MAILER BUBBLE

  Right upfront I need to warn you about something.

  I’ve been reading essays by Norman Mailer. And I can’t shake the feeling that his style is creeping into mine. Style does this. 

  Those of you old enough to recall the days when writers could be celebrities are probably already working up the smartass comments, along the lines of, “Does this mean you’re going to start punching bloggers at cocktail parties, stabbing your current wife, and so forth?” 

  I can put all that to rest. No. If there are cocktail parties where bloggers cluster, I doubt I’ll be invited to them. And if I were in the mood to punch a blogger, a cocktail party wouldn’t be the right place to do it. First of all, I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m at a cocktail party, I never have both hands free. I’m lucky if even one is available— I’m nearly always carrying a drink, because a wife or husband of somebody is always asking me what I’m drinking, and they rattle off a long list of the fluids they have available, and to avoid having to stand there looking interested while they go through the specials, I generally just pick something quick. (I hate that “telling you about the specials” ritual in restaurants, too. It always makes me feel like I have to react as if it’s amazing that these specials exist. “We sauté the fish in a reduction of this that and the other and then garnish it with this other thing.” “You do all that, eh? It’s encouraging to hear that in this lickety-split modern age, YOU take the time to apply heat to the food and dump a bunch of junk on top of it before whisking it to the table with a great deal of pomp and peppermill brandishing.”) 

  So, I’m saddled with a drink in one hand, and in my other hand I’m carrying a little plate that can’t really accommodate my byzantine stockpile of Tiny Meat Wrapped in Flexible Meat, so I have to walk very carefully, lest I spill something saucy onto the carpet which was just vacuumed. There’s a perverse logic at work when you clean a carpet just before letting loose a bunch of drunks carrying shrimp. I’ve never been on a battlefield, but I recall from reading The Red Badge of Courage that even in a war that breeds romanticism, due to the great number of young people dying in it, they don’t really clean the battlefield first.

  I can’t picture myself managing to put all the hors d’oeuvres and my Mr. Pibb down without staining anything, and then hastily punching some bozo who was asking for it. Then there’s the problem of awkwardly getting your jacket from the host after you’ve punched another guest. “Yes, mine is the herringbone tweed.” 

  If you haven’t read any Mailer, you’re probably unaware of his writing style. Reading him takes care of that. What you notice right away is a kind of gruff but weary listing of American shibboleths, both dainty and rank, as shibboleths tend to be. He has the jaded air of an Asian carryout cashier reading you back your order, but with a patina of manliness that suggests he had to punch a lot of people in the process of getting the story. 

  Mailer appeals to me, because I like to write about shibboleths, too— I’ve been accused of basically hopping from one shibboleth to another until a piece seems long enough—in fact, a fellow blogger once blogged that “blogger Karl Straub seems to live by the maxim that shibboleth is more.” 

  And what’s more, the manliness is seductive. I’m roughly in the middle of the manliness spectrum that runs from Morrissey to Mailer, and I suppose it couldn’t hurt for me to tack a little to the east. 

  Allow me to put this dummy back into his trunk, long enough for me to get to my point. 

  It’s another day in the Trump era, and my outrage has practically run out. It’s not quite to the point where the red light goes on, but the needle is definitely on E. 

  This isn’t because outrage is no longer justified. It will always be justified in this era, as it generally is even in eras that aren’t presided over by oafish bullies whose command of the English language is less assured than their command of a television remote. 

  But I can only be pelted so much before I lose the habit of leaving my house. Some artists thrive on the inspiration that pelting provides, and normally I’m in that camp, but 

nonstop pelting takes a toll. I’ve always been both repulsed and charmed by human idiocy, but they’re coming over the plate too fast these days for me to keep finding that balance. 

  When the Trump era began, my first thought was that we were dealing with a problem that wasn’t about to go away. I refer to the landscape we’ve arrived at, where large swaths of the American electorate simply don’t believe what they read in the Post or the Times. That is, they don’t believe what others read there. This means that bullying and credulousness have become the bills and coins of a kind of alternate currency.

   I read the other day that liberal college students have grown up in a world where zero tolerance for bullies has been thoroughly ingrained in their minds. And I can definitely say that I didn’t foresee this result of that well-intentioned policy, but it’s time to accept that we’ve created a generation or three that sees everything through this lens. Bullies are to be denounced, whether they are commenting on your post, or speaking on your campus. And this would be fine, except that denouncing is a little too much fun, and people tend to get a little caught up in it, while forgetting that somebody has to pay for security when the denouncing really gets rolling. In the old days, a speaker might come to a campus and blather to a small crowd, and then go home. The school might actually turn a small profit on the deal. Nowadays, some weaselly commissar schedules a campus speech in order to get a lot of media coverage about how liberals won’t allow conservatives to speak publicly, and they can then pump their donors’ wallets while the school has to spend their donors’ money on security so nobody gets killed. The college can’t win in this scenario. If they let the speaker come and speak, they’ll be criticized for it. If they cancel the speech, they’ll be criticized for it. And if they are committed to the free exchange of ideas, they’ll have to pay a lot of cash to back up this commitment. Eventually, I assume that college tuition will be affected by all this, and as a cheapskate, I certainly don’t look forward to emptying my bank account so that my son can indulge in riskfree outdoor denunciation. 

