A couple of days ago, I commented on the preposterous arrest in Sudan of the English schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons, whose crime had been to allow her 6- and 7-year-old students name a Teddy bear “Muhammad.” At the time, it seemed as if poor Ms. Gibbons, a 54-year-old mother of two, might get 40 lashes or six months in jail for “insulting the prophet.” In the event, she was sentenced to a 15-day prison term, better than feared, though just think how much you would enjoy spending two weeks in a Sudanese jail. It was disgusting that she was arrested at all, of course, but today I see that the Sudanese racaille (if I may poach a French word from Nicolas Sarkozy) have taken to the streets in droves to protest the “lenient verdict.” According to an English paper,

“Thousands of Islamic fanatics wielding clubs and knives are marching through the streets of Khartoum demanding the execution of teddy bear teacher Gillian Gibbons.”

“Shame, shame on the U.K.,” protesters chanted,” as they called for Miss Gibbons’ execution, saying, “No tolerance: Execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

Others shouted: “Those who insult the Prophet of Islam should be punished with bullets.”

Nice, eh? It used to be that British navy would intervene to protect its citizens. Earlier this year, when the Iranian navy kidnapped 15 British sailors, England showed the world that it no longer had the spine to defend even its military personnel, let alone civilians. I hope Gillian Gibbons survives her ordeal without harm. I hope that she then has sense enough to return home. Whitehall has made it clear exactly what they will do to protect British subjects: absolutely nothing.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s incendiary book The Closing of the American Mind. By some stupendous oversight on the part of the management, I was asked to review the book for The New York Times Book Review. They didn’t make that sort of mistake again, especially after Bloom’s book became a number-one bestseller. In fairness to the Times editors, though, they couldn’t have known that such a peculiar book by a then-obscure professor of philosophy was poised to become important ammunition on (for them) the wrong side of the culture wars. (Nor for that matter could they known that I would do my bit for the cause with books like Tenured Radicals. Indeed, part of the genius of the title of Bloom’s book was its ambiguity. I remember visiting a liberal friend when I was toting around galley’s of the book. “The Closing of the American Mind, eh?” she said. “What’s that about, Reagan’s America?” Well, not quite, Virginia, but you see where she was coming from.

Anyway, the anniversary of Bloom’s book has occasioned a few events and celebrations, including a symposium organized jointly by The Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and The New Criterion. We published a selection of the papers in the November issue of The New Criterion, and if you missed the CSPAN broadcast of the conference itself, you can watch the proceedings here.

What’s in a name? asked Juliet. Quite a lot, as she found to her sorrow, notwithstanding the constant redolence of that botanical efflorescence we happen to call a rose but others might call une églantine, die Rose, la rosa. I expect that Gillian Gibbons, a 54-year-old British school teacher working in Sudan, knows just how Juliet felt. A weirdo by any other name, she must be thinking to herself, would be as strange. Miss Gibbons was busy bringing literacy and civility to 6- and 7-year-old Sudanese children when she made her big mistake. She let her pupils name a teddy bear. And the name they chose, poor darlings, was “Muhammad.”

Meet Muhammad

It was, Miss Gibbons protested, an “innocent mistake.” (”Mistake”? What mistake? For Christ’s sake–if I may so put it–we’re talking about children naming a stuffed animal!) Several parents complained that naming Teddy Muhammad was “an insult to Islam’s prophet.” Result: Miss Gibbons was arrested, put into a Sudanese jail (think about that, mon brave), and is waiting to discover her fate, which, according to a BBC report, might include 6 months in the cooler, a fine, or 40 lashes. A spokesman for the British embassy assured reporters that “We are in contact with the authorities here and they have visited the teacher and she is in a good condition.”

Reassuring, isn’t it?

Actually, Miss Gibbons may be getting off lightly. Consider the fate of a 19-year-year-old Saudi woman who was gang-raped by 7 men. She, too, was tossed into jail and faces 200 lashes. Her crime? Being in the company of a man not her husband.

Not only women need fear the lash. Consider Massoud Bastan, a young Iranian journalist who is in jail an faces 74 lashes for . . . Well, it’s hard to say. He refused to grovel to the court and ask for a pardon: that seems to be the long and the short of it. As one commentator observed, it is pointless to ask what the crime is because

in the Islamic Republic, punishment is not related to having committed a crime, but related to a refusal of being servile to the authorities and the self appointed representatives of Allah on earth. Yet, it is appropriate to ask where are the Western journalists? Should they not be standing by their colleague?

Good questions.

Under the title “The Times Does Theology,” the folks at Powerline have a post commenting on a recent Correction in The New York Times:

I always thought the New York Times’ pontifications on political and cultural subjects were a bit arrogant, but the paper has now extended its alleged omnicompetence to the realm of theology. From this morning’s Corrections section:

A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God — not different ones.

The underlying theological question is an interesting one on which I have no opinion. I doubt, though, that the Times’ pronouncement has ended the controversy.

Indeed, the Corrections page of the Times is worth scrutinizing. It is often as amusing as it is instructive to see what sorts of errors and inaccuracies our Paper of Record perpetrates which it is then called upon to correct. There is a discernible pattern to the mistakes. Earlier this year, for example, the Times reported that it had erroneously described the American Jewish Committee as a “conservative advocacy group.” In fact, the Times conceded, the AJC’s stance on issues “ranges across the political spectrum; it is not “conservative.’” Noted. And then there was the delicious correction that appeared in January 2007 about a story that appeared in April 2006 about a woman in El Salvador who received a thirty-year jail sentence for, according to the Times, having a clandestine abortion. In fact, the paper finally acknowledged, the court record revealed that the woman in question was given the thirty-year sentence for homicide. Right. It reminds me of an item from an unnamed American newspaper that the artist Edward Burne-Jones reported to one of his correspondents: “Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the revd. James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago.”

