Every employee of newspapers like Creative Loafing should reflect today on where we started and where we’re going. Norman Mailer, who will be remembered as a lion of a novelist, died Saturday at 84. He was one of the fathers of a genre of newspapers that we once called “underground” and now dub “alternative.”
Along with two pals, Edwin Fancher and Daniel Wolf, Mailer founded the Village Voice in 1955. Now, 52 years later, little clones of the Voice inhabit just about every American city with more than two traffic lights. And, like clones in sci-fi novels that are duplicated and copied too many times, the DNA is disintegrating.
Mailer was driven by repetitive themes of anti-totalitarianism and free will. He probably never achieved his own much sought after personal freedom — like most great artists, he always wrestled with demons — but he came as close as any of us do.
The Voice in its obituary quoted Mailer as saying he wanted the newspaper to be “outrageous” and to “give a little speed to that moral and sexual revolution which is yet to come upon us.” It did. Unfortunately, the current owners of the Voice are hardly of the same caliber as Mailer. They’re more adept at firing great journalistic voices than nurturing them.
The Voice article also said his partners were in it for the money. And that has won out in our industry. We’re too timid to forcefully challenge the awful people in charge of this nation — believing, as we do, that our readers are driven by hedonistic consumerism far more than they are motivated by principles. Oh, sure, we wag our fingers a little, just not too often and not without checking the latest findings of our marketing focus groups.
Indeed, it has been argued by a few wags, including me, that we are bigger betrayers than our mainstream brethren. Daily newspapers and broadcast media were always voices of the establishment, fearful to speak truth to power. We were supposed to be different, the anti-establishment. And maybe we were — a long, long time ago.
How many of our executives would attack — as Mailer did in 1967 — the very belly of the beast, the Pentagon, in protest of a horrible and unjust war? Or face a jail cell as Mailer did? I once was that bold; am I today?
We stand on the shaky edge of civilization-destroying warfare and environmental disasters, precipitated or exacerbated by a president who has wrecked our Constitution. But in “alternative” papers, you have to diligently search to find that information hidden somewhere amid our sex ads. Not that I have anything against most of the sex ads, and neither did the lusty Mailer, but I wonder what happened to the important stuff.
I met Mailer a few times. The first was in 1967 at the massive march on the Pentagon, where he spoke, and along with about 700 others was arrested. I had to settle for merely being tear-gassed. Those were heady days, when a whole generation knew the life-empowering meaning of dissent.
Mailer was from the generation ahead of mine. Along with Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Camus, Ginsberg, Sartre, Hemingway and many others, they broke with the norms that constricted thought throughout much of the 20th century. In that sense, they were revolutionaries — although, as with Mailer, many developed a financially rewarding symbiotic relationship with the society they despised.
My favorite Mailer novel — other than the novelized history of Armies of the Night, about the Pentagon march — is Harlot’s Ghost, the story of an aging CIA spook. One of the minor things I liked about it was its ending: “To be continued.” Mailer reneged on that promise. It takes real arrogance to make such a vow — and later to say, “Fuck it.” But that was vintage Mailer.
And just like that novel, the epitaph for the “alt press” could well be “To be continued.” Sired by a literary giant, we had great promise. We’ve lost our way, but we may find it again if totalitarian-creep doesn’t swamp us. To be continued.