  But lest you liberals get bent out of shape by what may appear to be the ravings of a conservative, let me bring out my more vitriolic vitriol, which I’ve saved for Trump’s Legion of Apologists. 

  Trump apologists remind me of my late mother, even though she was mercifully spared from the Trump era. My mom, in her last years, was constantly inveigling (I think it was inveigling— it seemed to be) against bullies, and proselytizing for common sense. This makes it sound like she was on the side of the angels, but the problem was that “bullies” meant anyone who wouldn’t let her do exactly what she wanted to do every moment, and “common sense” meant whatever she believed, following years of near-total avoidance of newspapers and internet. 

  I read the Trump era as payback for a lot of working class and middle class white people feeling bullied for god knows how many years, bullied into packing away their culture in an attic, pressured by bullies to stop telling racist jokes, pressured by bullies to stop mocking gay people, pressured by bullies to feel like rubes for going to church, or for owning guns, or for driving a truck instead of a minivan. And Hillary Clinton was the person who represented all of this liberal bullying more perfectly than even Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. I’m convinced that conservatives may not want to be lectured by a gay man, or by a black man, but they really get their dander up when a woman is doing the lecturing. 

  This is true of conservative men and women alike. In fact, with conservative women, the ire against feminists is even deeper and more passionate. I understand that we’ve been shaking out the carpets around here, and seeing just how ugly men can be when dealing with non-powerful women, and how prevalent that kind of bullshit really is, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard anyone talking about how cruel and hateful women can get when THEY encounter a woman who’s in their way. It rarely gets mentioned how often romantic comedies encourage us to root for a woman as she comically struggles to take a guy away from another woman, for example. And if you’ve ever seen what a young girl can do psychologically to another young girl, without even raising her voice, you’ve seen something. 

  But the point is that Hillary became, for many, the face of every liberal bully that ever snobbishly judged them, or tried to tell them how to raise their kids, or what to feed their families, or how to vote. 

  I don’t say this to accuse liberals of bullying anybody. It doesn’t really matter what I say about that. Liberals will say they are (in effect) doing the lord’s work, and conservatives will say I’m not pillorying liberals nearly enough. 

  But I think it’s important to see how much we’ve lost by framing every conflict as an opportunity to tell bullies to ram it up their ass, as if we’re all Kevin Bacon in Footloose. 

  I’m going to try— briefly— to lay out a very specific case against respecting Donald Trump, even if you like him, that may carry some weight even for the newspaper-averse Trump apologist. I know this will be ignored by the people who might benefit from it, but that’s never stopped me before. 

  Here it is. 

  Rex Tillerson’s firing set me off. Not because I like or admire the man. In fact, I barely know anything about him. 

  But I do know this. The Trump White House has fired or pushed out an absurd number of people. Trump Apology requires an amount of spin that I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few short years ago, and I suspect there are ways to spin even this aspect of his management approach, but I’d like to see someone try to put a positive spin on this. Given that most of Trump’s hires either relentlessly kiss his ass, or grimace all day long, or both, I don’t see how anyone can possibly claim that this egregious level of firing is evidence of anything other than terrible management skills. As far as I can tell, he’s fired both shameless toadies and dyspeptic professionals, a generous passel of each. Even if you grant Trump glittering good judgment in each of these cases, how can anyone believe that he knew what he was doing when he hired these people? Or that he knew what he was doing when he tried to work with them?  

  I’m a bandleader, and when I hear of a bandleader who’s fired countless drummers, for example, it’s hard for me to avoid the assumption that this person doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing. I’m well aware of how insufferable drummers can be— believe me— but the point is, you don’t hire that kind of drummer. You hire the kind who can do their job, and who you can stand to be around for an evening. And you also learn how to talk to drummers. If you don’t know how to talk to a drummer, you don’t know how to run a band. You probably, in fact, don’t know much about music either. 

  I don’t see that politics really enters into this. I’ve worked for years with a brilliant drummer who ticks all the boxes, and he’s a Republican. What of it? If a fellow can keep a beat, end songs when they’re supposed to end, and show up early enough that the sound guy doesn’t yell at me, what do I care what he does in his spare time?