Pity the Anglican Church. Not only is it disintegrating from within–what will they do with all those gorgeous churches now that no one uses them?–but it has leaders whose embrace of politically correct pap is as thoroughgoing as it is contemptible. Consider Rowan Williams, since 2002 the Archbishop of Canterbury. The London Times reports today that the Archbishop recently opined in an interview with Emel “The Muslim Lifestyle Magazine” that “the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.” Maybe so, maybe so. But then Imperial Britain is a hard act to follow. Everywhere it went, it brought the rule of law, better education, better physical infrastructure, better health and hygiene, improved literacy, greater freedom, and greater civility.

Somehow, though, I suspect that is not what Archbishop Williams would care to emphasize. According to the Times, American foreign policy–its efforts to intervene overseas by “clearing the decks” with a “quick burst of violent action”–has led to “the worst of all worlds”. Gee. The worst of all worlds? Worse than one in which the United States had not intervened violently? Worse, for example, than a world presided over by Nazis, Japanese militarists, or Communist thugs?

But according to Archbishop Williams, the problem is not just America’s actions but also its attitude, its “misguided sense of its own mission,” the “chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”.

Not that the Archbishop confined his criticism to America. In his view, “the West” as a whole was “fundamentally adrift”: “Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.”

Right. I am perfectly willing to concede that there is plenty to criticize about American society and, indeed, about Western society writ large. But that is a trivial observation. Every society in history has been gravely flawed. But compared to all the rest, Western society–and in the last century, pre-eminently American society–has been (as Churchill said of democracy) the least worst of all, by far.

Archbishop Williams occupies a serious office. But he is not a serious man. I think, for example, of the moment back in 2000 when he was Archbishop of Wales and he recommended the TV cartoon characters Homer and Marge Simpson to his flock as admirable exceptions to the entertainment industry’s usual unromantic treatment of the institution of marriage.

Or think of his admonition, shortly after his installation at Canterbury, that America should recognize that terrorists, too, can “have serious moral goals.” Not that he, Dr. Rowan Williams, advocated, condoned, or otherwise gave countenance to the actions of terrorists. Heavens no! Dr. Williams is frank in admitting that he does not like what terrorists do. But even terrorists, Dr. Williams counsels, are people. And although they express themselves in ways we find, er, distasteful–Dr. Williams even allowed himself the daring word wicked–still, it is possible that, in their own way, terrorists are pursuing “an aim that is shared by those who would not dream of acting in the same way, an aim that is intelligible or desirable.” Got that? Terrorists may be misguided, poor chaps, but even terrorists, although they have an unfortunate propensity for incinerating thousands of innocent men, women, and children–despite all that, even terrorists dream of a better world.

The same, of course, could be said of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and other proponents of unorthodox routes to utopia. Each, in his own way, believed he was working to make the world a better place. If that happened to involve the extermination of the bourgeoisie, the Jews, or anyone who had glasses and could read–well, you cannot make an omelette without etc., etc.

Really, though, Dr. Williams was only incidentally interested in terrorists. The real focus of his censure, then as now, was that ominous bastion of evil, the United States. The problem–one problem–is that America has not been sufficiently sensitive in its response to al Qaeda. Many policy makers in America have failed to appreciate the “serious moral goals” of Mohammed Atta and his pals. (Come to that, many ordinary citizens have also failed on that score.) Not, again, that Dr. Williams approves of young men slitting the throats of airline pilots and steering airliners into densely populated buildings. No, no. Dr. Williams is against violence. (I think of that stirring poem by Hilaire Belloc, “The Pacifist”: “Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight./ But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.”)

Back before the war with Iraq even began, Dr. Williams warned that the conflict would be “immoral and illegal.” Similarly, he argued that, in its indelicate response to al Qaeda, America “loses the power of self-criticism and becomes trapped in a self-referential morality.”

Eh what? “Self-criticism”? “Trapped in a self-referential morality”? As Dr. Williams might recall, the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that “to everything there is a season.” A time for hand-wringing self-criticism, and a time for deliberate action: “a time to kill,” as the Good Book says, “and a time to heal.” When a gang of Islamist fanatics commandeer several airliners and proceed to murder 3000 people and destroy a couple billion dollars worth of real-estate, you don’t ring up your local group therapy leader.

And what about all that Ecclesiastical real estate over which Dr. Williams presides? The buildings are empty now, but maybe by giving interviews to magazines like Emel he is just sussing out the future tenants.

What is your favorite bit of Orwellian Newspeak? Near the top of my list is “affirmative action.” It’s such an emollient phrase, so redolent of cheeriness (savor the word “affirmative”) and practicality (”action”). What it really means is “discrimination on the basis of sex, skin color, or some other item in the contemporary lexicon of victimology.” But you can–almost–forget that while the pleasing phrase “affirmative action” echoes in your recollection.

I had occasion to ponder this anew last week when I attended a dinner in New York following the latest Intelligence Squared debate. If you do not live in New York, you may not know about this splendid series of live debates organized by Robert Rosenkranz and the Rosenkranz Foundation. The resolution this evening was “It’s time to end affirmative action.” To me, the question is a no-brainer. Of course it is time to end “affirmative action.” But that is not how some of my dinner partners saw it. Nor, as it happens, did the audience for the debate. Much to my surprise, they voted heartily against the resolution (44% against, 34% for, and 22% undecided). My surprise was only increased when I looked over the transcript of the debate (I had to miss the event itself): I thought those arguing for abolishing the practice of “affirmative action” had all the good arguments.

Alas, debates are not always won by the better arguments–a fact I know to my sorrow. When I participated in an Intelligence Squared debate last year on the motion “Hollywood has fueled anti-Americanism Abroad,” I went to the debate thinking my side, which argued for the motion, would lose. But then we argued so much more persuasively than the other side (or so I thought) that I awaited the audience’s vote with confident equanimity. It was a misplaced presumption, unfortunately, since we lost by a considerable margin. As I noted at the time, “in order to win an argument, you must appeal to the audience’s emotions as well as their reason. What people yearn for, what they fear, is often more important than what they think in determining how they vote.”

