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Popular Culture Review
master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the
telescopes. . . has given some advantage for correcting the
error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May
that be claimed of many histories? . . . For the novel. . . is,
when it is good, the personification of a vision which will
enable one to comprehend other visions better; a
microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a
tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.56
Thus, Mailer is making a distinction between accuracy and truth; while
a conventional news story may be accurate in its surface account of what
transpired on the steps of the Pentagon, it likely failed to capture the true sense
of what it was like for a protester to get billy-clubbed over the head by a U. S.
Marshal, or what it was like for a Marshal to face thousands of protesters intent
on entering the Pentagon. Along with a tower perspective of historical events,
Mailer also is calling for the necessary reflection it takes to transform raw facts
and data into historical moments that yield some sense of meaning and
significance. Mailer asserts this can be achieved by employing the novelist’s
painstaking dedication to detail, nuance, pathos, and irony—an approach
conducive to analyzing facts “in the field of light a labor of lens-grinding has
produced.”57
Utilizing an autobiographic narrative that also uses a tower perspective
of analysis, Mailer comes to the conclusion that dissent is an ethical duty (on the
individual level) in the face of what he considers to be immoral governmental
policies concerning American involvement in Vietnam. In fact, Mailer views
American policies in Southeast Asia as being symptomatic of a far more
pervasive disease that is destroying America—a capitalist system that spawns
compulsive greed and negates citizen participation in the democratic process:
Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America,
once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty
with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if
legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are
never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor
begin—it will go on: No doctor exists to tell the hour. It is
only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she
will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome
totalitarianism the world has ever know? Or can she, poor
giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world
brave and tender, artful and wild?58
Mailer further refines his impressionistic examination of American
political policy and the nature of dissent in Miami and the Siege o f Chicago. In
terms of political policy, Mailer asserts that politics at the national level should
be comprehended as “politics-as-property”—so much so that even moral