Word: mailer
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ONCE AGAIN Norman Mailer has charged to the middle of the national political conventions Far from the aloof commentators who dissected this year's campaign at a distance, Mailer plunged pen first into the tumult of the floor. He managed to impale nearly everyone on its point and came out grinning with a delegate's-eye-view of the American political process at work, and slyly ingenious speculations and insights into what--really--was going...
...weeks later at the Republican convention he finds all the demoniac presences he can handle. Unlike most Democrats, Mailer was not turned off by the G.O.P.'s carefully scripted agenda. In the stockholder-meeting monotony and evasive efficiency Mailer perceives the highest expression of Richard Nixon's political genius. In fact, says Mailer, if it were not for the bombing in Southeast Asia he would seriously have to consider voting for the President...
...good part of this attitude is Mailer's obvious awe of power and respect for professionalism, wherever found. But Nixon is even more in Mailer's eyes, not merely a political genius but an artist of the banal, "the Einstein of the mediocre and the inert." In an astute account of the psychological balance-sheet, Mailer sees that one egg thrown at a Republican matron by an antiwar demonstrator "can mop up the guilt of five hundred bombs" dropped on Viet...
Elsewhere he marvels at the way the Republicans filled the TV screen with nonevents, all the while knowing that "The Wad," as he calls the general public, will always watch something rather than nothing-and indeed be soothed by it. Mailer seems both fascinated by and resigned to the power of mass noncommunication. He even offers the possibility that Esso is changing its name to Exxon because it sounds like Nixon. This seems farfetched, although one recalls that 20 years ago Mr. Clean was created to resemble President Eisenhower...
...more than anything else Mailer captures an atmosphere at the Republican national convention that resembles the eerie stillness at the eye of a hurricane. There Nixon, the complete centrist, rules by relocating his middle as the storm around him changes direction...