Everyone Here Hates Him

[Kathleen Collins]

I find it a little difficult to believe that Clinton was involved with Mailer's tax problems, blackmailing him to write a book saying Oswald did it alone.

It would not have been Clinton's idea, as I doubt that he was keeping tabs on Norman Mailer. Clinton would have simply passed along to the IRS any instructions or suggestions to relieve Mailer of his tax problems.

According to someone presumably in a position to know, when Clinton took office, he called in chief military advisors and said, "I want to know 2 things. I want to know about the Kennedy Assassination and the existence of UFOs."

And the military chiefs responded, "You don't have high enough clearance."

According to Web Hubbell, it was Hubbell whom Clinton told to find out for him who killed JFK and about UFOs, when Clinton gave Hubbell a high-ranking job at the State Dept. Hubbell eventually reported back that he couldn't find anything out.

Thank you, Ron, for giving me this source. Some things are so arcane -- a conversation here, a quote there. I appreciate it. I'm going to write it down so I don't forget it.

Kathy

[Tim Gratz]

It is of course preposterous that anyone in the Clinton administration was a witting party to the cover-up to the extent of making a tax deal with Mailer.

This is not to say of course that all members of his administration were paragons of virtue.

[Ron Ecker]

It is of course preposterous that anyone in the Clinton administration was a witting party to the cover-up to the extent of making a tax deal with Mailer.

I imagine it was a little project of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division (if it still existed after November 1963).

The CIA pays people to sit around and come up with "preposterous" ideas and implement them. Call it busy work. And it's apparent that some of this work is related to continuing a 44-year cover-up in the JFK case. (See Reclaiming History, which on the face of it is preposterous - perhaps a clue as to who was behind it.)

[Tim Gratz]

How would Oglesby know that after "Oswald's Tale" Mailer's tax problems disappeared??

A simple explanation is that Mailer used some of the proceeds of the royalties from the book to compromise his obligation to the IRS.

On the other hand, perhaps we should add the IRS as a possible govt entity involved in the assaasination, joining the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Fish and Wildlife Commission.

[John Simkin]

Interesting article by Joan Smith in today's Guardian entitled "Farewell to Norman Mailer, a sexist, homophobic reactionary":

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2210133,00.html

When the world speaks with one voice, it almost invariably gets it wrong. Thus, Norman Mailer, who died at the weekend, has been hailed as a great, if flawed, American writer, a pre-eminent chronicler of the 20th century. But it would be closer to the truth to characterise him as an arch-conservative who pulled off a stunning confidence trick.

Mailer hated authority, homosexuality, women and almost certainly himself, producing fiction and essays that would be comically bad if they did not display addictions to violence and abusive sex. He was in his 40s when the movement against the Vietnam war brought a younger generation on to the streets; having established his credentials with his second-world-war novel The Naked and the Dead, Mailer marched with draft-resisters and wrote about it in The Armies of the Night.

Then as now, few on the left cared that he was a hysterical opponent of contraception and abortion: "I hate contraception ... it's an abomination." It was left to one or two feminist writers, notably Kate Millett in Sexual Politics, to point out the contradictions that disfigured his work. Millett regarded Mailer as "a prisoner of the virility cult", a man whose "powerful intellectual comprehension of what is most dangerous in the masculine sensibility is exceeded only by his attachment to the malaise."

That malaise often expresses itself in domestic violence. Mailer did not actually kill any of his wives (unlike the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his), but he stabbed his second wife twice in the neck and his fourth accused him of beating her. His fascination with hyper-masculinity drew him to boxing; it also resulted in tragedy when Mailer was instrumental in securing the release of a convicted killer, Jack Abbott, who then stabbed a waiter to death.

Irresponsibility on such a grand scale does not exclude someone from the status of heroic outsider, a category also available to self-destructive rock stars. But the most telling comparison is with Mailer's near-contemporary Betty Friedan, who wrote sourly in 1963 that homosexuality was spreading across America like "a murky smog".

Like Friedan, Mailer thought there were more gay men around and he blamed it on a loss of faith in the "notion of one's self as a man". He complained bitterly about the "womanisation of America", revealing his pathological fear of a femininity he regarded as passive and threatening at the same time.

More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.

[Tim Gratz]

But read WHY he said he opposed abortion: (By Roger Kimball):

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 ****.” 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 ****, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

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

If those statements are representativee, his opposition to abortion was not grounded in any moral objections thereto.

Edited November 13, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Kathleen Collins]

How would Oglesby know that after "Oswald's Tale" Mailer's tax problems disappeared??

A simple explanation is that Mailer used some of the proceeds of the royalties from the book to compromise his obligation to the IRS.

On the other hand, perhaps we should add the IRS as a possible govt entity involved in the assaasination, joining the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and the Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Don't laugh. No one escapes the IRS -- unless for a good reason. My own mother was audited 2 or 3 times and her paycheck was zilch. It came down to who was taking care of me, my mother or my father. I believed my mother was. But the IRS concluded my father took care of me because he'd send a paltry check for child support. It was ridiculous.

