So I finally just finished reading this book - and it was about as awesome as "history as a novel" or "the novel as history" could possibly be.
The story recounts the march on the pentagon to protest the war in vietnam in '67. Back then people could only expect to hear what really went on about these events but from a few key media sources. Needless to say these media sources were most (not all!) -- but mostly on the side of Lyndon Johnson's administration.
For his experimental recounting of these true events from first the perspective of his own person (as a novel) and then from the perspective of a historian (part 2 of the book), Norman Mailer earned himself the Pulitzer prize and a national book award.
Here goes:
11: The Metaphor Delivered
Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America-- the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people -- if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn-- was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars controlled the locks.
Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child-- no one knows if legitimate -- and languishes in a dungeons whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin-- it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what? --the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep.
I also found this next passage pretty interesting. Mailer describes the military police (here I'm guessing described as the "working class"...) systematically brutalizing (with a particular focus on women) the hippie protesters of the war (here again I'm guessing those described as the sons and daughters of the middle class). Mailer was himself from a working class neighborhood in brooklyn NY. Here we go, page 258:
The sons and daughters of that urban middle class, forever alienated in childhood from all the good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the working class like winning a truly dangerous fist fight at the age of eight or getting sex before fourteen, dead drunk by sixteen, whipped half to death by your father, making it in rumbles with a proud street gang, living at war with the educational system, knowing how to snicker at the employer from one side of the mouth, riding a bike with no hands, entering the Golden Gloves, doing a hitch in the Navy, or stretch in the stockage, and with all, their sense of élan, of morale, for buddies are the manna of the working class: there is a God-given cynical indifference to school, morality, and job. The working class is loyal to friends, not ideas. No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit. But the working class bothered the sons of the middle class with their easy confident virility and that physical courage with which they seemed to be born -- there was a fear and a profound respect in every middle class son for his idea of that most virile ruthless indifferent working class which would eventually exterminate them as easily as they exterminated gooks. And this is not even to mention the sense of muted awe which lived in every son of the urban middle class before the true American son of the small town and the farm, that blank-eyed snub-nosed innocent, bewildered, stubborn, crew-cut protagonist of all conventional American life; the combination of his symbolic force with the working class was now in focus here.
(...As the MPs wedged through the seated hippies, clubbed them and dragged them off to jail for acts of civil disobedience.)
The story recounts the march on the pentagon to protest the war in vietnam in '67. Back then people could only expect to hear what really went on about these events but from a few key media sources. Needless to say these media sources were most (not all!) -- but mostly on the side of Lyndon Johnson's administration.
For his experimental recounting of these true events from first the perspective of his own person (as a novel) and then from the perspective of a historian (part 2 of the book), Norman Mailer earned himself the Pulitzer prize and a national book award.
Here goes:
11: The Metaphor Delivered
Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America-- the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people -- if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn-- was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars controlled the locks.
Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child-- no one knows if legitimate -- and languishes in a dungeons whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin-- it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what? --the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep.
I also found this next passage pretty interesting. Mailer describes the military police (here I'm guessing described as the "working class"...) systematically brutalizing (with a particular focus on women) the hippie protesters of the war (here again I'm guessing those described as the sons and daughters of the middle class). Mailer was himself from a working class neighborhood in brooklyn NY. Here we go, page 258:
The sons and daughters of that urban middle class, forever alienated in childhood from all the good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the working class like winning a truly dangerous fist fight at the age of eight or getting sex before fourteen, dead drunk by sixteen, whipped half to death by your father, making it in rumbles with a proud street gang, living at war with the educational system, knowing how to snicker at the employer from one side of the mouth, riding a bike with no hands, entering the Golden Gloves, doing a hitch in the Navy, or stretch in the stockage, and with all, their sense of élan, of morale, for buddies are the manna of the working class: there is a God-given cynical indifference to school, morality, and job. The working class is loyal to friends, not ideas. No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit. But the working class bothered the sons of the middle class with their easy confident virility and that physical courage with which they seemed to be born -- there was a fear and a profound respect in every middle class son for his idea of that most virile ruthless indifferent working class which would eventually exterminate them as easily as they exterminated gooks. And this is not even to mention the sense of muted awe which lived in every son of the urban middle class before the true American son of the small town and the farm, that blank-eyed snub-nosed innocent, bewildered, stubborn, crew-cut protagonist of all conventional American life; the combination of his symbolic force with the working class was now in focus here.
(...As the MPs wedged through the seated hippies, clubbed them and dragged them off to jail for acts of civil disobedience.)
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