Mind of an Outlaw (84 page)

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.

Long may good questions prevail.

The essays in this book have been previously published in the following publications:

American Review:
“Genius”;
Big Table:
“Quick Evaluations on the Talent in the Room”;
Dissent:
“From Surplus Value to the Mass Media,” “Introducing Our Argument,” “The White Negro,” “What I Think of Artistic Freedom”;
Esquire:
“The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst,” “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy,” “The Mind of an Outlaw,” “Our Man at Harvard,” “Some Children of the Goddess,” “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” “Suicides of Hemingway and Monroe”;
George:
“Clinton and Dole: The War of the Oxymorons”;
The Harvard Advocate:
“Comment on the Passing of George Plimpton”;
International Herald Tribune:
“Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?”;
Look:
“Looking for the Meat and Potatoes—Thoughts on Black Power”;
Michigan Quarterly Review:
“The Hazards and Sources of Writing”;
The Nation:
“On Sartre’s God Problem”;
National Guardian:
“A Credo for the Living”;
The New Republic:
“By Heaven Inspired”;
New York:
“Before the Literary Bar”;
The New York Review of Books:
“Discovering Jack H. Abbott,” “The Election and America’s Future,” “Punching Papa,” “Tango, Last Tango,” “The White Man Unburdened”;
The New York Times Book Review:
“Huckleberry Finn, Alive at One Hundred”;
The New York Times Magazine:
“Christ, Satan, and the Presidential Candidate: A Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains”;
One:
“The Homosexual Villain”;
Parade:
“All the Pirates and People,” “Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment”;
Partisan Review:
“Black Power”;
Playboy:
“The Crazy One,” “Immodest Proposals”;
Vanity Fair:
“How the Wimp Won the War,” “Review of
American Psycho”; Video Review:
“Marilyn Monroe’s Sexiest Tapes and Discs”;
Village Voice:
“Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part I,” “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President: Part II,” “On Lies, Power, and Obscenity,” “Raison d’Être”;
The Big Empty
(New York: Nation Books, 2006): “Myth Versus Hypothesis”;
Cannibals and Christians
(New York: Dial, 1966): “Our Argument as Last Presented”;
The Prisoner of Sex
(New York: Little, Brown, 1971): “Millett and D. H. Lawrence”;
The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
, edited by J. Michael Lennon (New York: Random House, 2003): “Review of
The Corrections
,” “Social Life, Literary Desires, Literary Corruption”;
Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction
, edited by Will Blythe (Boston: Back Bay, 1998): “At the Point of My Pen.”

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

I would like to thank the Mailer family and David Ebershoff, Random House executive editor, for the generous opportunity to edit this volume. A nod of deep friendship and gratitude goes to J. Michael Lennon, authorized biographer of Norman Mailer (
Norman Mailer: A Double Life
, 2013), who was particularly gracious and cogent in providing strategic inclusion suggestions as well as acquisition strategies. Caitlin McKenna, Random House editorial assistant, was exceptionally helpful in assisting with the assembly and transmission of essays and other critical segments. My special thanks and warm appreciation to M. Allison Wise, managing editor of
The Mailer Review
, for her painstaking and meticulous assistance in locating challenging, elusive manuscripts and assisting in generating faithful copy text. And to my wife, Cary Sipiora, my inexpressible gratitude for her unrelenting support.

PHILLIP SIPIORA

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh
New York Times
bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.