Why Are We at War? by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page B

interesting.
NORMAN MAILER : Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, America is being lost, but in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost through television.
    Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to bethat a seven- or eight-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption. Add to that our present-day classrooms. Does anybody ever say that one reason our education is such a blighted mess is that just about all schools now use fluorescent lights? Why? Because they cost less. I would say that in the final count of dollars and cents, they cost more, because the kids are less productive. What characterizes fluorescent light is that everybody looks 10 percent plainer than they do under incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent tubes offer a sickly light. Skin looks washed-out and a bit livid. If everybody seems uglier than they are normally, why then, everyone naturally grows a little depressed. They begin to think,What am I doing with all these plain-looking people? Aren’t I worth more?
    This little matter does contribute to the deterioration of the powers of concentration. Bad architecture, invasive marketing, ubiquitous plastic—such deleterious forces bother me much more than immigration. I could go on about this. Our first problem is not immigration but the American corporation. That is the force which has succeeded in taking America away from us.
    IMPERIAL PLASTIC
    NORMAN MAILER : Live in a technological environment long enough and you begin to feel as if your soul is frayed. A curious process has been going on in America for many years. You could term it the dumbing down of Americans, as if we have become cruder in certain ways as a reaction to a terribly uncomfortable time of coming to grips with technology, which is essentially antipathetic to the part of ourselves we love best—that creaturewho senses and can enjoy life. At this point in existence we’re being asked to substitute power for pleasure.
    Technology says to you, Fellow, get it through your head: You’re going to have a little less pleasure from now on but much more power. That’s technology’s credo. And it opens a tendency for many of us to become narcissistic and power-driven. (And icy within.) Working in a technological environment, what do you have under your fingertips? Plastic. We all know plastic doesn’t feel as good as wood, or skin. Even metal offers more to the touch, but the aim of technological society, ultimately, is to work everything over to plastic—woods, metals, flowers, food if they can do it, and indeed they’ve virtually accomplished that with the astronauts’ nutrient packages.
    Take commercial airplanes, for example. Getting on one is always a hellish experience. Not because you fear the plane is going to crash, but you are put into a totally plastic environment, you are hermetically sealed, you are engagedwilly-nilly in the collective aura and psychic emissions of sixty, eighty strangers in a confined space. Even the air is fake. So it is a specifically unpleasant experience. And the airlines have been trying intermittently for the last fifty years to make the experience less unpleasant. The rest of the time they are looking to reduce amenities and squeeze out more money. Ah, the pangs of