Notwithstanding the results of the IQ2 debate, it seems an opportune moment to step back and reflect on the phenomenon of “affirmative action” and its ideological comrade in arms, multiculturalism.

A favorite weapon in the armory of multiculturalism is the lowly hyphen. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.” (I believe something similar can be said about the feminist fad for hyphenating the bride’s maiden name with her husband’s surname. It is a gesture of independence that is also a declaration of divided loyalty.) It is curious to what extent the passion for hyphenation is fostered more by the liberal elite than the populations it is supposedly meant to serve. How does it serve them? Presumably by enhancing their sense of “self-esteem.” Frederick Douglass saw through this charade some one hundred and fifty years ago. “No one idea,” he wrote, “has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.”

The indispensable Ward Connerly would agree. Connerly has campaigned vigorously against affirmative action across the country. This of course has made him a pariah among the politically correct elite. It has also resulted in some humorous exchanges, such as this telephone interview with a reporter from The New York Times in 1997.

Reporter: What are you?

Connerly: I am an American.

Reporter: No, no, no! What are you?

Connerly: Yes, yes, yes! I am an American.

Reporter: That is not what I mean. I was told that you are African American. Are you ashamed to be African American?

Connerly: No, I am just proud to be an American.

Connerly went on to explain that his ancestry included Africans, French, Irish, and American Indians. It was too much for the poor reporter from our Paper of Record: “What does that make you?” he asked in uncomprehending exasperation. I suspect he was not edified by Connerly’s cheerful response: “That makes me all-American.”

The multicultural passion for hyphenation is not simply a fondness for syntactical novelty. It also bespeaks a commitment to the centrifugal force of anti-American tribalism. The division marked by the hyphen in African-American (say) denotes a political stand. It goes hand-in-hand with other items on the index of liberal desiderata–the redistributive impulse behind efforts at “affirmative action,” for example. Affirmative action was undertaken in the name of equality. But, as always seems to happen, it soon fell prey to the Orwellian logic from which the principle that “All animals are equal” gives birth to the transformative codicil: “but some animals are more equal than others.”

Affirmative action is Orwellian in a linguistic sense, too, since what announces itself as an initiative to promote equality winds up enforcing discrimination precisely on the grounds that it was meant to overcome. Thus we are treated to the delicious, if alarming, contradiction of college applications that declare their commitment to evaluate candidates “without regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or national origin” on page 1 and then helpfully inform you on page 2 that it is to your advantage to mention if you belong to any of the following designated victim groups. Among other things, a commitment to multiculturalism seems to dull one’s sense of contradiction.

The whole history of affirmative action is instinct with that irony. The original effort to redress legitimate grievances–grievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow–have mutated into new forms of discrimination. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee because blacks were openly barred from war factory jobs. But what began as a Presidential Executive Order in 1961 directing government contractors to take “affirmative action” to assure that people be hired “without regard” for sex, race, creed, color, etc., has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities. White is black, freedom is slavery, “without regard” comes to mean “with regard for nothing else.”

Had he lived to see the evolution of affirmative action, Tocqueville would have put such developments down as examples of how in democratic societies the passion for equality tends to trump the passion for liberty. The fact that the effort to enforce equality often results in egregious inequalities he would have understood to be part of the “tutelary despotism” that “extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.”

Multiculturalism and “affirmative action” are allies in the assault on the institution of American identity. As such, they oppose the traditional understanding of what it means to be an American–an understanding hinted at in 1782 by the French-born American farmer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his famous image of America as a country in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” This crucible of American identity, this “melting pot,” has two aspects. The negative aspect involves disassociating oneself from the cultural imperatives of one’s country of origin. One sheds a previous identity before assuming a new one. One might preserve certain local habits and tastes, but they are essentially window-dressing. In essence one has left the past behind in order to become an American citizen.

The positive aspect of advancing the melting pot involves embracing the substance of American culture. The 1795 code for citizenship lays out some of the formal requirements.

I do solemnly swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, or (B) to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law . . .

For over two hundred years, this oath had been required of those wishing to become citizens. In 2003, Samuel Huntington tells us in his book Who We Are, federal bureaucrats launched a campaign to rewrite and weaken it.

I shall say more about what constitutes the substance of American identity in a moment. For now, I want to underscore the fact that this project of Americanization has been an abiding concern since the time of the Founders. “We must see our people more Americanized,” John Jay declared in the 1780s. Jefferson concurred. Teddy Roosevelt repeatedly championed the idea that American culture, the “crucible in which all the new types are melted into one,” was “shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day.”

It is often said that America is a nation of immigrants. In fact, as Huntington points out, America is a country that was initially a country of settlers. Settlers precede immigrants and make their immigration possible. The culture of those mostly English-speaking, predominantly Anglo-Protestant settlers defined American culture. Their efforts came to fruition with the generation of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison.

The Founders are so denominated because they founded, they inaugurated a state. Immigrants were those who came later, who came from elsewhere, and who became American by embracing the Anglophone culture of the original settlers. The English language, the rule of law, respect for individual rights, the industriousness and piety that flowed from the Protestant work ethic–these were central elements in the culture disseminated by the Founders. And these were among the qualities embraced by immigrants when they became Americans. “Throughout American history,” Huntington notes, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.”

Justice Louis Brandeis outlined the pattern in 1919. Americanization, he said, means that the immigrant “adopts the clothes, the manners, and the customs generally prevailing here . . . substitutes for his mother tongue the English language” and comes “into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate[s] with us for their attainment.” Until the 1960s, the Brandeis model mostly prevailed. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish groups, understanding that assimilation was the best ticket to stability and social and economic success, eagerly aided in the task of integrating their charges into American society.

