Authors: Norman Mailer
Grenada may have demonstrated that the need for pride in one’s patriotism was the largest unsatisfied love in American life, but the most feared nightmare in American life (now that the Evil Empire was benign) had to be the black criminal avenger whom good liberals were blind enough to let out of jail long enough to rape a white, doubtless Christian, female person. The case of Willie Horton was a real shitkicker’s stomp, and the creative author, Lee Atwater, who happened to be an aficionado of black music, would subsequently develop a tumor in his head and would die last month. Who can say how much he felt inwardly condemned for conceiving and carrying out such a caper on a people whose music he loved.
George Bush cut his thin thread of congressional liaison to the Democratic Party with Willie Horton (and that would cost him later, since Democrats do control Congress), but then, he did not know at the time that Michael Dukakis would prove lead-footed as a candidate. Bush saw the immediate world head-on. Win the presidency. Do not debate the efficacy of overkill. Swear allegiance to the first precept of Ronald Reagan:
Be as shallow as spit on a rock and you will prevail
. Bush prevailed and entered the postmodern American presidency of crack, crime, AIDS—we have the list.
On August 2, 1990, however, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein entered American life.
Before it was all over, there would be people to suggest—King Hussein of Jordan, for one—that Saddam Hussein was provoked into crossing the border by Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the State Department, and presumably the CIA.
This is, of course, paranoid, which by writer’s rule of thumb means not within the parameters of my piece. We will assume for the purposes of this reconnoiter through recent history that it was no more than George Bush’s good luck for Saddam Hussein to misread a few signs en route to gobbling the Kuwaitis. That sort of error would not have been difficult to make. Saddam was endangered at home by problems as deep as the need of other people to see him dead, and he was surrounded by sycophants who would never indicate that an unhappy matter could be the leader’s fault, a condition which is tonic for a leader’s vanity, but does feed elephantiasis of the ego.
In addition, Saddam was a poet. “The mother of all battles” is a metaphor primeval enough to reach into the nightmares of every infantryman arrayed against him. No poet ever believes he or she is incapable of world-shaking moves. When you know the power of the word, you depend on it.
To strengthen this mix, the president of Iraq was a degenerate gambler. He had played all his life with table stakes larger than he could afford. That was his strength. Few men gain a sense of personal power greater than does a degenerate gambler who has not been destroyed by his vice. One tends to believe that God, or Providence, or some mysterious demiurge like Lady Luck, is enraptured with your presence on earth.
Hitler held to such beliefs; there may be no other explanation for him. So, by an extrapolation of his imagination, George Bush was able to speak of Saddam Hussein as Hitler, and that was certainly a page taken from the gnomic maxims of Ronald Reagan—a Muslim Hitler who comes to the stage as your foe can do a lot to save the American presidency.
Now, Saddam could conceivably have become as monstrous as Hitler. For that, however, he would have had to acquire Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Emirates, then Iran and Syria (two formidably indigestible items) plus Israel—a major war—and Egypt, and North Africa. There may not be the rudiments of enough administrative ability in all of Islam to take care of such an empire, temperamentally supercharged, technologically Third World, oil-rich, and revolution-rife; yes, if you can conquer all of
that in a decade, when Saudi Arabia alone is one-quarter the size of the United States, then you are the equal of Adolf Hitler and would doubtless exhibit the same cavernous disregard for the deaths of whole millions of people; yes, putting Saddam Hussein into the equation with Hitler was also a metaphor, but then, George Bush was even competitive about that. Saddam Hussein was Hitler, QED, and there would be no Munichs for George.
On a stripped budget, Hussein could have been stopped, probably, from moving into Saudi Arabia by sending over a division of Marines with naval and air support. The troops could have been kept—as they were, in fact, for months—hundreds of miles south of the Kuwait border. It would have been effective militarily if one wanted to avoid war; it would have drawn, precisely, a line in the sand.
