And here on this side of the pond, we have Stormin' Norman Mailer to deal with. In an attempt to get people to read his boring, swollen tomes, the murderer-coddling typist offers forth his opinions on George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and everything. In the course of his brilliant (urp) dissection of the Coming American Empire, he drops this gem:
"...You have to go back to melodramas in the 1850's where a villain with a great big mustache leaped onto the stage to defile the maiden before you get someone as good as Saddam Hussein as an enemy. Ho Chi Minh had that wonderful saintly look that made life much easier for a good protest movement."Damn. In my next life I want to be a cute little Oriental man with a wispy goatee, so everyone will fawn all over me and send me money and Hollywood actresses when I decide to kill all my enemies and cause the death of countless others.
Norman Mailer, the macho man of the desk-chair set. He's always tried to come off as a rough, tough, he-man male writer of the Hemingway set. Here's his quote on women writers: ""The sniffs I get from the ink of women are always fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic." I always thought that quote too femme for words. I'll bet his high school yearbook called him the grad most likely to surrender to the French.
(Via Juan Gato.)
Posted by Andrea Harris at January 22, 2003 10:35 AMI googled up some pictures of Uncle Ho, and he does have bony features and the kind of dreamy look you like to see in your martyrs and saints. Perhaps we have El Greco to thank for that. It's the kind of look ol' Chipmunk Cheeks Hussein cannot match.
But I really thought he (Ho) would make an excellent Fu Manchu. I don't know if people sent Fu fictional money and actresses after he murdered people.
Posted by: Angie Schultz at January 22, 2003 at 11:51 AMDidn't Fu always have an attractive doxy or two? I admit I was never much into the Fu Manchu movies.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 22, 2003 at 12:12 PMNot that there's anything wrong with that (as they said on Seinfeld), but that is almost certainly the most flamingly gay expression I've ever heard of.
Posted by: David Jaroslav at January 22, 2003 at 02:13 PMJust saw another has-been airhead writer, Gore Vidal, on MSNBC running his yap about how evil America is and how unjust our attack on poor down-trodden Saddam will be, and all of it just for the oil.
Not one logical word came out of his mouth, and he never had an intelligent reply to any of the other guests.
He was, in short, an imbarrassment to himself and the Left -- as all Lefty celebs are proving to be.
Posted by: Tom1 at January 22, 2003 at 02:19 PMI'll bet if you put Mailer, Vidal, Harold Pinter, John LeCarre, Joan Didion and Susan Sontag together in a room, they'd achieve a critical mass of stupidity so dense that the power released could get us off of oil forever. Not only that, but millions of acres of forest would be saved from being turned it to paper on which to print their turgid nonsense.
Posted by: Phil Dennison at January 22, 2003 at 03:17 PMMailer's case of penis envy is the stuff of legend. His posturing is transparent and pathetic. In my opinion, he had a crush on Jack Henry Abbott.
Posted by: Steve H. at January 22, 2003 at 04:21 PMHere's the link where I got the "quaintsy goysy" quote, by the way. It's a rather famous quote; I've seen it mentioned before in other articles on Mr. Mailer and his problems with women writers.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at January 23, 2003 at 01:06 AM