The story is very different today. In America, there is a dangerous new tide of immigration from Asia, a variety of Muslim countries, and Latin America, especially from Mexico. The tide is new not only chronologically but also in substance. First, there is the sheer matter of numbers. More than 2,200,000 legal immigrants came to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1990s alone. The number of illegal Mexican immigrants is staggering. So is their birth rate. Altogether there are more than 8 million Mexicans in the U.S. Some parts of the Southwest are well on their way to becoming what Victor Davis Hanson calls “Mexifornia,” “the strange society that is emerging as the result of a demographic and cultural revolution like no other in our times.” A professor of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico gleefully predicts that by 2080 parts of the Southwest United States and Northern Mexico will join to form a new country, “La Republica del Norte.”

The problem is not only one of numbers, though. Earlier immigrants made–and were helped and goaded by the ambient culture to make–concerted efforts to assimilate. Important pockets of these new immigrants are not assimilating, not learning English, not becoming or thinking of themselves primarily as Americans. The effect of these developments on American identity is disastrous and potentially irreversible.

Such developments are abetted by the left-wing political and educational elites of this country, whose dominant theme is the perfidy of traditional American values. Hence the passion for multiculturalism and the ideal of ethnic hyphenation that goes with it. This has done immense damage in schools and colleges as well as in the population at large. By removing the obligation to master English, multiculturalism condemns whole sub-populations to the status of permanent second-class citizens. By removing the obligation to adopt American values, it fosters what the German novelist Hermann Broch once called a “value vacuum,” a sense of existential emptiness that breeds anomie and the pathologies of nihilism.

As if in revenge for this injustice, however, multiculturalism also weakens the social bonds of the community at large. The price of imperfect assimilation is imperfect loyalty. Take the movement for bilingualism. Whatever it intended in theory, in practice it means not mastering English. It has notoriously left its supposed beneficiaries essentially monolingual, often semi-lingual. The only “bi” involved is a passion for bifurcation, which is fed by the accumulated resentments instilled by the anti-American multicultural orthodoxy. Every time you call directory assistance or some large corporation and are told “Press One for English” and “Para español oprime el numero dos” it is another small setback for American identity.

Meanwhile, many prominent academics and even businessmen come bearing the gospel of what John Fonte has dubbed “transnational progressivism”–an anti-patriotic stew of politically correct ideas and attitudes distinguished partly by its penchant for vague but virtuous-sounding abstractions, partly by its moral smugness. It is a familiar litany. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum warns that “patriotic pride” is “morally dangerous” while University of Penn PresidentAmy Gutmann [n.b., thanks to the reader who corrected me on this: see below] reveals that she finds it “repugnant” for American students to learn that they are “above all, citizens of the United States” instead of partisans of her preferred abstraction, “democratic humanism.” New York University’s Richard Sennett denounces “the evil of a shared national identity” and concludes that the erosion of national sovereignty is “basically a positive thing.” Cecilia O’Leary of American University identifies American patriotism as a right-wing, militaristic, male, white, Anglo, and repressive force, while Peter Spiro of Temple University says it “is increasingly difficult to use the word ‘we’ in the context of international affairs.”

Of course, whenever the word “patriotism” comes up in left-wing circles, there is sure to be some allusion to Samuel Johnson’s observation that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Right on cue, George Lipsitz of the University of California sniffs that “in recent years refuge in patriotism has been the first resort of scoundrels of all sorts.”

Naturally, Dr. Johnson’s explanation to Boswell that he did not mean to disparage “a real and generous love of our country” but only that “pretended patriotism” that is a “cloak for self-interest” is left out of account.

The bottom line is that the traditional ideal of a distinctive American identity, forged out of many elements but unified around a core of beliefs, attitudes, and commitments is now up for grabs. One academic epitomized the established attitude among our left-liberal elites when she expressed the hope that the United States would “never again be culturally ‘united,’ if united means ‘unified’ in beliefs and practices.”

Nor is this merely an academic crotchet. Many politicians–and, as Robert Bork shows earlier in this volume, many courts–have colluded in spreading the multicultural gospel. The nation’s motto–E pluribus unum–was chosen by Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams to express the ideal of faction- and heritage-transcending unity. America forged one people out of many peoples. Vice President Al Gore interpreted the tag to mean “Within one, many.” This might have been inadvertence. It might have been simple ignorance. It might have been deliberate ideological provocation. Which is worst?

The combined effect of the multicultural enterprise has been to undermine the foundation of American national identity. Huntington speaks dramatically but not inaptly of “Deconstructing America.” What he has in mind are not the linguistic tergiversations of a Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault but the efforts–politically if not always intellectually allied efforts–to disestablish the dominant culture by fostering a variety of subversive attitudes, pieces of legislation, and judicial interventions. “The deconstructionists,” Huntington writes,

promoted programs to enhance that status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth-country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the “peoples” of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America’s overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American identity that had been gradually created over three centuries.

Taken together, Huntington concludes, “these efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”

The various movements to deconstruct American identity and replace it with a multicultural “rainbow” or supra-national bureaucracy have made astonishing inroads in the last few decades and especially in the last several years. And, as Huntington reminds us, the attack on American identity has counterparts elsewhere in the West wherever the doctrine of multiculturalism has trumped the cause of national identity. The European Union–whose unelected leaders are as dedicated to multicultural shibboleths as they are to rule by top-down, anti-democratic bureaucracy–is a case in point. But the United States, the most powerful national state, is also the most attractive target for deconstruction.

It is a curious development that Huntington traces. In many respects, it corroborates James Burnham’s observation, in Suicide of the West (1964), that “liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature.