George Bush, however, needed war. It would take no less than that to dig into the macho meat of B-movie sentiments. As Ronald Reagan had delineated, this was the real emotional broth of a majority of voting Americans—they had, after all, put in their time growing up on the narrative reflexes of B movies, plus all the A movies that happened to be no more elevated in sentimental vision than the B movies. George Bush could avoid war by keeping a token force in Saudi Arabia—and who but the Kuwaitis would grieve for Kuwait?—but the prognosis suggested poor media potential; the action could downgrade itself into one headline blight after another. A task force underwriting such a limited peace in the Middle East would hardly be large enough to accomplish dramatic results. Incidents were bound to occur. Carousing soldiers would sooner or later be killed by Saudi policemen (which, in the absence of other news, would loom as large as a tank battle). Governing America in company with the media is like spending a honeymoon with your mother-in-law’s ear to the door. George Bush’s aim was hardly going to focus, therefore, on something as minimal as avoiding a war; his goal was to save his presidency. For that, nothing less than a major campaign would do.
Many a political leader has the ability to bear comparison to Napoleon for a season. Maggie Thatcher had the Falklands in
1982, and it gave her eight and a half more years of political life. The president, abetted by the skills of his secretary of state, had a few such weeks in August 1990: showing precisely the sort of competence Michael Dukakis had advertised as his own first virtue, Bush and Baker succeeded between them in establishing UN sanctions against Iraq. Twenty-eight countries joined the coalition. A mighty and magnetic movement toward war got under way in America against an outraged liberal defense: “No blood for oil.”
The liberals had the commonsense logic, the good ethics, the good morals, the antiwar pieties, the slogans, the demonstrations, and the inner conviction that they were on the side of the angels, but they were entering a trap larger and deeper than any of the moats ablaze with burning oil that Saddam Hussein had promised American troops. Intellectually speaking, liberal ideology had become about as stimulating as motel furniture. You could get through a night with it provided you didn’t have to hang around in the morning. Liberalism was opposed to war, poverty, hunger, AIDS, drugs, corruption in high places, crowded prisons, budget cuts, sexism, racism, and opposition to gay liberation, but it had not had an idea in twenty-five years for solving any of those problems.
George Bush, however, had heard the music of the Pied Piper. He knew that Ronald Reagan had launched America on a fiduciary way of life once practiced by Marie Antoinette and various members of the French, British, and Russian aristocracy. One spent lavishly for one’s pleasures, sold one’s cherry orchards (a transaction we are, at present, arranging with the Japanese), and looked for entertainments that would offer new zest for life not only to the people who were attending the ball but to the populace watching outside. Reagan established the principle: you cannot be a good president unless you keep the populace entertained. Reagan understood what hard workers like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter did not; he saw that the president of the United States was the leading soap-opera figure in the great American drama, and one had better possess star value. The president did not have to have executive ability nearly
as much as an interesting personality. A touch of the selfish or the unscrupulous—just a touch!—might be necessary to keep a hero interesting.
Ronnie, of course, was perfect—the nicest movie actor ever to serve up his young manhood to losing the girl to the handsome guy who might not deserve her quite as much. His presidency was delivered from that hint of insipidity, however, by the presence of Nancy. She suggested more than a few touches of the cruel, the narrow, and the exclusive. So, they were interesting. You followed them. You kept waiting over eight years, like the rest of the American public, to see one small crack in the surface of their marriage. You never succeeded, but then, the rockbottom aesthetic of the long-running soap opera is to keep the same anticipation alive.
George Bush, as the central figure in the new series, had a totally different problem. His wife was strong, decent, gracious, and an obvious helpmate, but George had to prove he was worthy of her. Overcoming the wimp burden could then prove a narrative asset. Given such parameters, he was not about to look for a draw with Saddam Hussein. Only wimps were eager to endure the headaches and the dull obsessional arguments that follow in the wake of a contest which ends without decision.
George Bush, in it for the win, knew that sanctions, now that he had them, were not likely to work. How was one to keep Saddam Hussein encysted within the embargo for the two long years, or three, that starving him out was going to take? There were already trouble spots in the UN firmament—Syria, then the Soviet Union, Morocco, Germany, and Japan. And what of such uncommitted or barely committed nations as Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, and China? Constant vigilance would be required to accomplish, yes, what? Hussein would flood the world press with pictures of starving Iraqi children. Any Red Cross food that entered the country would feed his Republican Guard. Hussein could live with famine in large parts of Iraq—he would be busy making certain that his internal enemies suffered the famine. Meanwhile, he could play upon the passions of the Palestinians, and provoke the Israelis. For that matter, when the time was propitious,
what would ever keep him from starting a war with Israel? Every Muslim leader in the coalition would then have to hold down his own people. From George Bush’s point of view, maintaining sanctions would be about as sensible as going into a brothel to announce, “I’ll be in town for the next year. I want you girls to promise that during this period you won’t pick up a venereal disease.” No, the sanctions had to be seen as an instrument, a staging area from which to prepare the shooting war.