Remember Leona Helmsly of hotel fame? She did jail time. And I'm sure she put a lot of her money into New York, as well as charities. And as rich as she was, she couldn't even get a decent lawyer.

And there's Al Capone. They got him on tax evasion.

Don't underestimate the IRS.

Kathy Collins

Edited November 13, 2007 by Kathleen Collins

[Tim Gratz]

Kathleen you ignored my suggestion that the simplest answer was that he used part of his royalties to reach a compromise with the IRS.

Do you still assert a member of the Clinton administration was recruited into the assassination conspiracy some thirty years after the fact? The proposition is absurd on its face.

[Tim Gratz]

WFB ON NORMAN MAILER--my emphasis supplied (Not Buckley's greatest writing IMO)

How to deal with Norman Mailer? I begin by acknowledging the truth of much that is being said about him, that he was a towering figure in American literary life for sixty years, almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unrivaled in his co-existence with it. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has written that 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.”

But to delve into one’s own little portfolio, Mailer’s career intersected with my own when in September 1962 two entrepreneurs rented the Medinah Temple in Chicago, which held over four thousand people, and engaged Mailer and me to debate on the nature of the right wing in American politics. It pleased Mailer, who was complaining widely about his poverty, that Playboy magazine immediately contracted to publish his and my opening statements in their next issue.

A few years later I had Mailer as a guest on Firing Line, and one critic was deeply inquisitive about the meaning of the engagement. “Seeing Buckley and Mailer on the tube yesterday I can’t get over it,” Mel Lyman wrote in the New York Avatar. “The greatest representation of the two extremes I’ve seen in a long time. Conservative meets liberal, right meets left, before meets after. Buckley didn’t know what the f—-Mailer was talking about, it just jammed his computer, he even had to resort to childish insults to try and keep up his end.” (“Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books,” I had said.)

“Buckley is a computer,” Lyman went on, “Mailer is a man. A man can only be categorized and computerized to a certain extent, the greater part of him lies out of definition. Greatness can be recognized only. That is why Buckley went all to pieces when Mailer spoke of the ‘greatness’ he saw in Castro. Buckley could only see the un-American activities accredited to the man, Castro. He could only see him as far as he could define his actions. Mailer could look right at him, like a child, and see a great force, an inner strength, a fearlessness that had nothing to do with right or wrong. . . .))

“I love Buckley,” this disciple of Mailer wrote, “but he makes me very sad, he’s completely mastered the art of living in prison but Mailer’s mastered the art of what you do after you get out, and Buckley doesn’t even know there is an out.”

Mailer took two practical steps that bounced off our Chicago exchange. The first was to sue Playboy—on the grounds that, manifestly, his essay was worth more than the $5,000 paid to us. That done, he said he wished to explore with me a string of Buckley-Mailer debates throughout the country, “beginning in Carnegie Hall.”

This initiative brought him and his wife to our house in Stamford, Connecticut, and I took him out on my 36-foot sailboat. He could not believe it when I turned the wheel over to him, pointing out a course to the end of the harbor. It was very cold by the time we had finished dinner, but he ordered his wife Jeannie to the back of his motorcycle, and they zoomed off to Brooklyn.

There were other episodes. There was the night in New York when, after dinner, I said I needed to file a column, but he wasn’t ready to go home, pursuing us to our apartment nearby. Wobbling up the steps, his then current wife passed out and was placed by my wife in a spare bedroom. Norman climbed upstairs with me to my study, and spoke disparagingly of the column as, paragraph after paragraph, I gave it to him to read. Finally he said it was time to go home, and we walked down the stairs to where his wife had been taken. But rousing her from that sleep defied any resource we were willing to deploy, so Norman announced fatalistically that, never mind, she would eventually rise, go out the street door, and get a cab. “Me, I’m going home, Slugger,” as he called my wife. I helped him find a cab.

###

But Norman Mailer is a towering writer! So why this small talk? Perhaps because it no longer seems so very small. I said about Mailer a few years ago that he created the most beautiful metaphors in the language. I reiterate that judgment. But I go further, wondering out loud whether the obituaries are, finally, drawing attention to the phenomenon of Norman Mailer from the appropriate perspective. The newspaper of record says of him, as though such a profile were routine, that he was married six times, that he nearly killed one wife with a penknife, and that he had nine children. What if he had had seven wives, the seventh of them abandoned there in somebody’s bedroom, waiting for a taxi to take her home, any home?

© 2007 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

[Tim Gratz]

In one of my early posts on this thread I noted that Mailer was an admirer of Castro and charter member of the FPCC. To which Mr. Drago replied in his usual low-key manner that I was either an idiot or ignorant.

We have now seen that Mailer was indeed an admirer of Castro and one of the literary elite to add his name to one of the first if not THE first national ads for the FPCC.

I await Charles' reply why he branded me as either ignorant or an idiot over my post re Mailer.

[Charles Drago]

Norman Mailer was a leftist, Castro-admiring member of the FPCC.