Barack Hussein Obama thinks he deserves a tax increase. That’s OK with me. In fact, I rather like the idea of a tax increase for him. But why should the rest of us have to feel his pain? Quoth the Senator:

“I think the best way to approach this is to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like myself are paying a little bit more and people who are in need are protected.”

Notice the weasel word “adjust.” What Barack Hussein Obama means is “raise.” You can be quite sure that by “adjust” he doesn’t wish to lower the cap on payroll taxes. No, he wants to take more of your money. But even in the process of proposing to increase taxes on hundreds of thousands of middle-class families, he injects a rhetorical lubricant to ease the shock. If there were a little truth bubble floating above these “we-want-more-of-your-money” politicians, it would read something like this: “Yes, we’re planning to lift unspecified thousands of dollars out of your pocket and spend it as if it were our money, but we are going to justify that bit of statist expropriation by ‘adjusting’ upward the volume on the knob marked ‘liberal guilt.’”

It’s quite a spectacle. The U.S. economy has been humming along nicely, thanks partly–maybe largely–to the tax cuts President Bush pushed through a few years ago. Now that there is building pressure on the economy from the weak dollar and the subprime scandal and some pundits are mouthing the “R” word, we have a crop of Presidential hopefuls proposing policies that would further curtail liquidity, place ever more initiative in the hands of the state (i.e., that apparatus they themselves hope to run), and generally foster the gloominess that helps to precipitate the recession they keep warning about. “The power to tax,” observed John Marshall, “is the power to destroy.” That was in 1819. Why haven’t we learned that lesson yet?

It used to be said that experience was the great teacher. But the stampede to raise taxes, and thereby choke the economy (incidentally hurting the people one pretends to be helping), shows that (as T.S. Eliot said in another context) when it comes to fiscal realities, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.”

The news that the novelist Norman Mailer died earlier today at the age of 84 has already elicited little hagiographical murmurs. That hushed choir will doubtless turn into a deafening chorus of praise in the coming days and weeks–how much space do you suppose The New York Times will devote to its (I predict) front-page obituary? What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to commemorate the polyphiloprogenitive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits? “Genius” will be paraded early and often, I’ll wager, as will the extended family of adjectives emanating from the word “provocative.” One early notice described Mailer as “the country’s literary conscience and provocateur” and characterized The Armies of the Night as one of his (presumably many) “masterworks.” Perhaps, before the celebratory paeans entirely drown out critical judgment, there is room for a few dissenting observations.

Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. It didn’t start out that way. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, “a nice Jewish boy,” as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. It was a background from which he had long endeavored to escape. “Mailer,” Norman Podhoretz observed in his memoir Ex-Friends, “would spend the rest of his life overcoming the stigma of this reputation as a ‘nice Jewish boy’ by doing as an adult all the hooliganish things he had failed to do in childhood and adolescence.” After a dutiful childhood, Mailer matriculated at Harvard in 1939. His parents had made a “big sacrifice” to send their intense, studious son to the elite institution, and he was “not going to let them down.” Although he did some writing in college, he majored in aeronautical engineering, graduating in 1942. In 1944, he married for the first of six times; and then from 1944 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines and Japan.

In 1948, when he was only twenty-five, Mailer’s war novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published. For most critics of war fiction, The Naked and the Dead ranks somewhere between the novels of Herman Wouk (e.g., The Caine Mutiny) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity). It is more pretentious, but less well-crafted, and its narrative develops less momentum. Its heavy-handed psychologizing and use of four-letter words were thought smart in 1948; most contemporary readers will find them quaint if not downright embarrassing. Nevertheless, The Naked and the Dead was an immediate and immense success. The novel catapulted its young author to an atmosphere of wealth, adulation, and celebrity from which he has yet to descend. Whatever else can be said about it, the reception of The Naked and the Dead is an object lesson in the perils–what it might please Norman Mailer to call the “existential” perils–of early success. Mailer himself has never recovered.

For readers who did not witness his elevation to the role of literary-political culture hero, it is difficult to appreciate the awe with which Norman Mailer was regarded by the literary and academic establishment from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. A typical paean is Diana Trilling’s convoluted 1962 essay on “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which concludes by comparing Mailer to the prophet Moses “with a stopover at Marx.” “His moral imagination,” Mrs. Trilling assured her readers, “is the imagination not of art but of theology, theology in action.”

Which means . . . ? Very little, alas, although talk of “theology in action” (as distinct, perhaps, from “theology asleep”?) doubtless sparked interesting vibrations in susceptible souls. As Mailer more or less admitted in what is probably his best-known collection, Advertisements for Myself (1959)–a title that could be used again for his complete works–he was a sucker for mystification: “mate the absurd with the apocalyptic, and I was captive.”

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway–booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads–he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

In 1955, Mailer helped to found The Village Voice, which, though always riven by internal dissension, quickly became a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture. By the mid-1960s, he had emerged as an established antiestablishment guru. The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)–Mailer’s bloated, “non-fiction novel” about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and his own role in the demonstration–bore witness to his gifts for literary demagoguery. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book followed Truman Capote’s example in In Cold Blood (1966), deliberately blurring fact and fiction, a procedure gratefully seized upon by a public eager to sacrifice truth to the demands of ideological zeal. Indeed, it was a procedure that characterized the intellectual–or, more accurately, the anti-intellectual–temper of a generation battened on mind-altering drugs and taught to regard any appeal to facts as an unacceptably “authoritarian” threat. Among anti-Vietnam War radicals–which is to say, among nine out of ten establishment intellectuals–Mailer’s exercise in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas, and duly picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sample adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: “Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality.” From the writer Nat Hentoff: “Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America.”