Bush, undeniably adroit at such a game, managed to maneuver the Security Council of the UN into agreement: If Saddam did not agree to pull out of Kuwait by January 15, 1991, then the allied armies, ultimately 750,000 strong, were authorized by the UN to engage in combat with Iraq. A vote of approval still had to be taken in Congress, however, and was on January 12, 1991.
During the TV hours of watching that debate in the House and Senate, our writer-at-large was to discover surprising sentiments in himself. He was on the side of war.
He could not believe it, but he felt a lifting of his spirit. A few days later, the sentiment was confirmed by a whole sense of excitement that the war had actually begun. For a man who disliked news shows, he now listened to generals with as much as half an open ear. He knew that if he felt himself viscerally allied with this combat, then nearly all of America would be gung ho over it.
It had gone beyond morality. Some cures can be found only in the art of the binge. Was this the phenomenon at work now? Did the country need a war?
Well, it had also needed Ronald Reagan, and Grenada, and Panama, and our writer had been opposed to all three. Where, now, was the difference? Perhaps it was that the country kept getting worse and worse. All the American revolutions seemed to have degenerated into enclaves of jargoneers who were not even capable of debate if their opponent did not employ their jargon. No, it was worse than that. When one forced oneself to contemplate the phalanxes of the left, one by one, it could be seen that
no effective left remained in the country. The trade unions were bureaucratic when they were not corrupt; the sexual left was confounded, fragmented, bewildered, and AIDS was a catastrophe; little power groups fought over the remains of gay liberation. The thought began to intrude itself into the mind of many an American that, no matter how tragic individual cases might be, not everyone who came down with AIDS was necessarily entitled to a medal. Women’s liberation, contributing to no cause but its own, had grown tiresome. Their agenda was sexist: women were good, and men were no damn good.
Then there were the blacks. The Black Power movement of the sixties, intended to give blacks a more powerful sense of identity, had, in the absence of real social improvement, succeeded merely in moving whites and blacks even farther away from each other. Encapsulated among themselves (in direct relation to how poor they were), the blacks were now divided between a bare majority who worked and a socially unassimilable minority who did not. Legions of black youth were marooned in hopelessness, rage at how the rich grew obscenely rich during the eighties, and self-pity. If there was a fair possibility that black people were more sensual than white people, then the corollary was that they suffered poverty more. Sensual people who are poor can drown in self-pity as they dream of how much real pleasure they could enjoy if they had money. It is a point of view that will draw you to the luminous inner life of drugs. Afterward, the luminosity used up, the habit keeps one chasing the high through crime, for crime is not only quick money but the heady rewards of risk, at least when risk is successful. Prison, the unsuccessful consequence, comes to be seen as a species of higher education. It is a way of life for young blacks that does not gear into the working black community, and it has nothing whatever to do with the working white community. The Democratic Party had a hole in its flank from the spearhead of this problem, and the Republican Party had a hole in its head. Republican thoughts on the subject had run out long ago.
Mailer had decided that America—no matter how much of it might still be generous, unexpected, and full of surprises—was
nonetheless sliding into the first real stages of fascism. The Left, classically speaking, might be the most resolute defense against fascism, but what was the Left now able to contest? No part of it seemed able to cooperate effectively with any other part, nor was it signally ready to work with the Democratic Party for any set of claims but its own. The Democratic Party was bereft of vision and real indignation, and, given the essential austerity of the Christian ethic, the Republican Party was never wholly comfortable with the idea that Americans like themselves ought to be that rich. They grew more and more choleric about the blacks. Their unspoken solution became the righteous prescription: if those drug bastards won’t work, throw them in jail.