Making It

One of the Loon Brigade caused me to wiki Michael Savage, and it was a fairly interesting read. Savage (then Michael Alan Weiner - but that sounded too much like the male sexual organ for a right wing loon), was a '70s Berkeley liberal, believe it or not. Then he jumped to the extreme right, became a popular writer and radio host and so on. When he was a liberal? Not so famous or wealthy. In America, the pundit money is always on the right... hence Ann Coulter. If she were a liberal, she'd be just another PETA "terrorist".

Anyway, I was reading Sullivan's blog (OMG he's a big giant now legally married homo), where he exerpted Norman Mailer's impression of the neocons, specifically Norman Podhoretz. It's facinating.

Interviewer: But let us talk about neoconservatism. It has become such a thing in America. I’m interested in your relationship with people like Norman Podhoretz, people who went on a journey that took them very far from the place where they started.

Mailer: Well, I can understand it. And in fact, I feel partly responsible for Podhoretz. He and I were close friends at one point. He wrote a book called Making It, and the book got trashed terribly. He was unpopular on the left. I never quite understood why he was so unpopular. But they trashed his book like you wouldn't believe. It was truly ugly. And I hadn't read it yet – or I'd read the first half of it, which was pretty good. And I witnessed this trashing and said to him, I’m going to write a review. So I read all of the book. And the book betrays itself. The second half is god-awful.
In the first half, his thesis is that the dirty little secret among the left, among artists and intellectuals, is that they really want to make it, and they want to make it big. And they conceal that from themselves and from others. But this is really the motivating factor that is never talked about. You can talk about sex but you can’t talk about ambition and desire for success. So he does all that. And then he starts to give portraits of all the people on the left who have made it – pious, sweet little portraits, with people who we know goddamn well are not that at all. And I was horrified at the way he could betray his own book. There was a failure in nerve there – in other words, if you want to be strong theoretically, you better be strong in detail as well. That’s what makes a good general. Strong at both ends. And he wasn’t.

So I ended up mocking his book, too. And I was pretty cruel. Looking back on it, I was probably too cruel. He went into a depression and stayed there for about a year… just didn't do much. Worked on his magazine and listened to music and hardly saw anyone. And by the end of that time, he’d moved over to the right. Podhoretz is nothing if not active and enterprising. So the moment he moved over to the right, it wasn’t enough to be on the right, he had to be far to the right. And so I feel that I’m responsible, to whatever degree, for helping to have shoved him over there. Which is too bad, because he now is paying for his sins on the right by having supported the war in Iraq and he has to live with it – he has to live with all the idiocies of the neoconservatives.

It is true that in America, it's a hell of a lot harder becoming rich and famous in political punditry just being a liberal. Michael Moore seems pretty good at it, but that's just about the only person I can think of. Still, it's amusing that some switch to the extremes of the other side purely out of individual ambition.

Could you imagine if Norman Podhoretz had some personal intgrety? John Podhoretz would likely be liberal, and that would have been some of the funniest shit ever.