In fact, like almost all of Mailer’s books, The Armies of the Night is badly written–almost preposterously so. It has often been observed that Mailer’s early literary heroes were Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But his own writing totally lacks Hemingway’s lapidary craftsmanship and Dos Passos’s cinematic control. When The Armies of the Night was serialized in Harper’s, to the great excitement of the editor, Willie Morris, a young copy editor complained about Mailer’s prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, “I wonder what he writes like when he’s sober?” The unfortunate copy editor was promptly fired. But she was right: The Armies of the Night is a hyperbolic, self-indulgent mess that looks sillier and more naive with every year that passes. Its famous third-person narrative strikes one now as a facile gimmick: “Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. [Robert] Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent. . . . Nonetheless, to Mailer it was now mano a mano.” That “mano a mano” is about as close to Hemingway as Mailer got.

The adulation that greeted The Armies of the Night underscores an important fact about Mailer’s success. It was part of Mailer’s genius to have been able to calibrate his appetites and deficiencies precisely to the appetites and deficiencies of the moment. His obsessions have been celebrated as brave insights because they have mirrored the defining obsessions of the time. For a moment–but only for a moment–they appear to be revelatory insights. Well into the 1970s, anyway, Mailer instinctively knew exactly what register of rhetorical excess would galvanize the left-wing intellectual establishment. This talent made him an important figure in the long march of America’s cultural revolution. It proved to be immensely profitable, financially and in terms of prestige. By the time Mailer came to write The Prisoner of Sex (1971), he was widely rumored to be up for a Nobel Prize, a rumor that absorbed his full attention for the first thirty pages of that execrable book.

This is not to say that Mailer escaped criticism. His second and third novels, The Deer Park (1955) and Barbary Shore (1961), were widely attacked, as indeed was An American Dream (1965). An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual–just like Norman Mailer, you see–starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.” (Buggery–another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads–was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (”Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe–who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions–makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wanted us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

For those in the know about Mailer, the novel carried an additional frisson. A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”–and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele–clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

If Mailer’s attempted murder of his wife met with little censure, An American Dream did not escape so easily. It had its admirers. But the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, in a devastating review called “Norman Mailer’s Yummy Rump,” spoke for many when he judged it “a dreadful novel,” “infinitely more pretentious than the competition,” a book whose “awfulness is really indescribable.”

Something similar, in truth, can be said about all of Mailer’s books. The journalist Raymond Sokolov, writing about Mailer in 1968, said that “in the end it is the writing that will count.” Indeed. Sokolov that Mailer commanded “a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems,” etc. What do you think? Consider The Gospel According to the Son (1997), Mailer’s effort at rewriting the Gospel story in the first person. It is after all a tall order to write not simply about but as Jesus. “I’m one of the 50 or 100 novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” Mailer said when the book came out, explaining that “I have a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.” But breathtaking though Mailer is about The Gospel According to the Son, the apogee of his pretentiousness probably came with Ancient Evenings (1983). This phantasmagoric tale features reincarnation and is set in Egypt around 2000 BC. Mailer really indulges his fondness for buggery in this “novel,” picturing it–along with various other sex acts–taking place between and among various characters as they mutate in and out of existence. Actually having a body does not, for Mailer, seem to be a prerequisite for any form of sexual congress. The one thing that can be said for Ancient Evenings is that it displays Mailer’s great gifts for unintentional comedy. He is funniest when he waxes solemn:

“Let me tell you again. There is the magic we invoke, and the magic that calls upon us. Do you recall that Isis dropped the fourteenth piece of the body of Osiris in the salts of Yeb, and saw battles to come between Horus and Set? That was a warning to find a proper sacrifice or there would be no peace. She heard Her own voice tell Her to slaughter a bull, but as she killed the beast, Her voice also told Her that the sacrifice was not great enough to compensate for the evil powers of Set. She must add the blood of a more painful loss. She must cut off her own head, and replace it with the bull’s face.” Menenhetet now giggled.

Ancient Evenings illustrates why readers who came to Norman Mailer in the 1970s and 1980s have a difficult time understanding the reverence with which he was once regarded by literary intellectuals. Who could take the author of this book seriously?

“Even in the first years I knew Him, I do not believe He had many thoughts which were not of battle, prayer, Nefertiti, or His other true taste–the buttocks of brave men.

“After the Battle of Kadesh, however, He was like an oasis that finds new water beneath its palms and divides to a hundred trees where before there were three. Our good Pharaoh came back from Kadesh with more hunger for the sweet meat of women than any man I knew in all of my four lives. He must have gained the seed of the Hittites He killed, for his loins were like the rising of the Nile, and He could not look at a pretty woman without having her. But then, He could like ugly women as well.”

The truth is that Norman Mailer very quickly became a parody of himself. Since the Sixties was itself a ghastly caricature of political radicalism, few people at the time seemed to notice just how ridiculous Mailer’s preening exhibitionism and blustering political and sexual pronouncements were. But as the years passed and Mailer became more and more indiscriminate in his enthusiasms, Mailer the existential sage was gradually revealed as Mailer the buffoon.

The point of no return was probably Marilyn (1973), a picture-book-cum-biography of the actress Marilyn Monroe. It is difficult to say with confidence which of Mailer’s books was really his worst: he has managed to be truly awful in several distinct ways. But Marilyn was certainly his silliest book. Over the years, Mailer’s fascination with the Star Who Slept With the Kennedys developed into another of his obsessions. In John Simon’s definitive description, what Mailer gave us with Marilyn was “a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming.”

In real life, Marilyn Monroe was an unhappy sexpot, a sometimes amusing but distinctly mediocre comic actress whose air-headedness was almost as much of an attraction as her pneumatic bustline. The unhappy truth, as Clive James observed, is that Marilyn Monroe “was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.” According to Mailer, though, Marilyn Monroe was a combination of Aphrodite and Ellen Terry. On the one hand, he says, Monroe was a “superb” actress who “possessed the talent to play Cordelia”; she was “Madame Bovary and Nana all in one”; “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” On the other hand, she was “a very Stradivarius of sex,” “the angel of Sex”: “she had learned by Mind,” Mailer wrote, “to move sex forward–sex was not unlike an advance of little infantrymen of libido sent up to the surface of her skin. She was a general of sex before she knew anything of sexual war.”

