His Punch Is Better Than Ever

By BONNIE ANGELO Norman Mailer

Q. Do you think George Bush is a wimp?

A. I don't think he's at all a wimp. His great asset is that he's perceived as a wimp -- it's always a strength for a public figure if the public misperceives him. People come in to deal with the man, or indeed a woman, with a misperception. Then their reflexes aren't ready for what's really there.

Q. So you see George Bush as . . .

A. A very canny, tough, self-centered political figure who would have huge difficulty in passing a course in philosophy.

He's a little bit like Maggie Thatcher. I don't think he's of her stature. (I must say of all the politicians I've disliked in my life, she has the most stature. Her only equal in the world was Gorbachev.) Like Thatcher, Bush is full of cant -- he believes what it is necessary for him to believe at any given moment. No philosophy whatsoever.

Q. O.K., you say these things about Bush, but how do you account for the fact that he has a 68% approval rating?

A. That's not hard. It's because -- what can I say -- the spiritual security of this nation at this point in history is analogous to the spiritual security of the battered wife. We've been through too many shocks as a country.

We had the three assassinations -- J.F.K., Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. We had a dreadful war, Vietnam. We had Watergate. We then had eight years of the Pied Piper. Who told us everything was fine, we were a great nation and not to worry.

And we now are facing a depression. We as a nation don't want to face facts. Like a battered wife who just wants a little security, a little peace and quiet. So it's in the national interest at this point for most individuals to , believe the President's a good man -- and a nice man. He may even be for all I know, but that has nothing to do with it because nice men can be incapable of solving problems just as much as bad men. Maybe more.

Q. Recently you warned that the country may be sliding toward fascism. That's pretty strong stuff. Do you see any trace of repression in our present government?

A. Totalitarianism, I'd rather say. I don't think we're ever going to have a cheap fascism of Brownshirts and goose stepping or anything of that sort. We're too American for that. We would find that ridiculous.

But there are always traces of repression. And you can find it in a Democratic government too. People who are "right-minded," you know, are always with us. But I think so long as we can move along with the economy, we're all right. It's just if there's a smash, a crash -- that's when I'm not at all optimistic about what's going to happen.

Suppose there are riots in the ghetto. The disruption could be so prodigious in the cities that a lot of people would go around saying we need martial law. Then you might have camps. Then a certain amount of free speech would be considered an excessive luxury. Which is the beginning of repression.

I'm hoping we blunder through.

Q. How do you feel about the Clarence Thomas nomination?

A. I think it was the niftiest move from his point of view that George Bush has made since he's been in office. I would just say to my fallen liberals, stop grousing. I mean, the guy pulled off a beauty. I wish we could come up with moves as brilliant as that.

Because no matter what happens now, Bush has won. If Clarence Thomas is stopped, then they're going to get some right-wing white judge who'll be further to the right. Bush saw a way to divide that solid black vote and took it. I think he succeeded. Because they can't in good conscience say no to a black man succeeding.

Q. You were a cornerstone of the New Left after World War II, yet you call yourself a left conservative.

A. I love the idea of a left conservative because it gets rid of political cant. We're stifling in it. One of the diseases of the right is self- righteousness. I do believe that America's deepest political sickness is that it is a self-righteous nation.

One of the diseases of the left is political correctness. If you're out of power for too long, then you just get worse and worse about how important your own ideas are.

Q. What's the outlook for the American novel? They say the new generation doesn't read.

A. A novelist may end up being as special to the scheme of things as poets, because the larger engines of society are moving toward immediate consumer satisfaction.

We really may be superannuated. I hope not, but there's no question that we all feel that we may be a dying species or an endangered species.

Q. Why is this?

A. Television. I have nine children. I've seen what television has done to them, and I sat there powerless to stop it. They watch it all the time. Their culture is television.

Q. The women's movement is surely allied to liberal politics, yet you've had a long-running feud with feminists.

A. Well, say a long-running feud with me.

In a book I wrote, The Prisoner of Sex, I said that biology is half of destiny for women. Freud said biology is destiny, but if they throw out Freud's remark entirely, they are losing touch with something absolutely vital. As women liberate themselves, they have to recognize that they carry a burden. Just as men carry other burdens.

Q. Have you changed your views at all in the years since those clashes?

A. Yes. I had a great many prejudices that have since dissolved. But what I still hate about the women's movement is their insistence upon male piety in relation to it. I don't like bending my knee and saying I'm sorry, mea culpa. I find now that women have achieved some power and recognition they are quite the equal of men in every stupidity and vice and misjudgment that we've exercised through history.

They're narrow-minded, power seeking, incapable of recognizing the joys of a good discussion. The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.

What I've come to discover are the negative sides, that women are no better than men. I used to think -- this is sexism in a way, I'll grant it -- that women were better than men. Now I realize no, they're not any better. At this point I can recognize, well, if they're not any better, then they absolutely are entitled to the same rights as men.

Q. What about the men's movement as defined and led by poet Robert Bly?

A. I believe Bly and I are thinking on parallel lines. He may be a touch too mystical to my taste, but I think there are great mysteries to masculine psychology. And this assumption that men have had it easy -- you know, from < the women's point of view, all men have to do is press buttons, in effect, and live well -- doesn't begin to understand the complexity of the pain of masculine experience.

It is not automatic to become a man. It's very hard to become a man. It is one's life search. One has to go through several states of transcendence, has to go through life's opacities to become a man.

Q. Would Hemingway's macho heroes have relevance in literature today? Have they gone out of style?

A. No, no, far from it. They're in every advertising commercial. You see people rappelling down a cliff, you see guys doing a 360-degree flip on a surfboard, skiers bank off three trees and drink a beer. Hemingway, in a literary sense, discovered machismo and the need for certain people to be macho. He didn't go into the philosophy of it, but my God, he certainly dominates advertising. And Wall Street. More's the pity. The American male is very oriented toward Hemingway.

Q. When you look at America today, what do you see?

A. We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there -- it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.

Q. You espouse some surprising points of view, for example, belief in reincarnation.

A. I happen to believe in it, but I'm not going to argue with anyone about it. It just seems to me that if we lead our lives with all that goes wrong with them, and then we die and that's the end of us, that doesn't make much sense. It doesn't go anywhere. Or if we die and go to heaven or hell, I can't quite perceive the sense in that. It just seems like two hugely expensive stations to keep going.

But if we're reborn, everything that was good and bad about us goes into the reincarnation. And God -- I suspect and hope, if God isn't too tired -- is exceptionally witty. So when you come up for that judgment, the post you're given for the next time out may not be exactly to your heart's desire.

The other possibility is that there's a huge bureaucracy in heaven as well, and if it's worn out -- which is terribly frightening for me -- there might be a lot of miscarriages of justice up there. That's why some people hate the thought of reincarnation. What if they're the victim of an injustice or poor selection? And there's no appeal!

/ Q. For a man once celebrated as pugnacious and outrageous, you seem very serene these days.

A. That legend is 30 years old. It's a misperception of me that I am a wild man -- I wish I still were. I'm 68 years old. The rage now is, oh, so deep it's almost comfortable. It has even approached the point where I can live with it philosophically. The world's not what I want it to be. But then no one ever said I had the right to design the world. Besides, that's fascism.