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NORMAN MAILER
not nailed down in American life : art, civil rights, student rebellions,
public criticism in mass media. We may be living in the shadow of the
biggest hype of them all, our last con game: red-neck dynamics; liberal
rhetoric. There is the ineradicable suspicion that liberal rhetoric was
conceived by Satan to kiss the behind of something unspeakable.
Recapitulate: we have an accelerating war whose justification by
the Establishment is that there is final and historic honor in fighting
an unpopular war if the cause is grave and just. That is one possibility.
I cannot say with certainty that this cannot be so. But, in tum, who of
you can say with greater certainty that the President is not insomniac
in his vanities; and that the nation is not insane with Christ, pop art,
fiberglass, moonshots, race riots, and Hilton Hotel architecture.
The editors ask for a counter-policy. I offer it. It is to get out of
Asia. A Communist bureaucrat is not likely to do any more harm or
destroy any more spirit than a wheeler-dealer, a platoon sergeant, or a
corporation executive overseas. We have our malignancies, Communism
has theirs. Whether capitalism or Communism will finally 'prove more
monstrous is out of my capacity, or yours, to guess, but it is perhaps
evident to both of us that Communism cannot grow without exploding
its own form.
If
Marx's vision conceivably left room for some minds
to remain fertile, Stalin fixed a process of petrifying thought until post–
Marxian thought is now an ideology which cannot change remotely so
fast as reality and so must be insulated from reality by war. War is the
health of Communist ideology whereas peace and the abrupt
strifeless
acquisition of backward countries is a nightmare to ideology. For back–
ward lands which are not used up by war have wealths of primitive
lore with which to mine the foundations of ideology.
Consider: a quiet end to the war in Vietnam by the agency of a
quiet victory of the Vietcong might have given the world one more
backward Red nation with still one more tenacious home-grown stubborn
little Communist party at odds with China and in intrigue with Russia,
thereby dividing world Communism somewhat further. Now, grace of
escalation-we have the likelihood that any future alignment between
Russia and China will be a little more on China's terms; and for China
vis-a-vis North Vietnam, (which countries formerly shared the distaste
of England and Ireland for one another) we have accelerated a col–
laboration.
Of course all those Washington Pistols, all those keepers of the
chalice, will talk about India falling if we "get out." And there will be
tears in Joe Alsop's eyes.
Of
course. And I, of course, don't know. Maybe
if
Vietnam falls, so, too, falls India. So
to
what? Do we really want India.?
