching the second strike on TV from his house in Provincetown while speaking on the phone to his daughter in Brooklyn; she was watching the same thing live through a plate-glass window. Mailer maintains that 9/11 provided the Bush people-Cheney, Wolfowitz, the whole recycled lot of them-the jingoistic cover they needed to do what they had wanted since the fall of the Soviet Union, namely expand the American Empire. The main reason the conservatives hated Clinton so much was less about the creative placement of cigars than the notion that he was frustrating their dream, their lust, for world takeover. No words are minced, no punches pulled in "Why Are We at War?". Former infantryman Mailer takes on "flag conservatives" and "promiscuous patriots", warns that President Bush will need a good "...karmic defense attorney" and wonders if we can export democracy the same way we export Big Macs and Coca Cola. Norman Mailer. The One and Only.

Lights Out:
I've never been a huge fan of Norman Mailer--let's be frank, no one is a bigger fan of Norman Mailer than Norman Mailer--and this book did little to change that opinion. The first section of this book is exactly the kind of rhetorical meandering that gives intellectualism a bad name in some circles. Mailer spends so much time propping up his own semi-logical house of cards that he completely sidesteps the meat of the matter. Truth is lost in the dust. After a while, statements like "people who are wicked are always raising the ante without knowing quite what they're doing. Most of us are wicked to a good degree," start to sound like the blathering of Hawkeye Pierce in a sub-standard MASH episode. Part II, a critical analysis of American foreign policy in the Middle East, Arabia and Persia following 9/11, is right on the mark, though Mailer's refusal to give even the slightest benefit of the doubt to the Bush administration overwhelms some of his better points; his relentless ridicule of religion and patriotism of all kinds is also daunting, unfair and unfounded. I have a hard time granting much credibility to a man who writes "We violate Christianity with every breath we take. Equally do the Muslims violate Islam. We are speaking of a war then between two essentially unbalanced and inauthentic theologies." Mailer never hints at any argument to buttress this statement; it is simply stated as fact. To write off 60 percent of the world's population as spiritually irrelevant is bogus, to say the least. Perhaps most distressing is Mailer's increasing tendency to invoke an idealized past to support his arguments. Late in the book he complains that young children don't "read consecutively for an hour or two," as he says they used to. Again, there is nothing factual to support the statement. Odder still are the bizarre causes Mailer claims led to the supposed problem: TV commercials (not TV shows, just the commercial interruptions) and--get this--fluorescent lights in classrooms. "What characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer than they do under incandescent bulbs...if everybody seems uglier than they are normally, why then, everyone naturally grows a little depressed." Oh brother. One of my usual complaints about Mailer is the length of his books: endless. Not so with "Why Are We At War," which I read cover to cover on my lunch hour. Eight bucks seems a little steep for 111 pages that appear to contain only a few more words than a NEW YORKER feature or a front page NY TIMES story with a jump.

From the mouths of babes...:
I mean not to trivialize this inciteful book in any way by this title, rather I want to express my surprise and profound admiration for an author far more widely known for his novels than his political commentary for producing a book that has assembled the dispirit facts surrounding America's ridiculous attack on Iraq. On pages 51,52 and 53 Mailer illuminates clearly the core reason for this attack: he writes that at root, America wants fundamentaly to turn the clock back-to return America to a morally absolute, Christian society and the current government believes by making America into a new Roman Empire these ideals will come to fruition. As an old American who spent too long in the beast's belly, I completely agree with Mailer. His eblucidation of America's reasons for its current foreign policy fit perfectly with all I remember from an even more innocent America many years ago-how much more true his insights are now on the footsteps of the new millennium. He writes on page 52, "Once we become a twenty first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture". There have been mumerous reasons put forward for this terrible Iraqi attack: oil, Israel, vengence, domestic politics but I feel that Mailer's insightful analysis is the best. He readily admits that he believes that the players at the top of Bush's government don't fully realize why they are doing what they're doing-they are unthinkingly pushing a religiously conservative barrel but not fully understanding why. A hugely thoughtful book-read it and decide for yourself.

Factless Arguments...:
Why are we at war? That question is never answered by Mr. Mailer because he rambles on and on about possible theories without supplying any factual evidence. The real question that needs to be asked is: Why would you ever read this?