The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Just to remind you that you have that more than slightly foxed copy of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. The usual Norman as ‘this reporter’ did not write it, he was hiding behind the arras listening to the flat locutions of ‘Western voices’. And he heard them. Those that know say he got them down pat and it must have been hard for him. How could he have stopped letting Mailer be Mailer? “She really cared about being dainty”. Yes of course, but messes occurred. “She felt like a lady of leisure”. Mailer gutted the language back to kernel sentences. How can cliché have such weight? Because it is a tired bandage.

Read it, hope for a stay of execution.

Norman Mailer Speaks

In the Temple of Asklepios as I lay on my bed awaiting a healing dream Norman Mailer came to me to explain everything:

“I thought her concession speech, too late for graciousness, just in time for contempt, was touchingly self-serving with her pleas to ‘little girls’. No the problem is not the ‘glass ceiling’ it’s the asbestos floor. He stood behind her, a sullen penitent, in his odd tie and good bad suit, he never forgets the country lawyer’s advice – don’t wear a suit before the jury that costs more than they earn in a month. No more will the plangent notes of the Sax sound through the White House or there be frolics in the sacred spaces. The golden nuggets of sophistry that Hillary delivered to bankers were fool’s gold that could buy a hollow laugh in the company store. Taking an early profit can be bad business, though no one ever went broke taking a profit. Ach the lost book deals, the lost book deals.!”

Norman Mailer on Queen Hillary

The Queen Hillary was about to dock, the engines were throttled back to assure a coast to victory and a glide to grandeur. Mentally the spoils were distributed, chines, hocks, liver and the succulent trotters for the faithful.

And then:
The reporter has in his time toyed with the power of coincidence in his view of a universe in which destiny orders things past the petty power of meddling agents. However the latest twist surpassed a writer's invention to revive a flagging story. Wienerwald my pretties. You would be thrown out of a script conference for suggesting it. But to the higher ground of serious commentary which is a dismal tar pit of viscous boredom compared to which Sartre looking at the roots of a tree in the park were Sartre looking at the roots of a tree..... Such boredom is recursive, he thought, I'll have none of it and he thought of a nobler time when pecadillos were absorbed in a grand narrative - who was inside the tent and who outside, who was the manic micturator marking a spot he might have to return to in the grim afternoon of his career. A sour whiff of old folly might be just another lamp post that lights our way to dusty death. So the reporter thought.

Come back Norman Mailer

Mailer thou shouldst be living at this hour, America hath need of thee. He characterised Hillary's adhesion to Bill as her fidelity to a conduit to power and told the Titanic joke at which the press laughed uneasily but this latest outbreak of hypocrisy would test his metaphoric powers.
titanic

'As though out of the permafrost of American puritanism the virus dormant in the exhumed corpse that had brought in Prohibition had mutated and commonplace lewdness was now a crime 'anathema sit' to be enforced by supporters of the sale of body parts. This from an administration that was not ashamed to photograph the cabinet watching the Bin Laden snuff movie and Hillary there rapt. Overseeing that mission was the work of military commanders not ghouls in suits. The spontaneous remark that captures her dangerous anger 'We came, we saw, he died'. What would Norman say? 'Marinated in the acid gravy of Bill's contumely there would be hell to pay when she became commander in chief and Bill would shrink to a purse sized Bubba.'