No one in our sex-obsessed culture is likely to underestimate the importance of sexual gratification in the lives of most people. But Mailer advanced the idea that sexual gratification was the existential center of life. In the world according to Mailer, every activity revolves around sex. In Marilyn, he remarked in passing that “it is a rule of thumb today: one cannot buy a Polaroid in a drugstore without announcing to the world, one chance in two, the camera will be used to record a copulation of family or friends.”

One chance in two? Writing about Mailer in Commentary, Joseph Epstein observed that “it is a sign of the deep poverty of Norman Mailer’s imagination that the only climax he can imagine in any human relationship is really just that–a sexual climax.” It is all the more ironical, then, that Mailer should have displayed such a profound misunderstanding of sex. It is his one true subject, but he got it all wrong.

Indeed, if Marilyn Monroe is “the angel of Sex,” Norman Mailer is its Walter Mitty. He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example–a fictional sketch that concludes Advertisements for Myself and of which Mailer was particularly proud–the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”

Mailer’s penchant for bombast makes him a difficult writer to parody; one can never be sure that he hasn’t said something even more ridiculous than the caricature. Still, Elizabeth Hardwick caught something essential about Mailer in the parody she wrote (under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne) of The Presidential Papers (1963) for The New York Review of Books:

This 6th note was ignored by LBJ, but attacked by the Black Negroes and the FBI. One admits that a lot of it is lousy–I was having personal troubles at the time–but I still think it lousy but good. The Bitch Goddess didn’t quite get into bed with me this round, but at least she didn’t get into bed with Bill Styron either, up in his plush Connecticut retreat. All the Bitch did was blow into my ear–one of those mysterious pre-psychotic Jackie Kennedy whispers. My answer to the FBI would run this way: The existential orgasm would make atomic war and even atomic testing impossible . . .

The problem with this virtuoso performance is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the writing it set out to spoof. Its perfection as an exercise in mimicry renders it void as parody.

The unwitting comic dimension of Mailer’s writing is large. But its many sinister elements far overshadow its humor. Norman Mailer may have been unintentionally funny; he was deliberately repulsive. He was an important figure in the story of America’s cultural revolution not because people found him ridiculous but, on the contrary, because many influential people took the ideas of this ridiculous man seriously.

Mailer wrote a great deal about politics. Yet in the end, he regarded politics the way he regarded everything else, as a coefficient of sex. As he put it in Advertisements for Myself, “the only revolution which will be meaningful and natural for the twentieth century will be the sexual revolution one senses everywhere.” Even his identity as an “existentialist” was filtered through sexual anxiety: “a man is in a more existential position than a woman,” Mailer assured us: “he has to get an erection.”

In fact, in Mailer’s writing, the term “existential” and its cognates are little more than hortatory epithets, devoid of anything except sexual wish-fulfillment. He began his essay “The White Negro” by telling his readers that “the American existentialist” is “the hipster,” and then goes on to say that “to be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself–one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.” Elsewhere he wrote that “we find ourselves in an existential situation whenever we are in a situation where we cannot foretell the end.” In other words, Mailer’s conception of existentialism is scarcely more substantial (though it is a lot less amusing) than Delmore Schwartz’s wry observation that existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

It is in his ideas about sex, especially as he relates them to the rest of life, that Mailer was influential and most destructive. It would be difficult to overstate the crudeness of his position. In 1973, in one of the countless interviews he gave, Mailer was asked for his opinion about legalized abortion. Mailer thought well enough of his answer to reprint it in Pieces and Pontifications (1982):

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

Whatever else can be said about this statement, it is the declaration of a moral cretin.

Indeed, it is one of the moral peculiarities of Mailer’s writings about sex that he seemed barely able to distinguish it from violent physical conflict. His depictions of lovemaking are almost always cast in terms of struggle and domination. There is scarcely any room for warmth or tenderness. Desire reveals itself first of all as a desire for conquest. No doubt this is one reason that sodomy features so prominently in his writings. Sex in Mailer is not so much an act of union as brute subordination. This is part of what makes it, for Mailer, so “existential.” As a macho existentialist, Mailer sees, or pretends to see, everything as a battle, a “war.” Indeed, despite his virulent anti-Vietnam War stand, “war” was one of Mailer’s abiding passions. It was part of his Hemingway pose: he likeed to bluster about life being a continual struggle–mano a mano as he might have put it–with the void.

In “A Public Notice on Waiting for Godot,” in which Mailer had the effrontery to tell us that he regards Samuel Beckett as “a minor artist,” he wrote that “man’s nature, man’s dignity, is that he acts, lives, loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way, as some part of this human exploration (and war) then we are no more than the pimps of society and the betrayers of our Self.” Destroys himself? Pimps of society? “Betrayers of our Self”? Mailer was clearly the captive of a debased and self-aggrandizing Romanticism. He manufactured melodramas to ventilate the tedium of his comfortable, bourgeois existence. It is a familiar adolescent gambit. But Mailer managed to prolong his pubescent rage into his seventies. It is what made him so productive of comic relief. It is also what underlay his fascination with violence.

Many critics believe that The Executioner’s Song (1979) is Mailer’s best book. Subtitled A True Life Novel, it tells the In Cold Blood-type story of the arrest and execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore, a psychopathic killer who spent most of his thirty-odd years in jail. Written in a clipped, unembellished style, the book contains some of Mailer’s most urgent and compelling prose. Considered as a moral document, however, The Executioner’s Song is profoundly repulsive. For Mailer does not simply delve into and display the humanity of the tortured killer he wrote about: He offers him up as a kind of hero, a courageous “outsider” who deserves our sympathy as a Victim of Society and our respect as an implacable rebel. Gary Gilmore, he said, was “another major American protagonist,” a man who was “malignant at his worst and heroic at his best,” implacable in his desire for (his clinching virtue) “revenge upon the American system.”

