---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 18:06:54 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: America Too Patriotic, Says Norman Mailer
America Too Patriotic, Says Norman Mailer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20020206/ts_nm/mailer_attacks_dc_1
Tue Feb 5, 2002
LONDON (Reuters) - Influential American novelist and journalist Norman
Mailer has criticized the "patriotic fever" gripping the United States
following the September 11 attacks.
"What happened on September 11 was horrific, but this patriotic fever can go
too far," Britain's Daily Telegraph quoted Mailer, 79, as saying on
Wednesday.
"America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been
a big powerful country that is as patriotic as America?" Mailer asked in an
interview.
"You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one
person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble.
America is the real religion in this country."
Mailer, renowned for his macho image and stabbing the second of his six
wives 40 years ago, said America's right wing had benefited from the attacks
on September 11.
"The right wing benefited so much from September 11 that, if I were still a
conspiratorialist, I would believe they'd done it," he said.
Mailer is widely recognized as pioneering the genre known as New Journalism,
where writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion blurred
the distinction between fact and fiction and peppered prose with their own
opinions.
Mailer's best known works include "The Executioner's Song" and "The Armies
of the Night."
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