Word: mailer
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Miami in the summer of 1972 was the scene of three political interactions between the young and the old--young Democrats and old Democrats, young Republicans and old Republicans, and demonstrators and police. Each face-off developed in its own way, and Mailer, who can't bear to consider himself as part of the old, wrestled continuously with the changing but shapeless form of the young, never quite pinning it all down at once...
Politically, Mailer was with McGovern, but he missed that old Kennedy charisma. He failed then to understand the appeal in not getting vicariously or sexually excited over a political candidate, in merely respecting a man for his decency and honesty...
LEAVING A DEMOCRATIC party behind that was trying to accomodate the young (who in fact had taken it over), Mailer went to Washington, the city of the old. Between conventions he visited Henry Kissinger, and found him not altogether unattractive, a likeness in some ways of himself. But on returning to Miami in August, he was reminded by the assembled demonstrators there of the planes sent out by Kissinger's employers--planes which "lay death in strings of defecation on the earth...
...spite of his outrage at the war, though, Mailer couldn't help admiring the way the great Republican prime-time extravaganza was handled. The timing, the celebrities, Pat, and especially the Young Voters for the President, fascinated him. For him the YVP was as a mindless, well-scrubbed cheering section, in whose faces he could...
...Mailer's term for the evil underside of Middle America, the money-conscious ugly population of bigots and haters. It is the Wad that can support the war in Vietnam, and it was the Wad that gathered in Miami in August to nominate its candidate for President...