After Gilmore had been executed, Mailer’s attention was captured by Jack Abbott, a violent convict and self-declared Communist who began writing Mailer long “existential” letters about life in prison. Mailer loved them. He helped Abbott have them published, first in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast (1981). In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” It seems clear that Mailer’s interest helped to expedite Abbott’s release from prison: “Culture,” Mailer declared at one point, “is worth a little risk.” Abbott had scarcely set foot in New York when he stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban-American waiter. Mailer testified on Abbott’s behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adan’s family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.” A reporter from The New York Post then asked “who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans?” Questions to which Mailer had no response but bluster: “What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask?” Clearly, he did not know the answer to his own question.

Mailer’s flirtation with criminals like Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbott must be seen as the fulfillment of his celebration of the “psychopath” as an existential hero. In “The White Negro,” first published in Dissent in 1957, and reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer definitively articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the world in all his later writings, but also the view that would inform the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In tone, “The White Negro” is a panoply of “existentialist” rant. In content, it is a manifesto on behalf of moral nihilism. Mailer speaks casually about “the totalitarian tissues of American society” and invokes “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” The only authentic response to this dire situation, he says, is “to divorce oneself from society” and “to encourage the psychopath in oneself.” This is the strategy of “the hipster,” who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and [who] for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” (Mailer’s stereotypical portrayal of blacks as beastlike sexual athletes is one of the many distasteful things about the essay.)

One is Hip or one is Square, . . . one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

The rest of “The White Negro” is a glorification of the hipster and his ethic of promiscuous sex, drug-taking, and criminal violence. The hipster, Mailer explained, is part of “an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively, for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.”

Mailer conjured up the image–it is what made the essay infamous–of eighteen-year-old hoodlums who “beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.” For Mailer such behavior is acceptable, even laudable, because the psychopath, by murdering, demonstrates his “courage” and “purge[s] his violence.” To the objection that it does not take much courage to kill someone older and weaker, Mailer explained that

one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.

Mailer goes on to explain that “at bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love.” Not, however, “love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy–he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.” This is one reason that the hipster adores jazz: “jazz,” Mailer tells us, “is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation.” The hipster’s quest “for absolute sexual freedom” entails the necessity of “becoming a sexual outlaw.”

It is not only sexual morality that the hipster discards.

Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad. . . . The only Hip morality . . . is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and . . . to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need.

“The White Negro” adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. It was, as David Horowitz notes in his autobiography Radical Son, “the seminal manifesto of New Left nihilism. . . . In New Left thinking, criminals were only ‘primitive rebels.’” Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay–if it feels good, do it!–was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro,” along with some of Mailer’s other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious abettors.

How do you spell “Schadenfreude”?

Trust The New York Times to add a further dimension of meaning to Benjamin Disraeli’s comment about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” When the Audit Bureau published circulation figures for major U.S Newspapers a few days ago, you could, if you closed your eyes and listened hard, make out the strains of Chopin’s funeral march: it was bad news almost everywhere: The Wall Street Journal was down 1.53%, The Washington Post 3.23%. In its own report on the dégringolade, The New York Times, under the headline ““Circulation Plunges at Major Newspapers”, had this to say:

The New York Times, one of the few major papers whose circulation held steady over the last few reporting periods, did not emerge unscathed this time: its daily and Sunday circulation each fell 3.5 percent.

Is that so? Every other story I saw put the performance of the Times rather differently, noting a 4.5% drop in daily circulation and nearly 7.6% drop in the circulation of its Sunday paper. Whom do you believe? Now I begin to understand what the Times means by its motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.” What it means is all the news that Pinch will print (”Pinch” being the soubriquet of Sulzberger fils, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s inadvertently comical publisher). Not all the news these days is bad.

As of now, in the autumn of 2007, it costs $52,202.00 a year to be an undergraduate at New York University. That’s Fifty-Two Thousand Dollars, and then some. And what do you get for all that dough? Well, one thing you get are cultural events like today’s screening of a 53-minute film called Q2P, followed by a “discussion” with the filmmaker, Paromita Vohra. Larry Craig: listen up! Here’s something to get your feet tapping. Sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, the Center for Religion and Media, and the Council on Media and Culture, Q2P, set in Mumbai,

observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, and how gender, power, and the need to “go” make up public space and bodily well-being.

That’s right folks: four separate entities at one of our premier institutions of higher learning got together to bring us a “a day-long conference on Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet Bringing together pioneering scholars of sex and gender with leading design professionals and activists to consider, critique, and reconstruct the public rest room.”

Think about it: “pioneering scholars of sex and gender,” “leading design professionals and activists” all under one roof to talk about sex, politics, and public toilets. A load of merde, you say? Quite possibly. An outrageous travesty as well? No doubt. But think of what it means for the art of satire. Who could possibly make this up? Back in the 1950s, Kingsley Amis wrote the splendid academic satire Lucky Jim, wherein he ridiculed that pseudo-scholarship which gloried in a “funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non problems.” But how do you satirize “Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet: Outing the Water Closet”? What obloquy is severe enough for these “pioneering scholars of sex and gender,” these “leading design professionals and activists”?

I sometimes despair, concluding that these malevolent clowns have forced us to that position Wittgenstein described at the end of the Tractaus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” But I cheer up when I remember that, although phenomena like “Sex, Gender and the Public Toilet” are beneath contempt, that doesn’t mean we should fail to let the world know about them. The sponsors of this ludicrous exercise in cultural pathology thoughtfully included contact information: the email address is center.religion.media@nyu.edu, the telephone number is 212.998.7608. I hope many right-thinking people will avail themselves of that information to upbraid the people responsible for such hogwash.