But according to Charles Drago, he LIED when he stated he thought Oswald acted alone.

No, Tim. There is no evidence to support such a claim.

Based upon your statement above, you are either a mistaken or an idiot.

Charles Drago

Tim,

As always, your limited intellect and its ham-handed control over your misdirection and dirty tricks efforts does you in.

Your "claim" that was and remains unsupported is that I ever wrote -- or said, or implied, anywhere, at any time -- that Norman Mailer "LIED when he stated he thought Oswald acted alone."

So, make your choice, Segretti Light. Are you mistake-prone or intellectually challenged?

Or is it all part of your brief?

As I've noted in regard to Purvis, whatever your masters are paying you, it's too much.

Charles Drago

[Tim Gratz]

Ever notice that when people are "caught" they often resort to personal attacks?

So it is NOW Drago's position that he challenged my statement that he claimed Mailer lied when he stated he thought Castro acted alone. He says he never stated or even implied that at any time.

Well, how about in his post immediately before mine?

Here is what Drago said (regarding the possibility of admiring Mailer):

I would submit that it is not possible for an honorable, informed man or woman who knows that, beyond all doubt, JFK was killed by conspirators to admire/appreciate a person who shares that knowledge yet who wilfully denies it.

In that sentence, Drago says that Mailer shared the knowledge that JFK was killed by conspirators but willfully denied it.

Anyone who willfully denies information he knows to be true is by definition a xxxx.

It is Drago who is playing "dirty tricks" here. I am confident his original post related to my claim that Mailer was a Castro-loving charter member of the FPCC. When I was able to demonstrate that he was, Drago had to back-pedal. But his back-pedaling only demonstrates his sophistry.

He could have just admitted he erred. I have done that. So has John S. But there are some whose intellectual arrogance is so overwhelming they are constitutionally unable to admit they made a mistake. Drago is in that category. I can think of few people as arrogant as he is, who asserts that anyone who disagrees with his position is either part of the conspiracy or "cognitively impaired". It is amazing to me that with all that self-righteous arrogance boiling inside the fellow does not simply implode.

Edited November 16, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Charles Drago]

Ever notice that when people are "caught" they often resort to personal attacks?

So it is NOW Drago's position that he challenged my statement that he claimed Mailer lied when he stated he thought Castro acted alone. He says he never stated or even implied that at any time.

Well, how about in his post immediately before mine?

Here is what Drago said (regarding the possibility of admiring Mailer):

I would submit that it is not possible for an honorable, informed man or woman who knows that, beyond all doubt, JFK was killed by conspirators to admire/appreciate a person who shares that knowledge yet who wilfully denies it.

In that sentence, Drago says that Mailer shared the knowledge that JFK was killed by conspirators but willfully denied it.

Anyone who willfully denies information he knows to be true is by definition a xxxx.

It is Drago who is playing "dirty tricks" here. I am confident his original post related to my claim that Mailer was a Castro-loving charter member of the FPCC. When I was able to demonstrate that he was, Drago had to back-pedal. But his back-pedaling only demonstrates his sophistry.

He could have just admitted he erred. I have done that. So has John S. But there are some whose intellectual arrogance is so overwhelming they are constitutionally unable to admit they made a mistake. Drago is in that category. I can think of few people as arrogant as he is, who asserts that anyone who disagrees with his position is either part of the conspiracy or "cognitively impaired". It is amazing to me that with all that self-righteous arrogance boiling inside the fellow does not simply implode.

Dear Segretti Light,

Anyone with reasonable access to the evidence in the case of JFK's assassination who does not conclude conspiracy is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.

So!

To which factor(s) may we attribute Mailer's endorsement of the LN lie?

Was his access to the evidence unreasonable?

Was he cognitively impaired?

Was he complicit in the crime (and thus lying)?

I have at least part of the answer. But I have yet to share it with anyone.

Beyond "I pledge allegiance ... " Segretti Light is clueless.

Charles Drago

P.S. "Castro acted alone" ???!!!

Baby, your Freudian slip is showing.

Edited November 16, 2007 by Charles Drago

[Tim Gratz]

Charles. you are obfuscating.

You falsely denied that you ever even implied that you called Mailer a xxxx.

And now when you repeat your mantra you again call him a xxxx since whatever elsemay be said about NM, he was NOT cognitively impaired.

Then when I post your sentence calling him a xxxx you again resort to insults.

It's pathetic.

And FYI, I never ever said Castro did it alone. I agree with you on at least one thing: there were more than two people shooting at JFK.

Edited November 16, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Charles Drago]

And FYI, I never ever said Castro did it alone. I agree with you on at least one thing: there were more than two people shooting at JFK.

Dear Segretti Light,

From post 60: "So it is NOW Drago's position that he challenged my statement that he claimed Mailer lied when he stated he thought Castro acted alone."

Check your meds.

And your Freudian slip.

Charles Drago

PS Ka-CHING!

(To avoid confusion: that's the sound of a cash register ringing.)