A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Mailering It In

The canceling of Norman Mailer is greatly exaggerated

Here are a few "facts" about the "problem" that led Random House
to "cancel" a planned anthology of Norman Mailer's political
writings, expected to coincide with his 2023 centenary, due to the
objections of a junior staffer (and possibly Roxane Gay) to the
inclusion of Mailer's 1957 essay "The White Negro." The decision
angered Mailer's family.

At least, that's what Michael Wolff has written on his Substack
newsletter The Ankler
.

However-
* Random House did receive such a proposal from representatives of the
Mailer estate. But its spokespeople say a decision was never reached to
publish it and no contract was ever on offer.

* There is no history of a "junior staffer" at Random House or any
other major publishing house I know of who can get a book canceled. That
takes a "senior staffer," at least, or a powerful friend of someone
who doesn't want a book published (see under: "Allen, Woody") or
some new news story about relatively recent bad behavior on the part of
the author (see under: "Roth, Philip, biography").

* Many, if not most, of Mailer's books remain in print from Random
House (and the Library of America), and the ones that are not in print
are not in print because no one wants to buy them. They don't exactly
sell like metaphorical hotcakes, but they no doubt pay their freight and
contribute to the prestige of the people who work there, which is
another form of payment, albeit one that will not help you when you need
to take a subway.

* When originally contacted, Gay had no idea what anyone was talking
about.

* The family's not mad
.

* The book in question will be published by Skyhorse (see, again, under:
"Allen, Woody" and "Roth, Philip, biography").

You can read, if you wish, "The White Negro" here
.
It's kind of crazy, even for its day, and Irving Howe said in his
memoir that maybe it was not such a hot idea for Dissent to publish it.
When Mailer was good, though, he was really good. Joan Didion said of
him, "It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great
and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the
story." If you are unfamiliar, see if you can find his essay on the
1960 Democratic convention, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket,"
which is behind Esquire's paywall, here
. I
am also a great fan of his books The Armies of the Night and Miami and
the Siege of Chicago (both of which are in the Library of America's
collection of his work from the 1960s
), Advertisements
for Myself, and The Executioner's Song-though to be honest, Norman
Mailer's greatest work was the hard-to-believe life of Norman Mailer
.

Here are a few conclusions one might draw from the above:

First, left-wing "cancel culture" may be real, and it may be a real
problem in academia and the culture business, especially for those just
starting out in those fields-I know it would be for me were I young
and starting out. But even given the above, the problem is, more often
than not, exaggerated way beyond its actual existence in the mainstream
(and especially social) media, as has happened here, because so many
conservatives have a vested interest in
(a) changing the subject from the far more prevalent phenomenon of
right-wing cancel culture;

(b) as well as from the onset of fascism, which appears to bother them
far less; and

(c) there is also the fact that, owing to their having experienced
decades of being worked by the refs, many journalists and others are
eager to prove to said right-wingers that they are not pushovers for the
"woke" left and hence jump on any opportunity to do so, without
bothering to check on the truth of the matter.

But also, the consolidation of the publishing industry is a real and
growing problem, especially given the proposed combination of Random
House, which already combined with Penguin, with Simon & Schuster
.
Those people who believe themselves to be on the left, but have no
respect for free speech because they disagree with the content of
what's being spoken, are not really on the left. Hachette should not
have canceled the publication of Woody Allen's memoir and Norton
should not have canceled the publication of Philip Roth's biography.
We cannot depend on a gadfly publisher like Skyhorse to save our freedom
of discourse, especially since, while gadfly publishers can publish,
they cannot command the kind of attention that Random House or Hachette
does, nor can they pay writers sufficient advances to support themselves
while they write.

Finally, don't believe something just because Michael Wolff says
it's true.

Over the break, I spent some time reading around the interwebs for
studies that might be of value to Altercation readers. Here are a few
subjects you might want to know more about but (a) did not realize you
wanted to know more about, and (b) if you did, you would not have known
where to look. (Note that for many of these, you will be able to read
the published abstracts, but will need either university or library
access or to pay a great deal of money to see the entire study or
article.)

* Fox News viewership increases incarceration length, especially for
Black defendants, and this phenomenon appears to be driven by elected
judges and not police or prosecutors.

* On Twitter, in six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream
political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the
mainstream political left. Consistent with this overall trend, the U.S.
media landscape does so as well.

* Increasing numbers of websites in the United States spread politically
conservative propaganda while masquerading as legitimate digital local
news outlets. Here's how they do it.

* The relationship between Christian nationalism and support for
political violence is sharply conditioned by white identity, perceived
victimhood, and support for the QAnon movement.

* How disinformation and demagogues coordinate rather than manipulate

* Europe is far more economically equal than the United States and there
are reasons for this.

* From the standpoint of winning future elections, Democrats were idiots
to support NAFTA in the 1990s.

* The failure of the U.S. high-tech war on drugs

* Was Alexander Hamilton's father Jewish? Were the Founders
anti-Semites?

* Worker alienation is not bullshit: Marx's concept of alienation and
a "Work Relations" approach provide inspiration for an alternative
account that highlights poor management and toxic workplace environments
in explaining why workers perceive paid work as useless.

* While there may no longer be a practicable two-state solution to the
problem of Israel-Palestine, there is far more certainly no "one-state
solution" either.

* While everybody knows about the famous conservative publications like
National Review and Human Events in the past century, did you know that
the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, the New York
Daily News-which called itself "America's Picture
Newspaper"-also adhered to a similarly racist, red-baiting agenda?

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Odds and Ends

I was looking forward to Mel Brooks's memoir
,
but man, what a slog. I'm pretty sure nobody edited it and it is
barely even copyedited. It's incredibly unreflective and uninsightful;
just one long pat on one's back and valentines to everyone Mel has
ever met. Patrick McGilligan's biography, Funny Man
,
paints Brooks as a sad, mean, insecure man. I did not want to believe
that when I read it. But this book does nothing to convince me
otherwise. I don't mind a 90-plus-year-old guy talking into a tape
recorder and remembering his life with rose-colored glasses. I just mind
paying to read it.

On the other hand, the new Library of America edition of John Williams:
Collected Novels is a
welcome surprise and an opportunity, if you have not already done so, to
read his novel Stoner, which may be the best novel ever written about
academia. It is almost certainly the best novel I recommend to people
who say they have never heard of the novel I just recommended that they
read. Williams, it turns out, wrote only three novels in his life.
Butcher's Crossing takes place in the Old West in the 1870s. The
third, Augustus, set in Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar in
44 B.C., is a tour de force of imaginative reconstruction. I will read
those now. But Stoner, which Irving Howe called "serious, beautiful
and affecting
," is all
those things, and the Library edition has all the notes and lovely
binding that make its books a pleasure to read before you even read
them.

P.S.: I found that reading this article
,
saving it, and then tweeting about it to be ... wait for it ... a
distraction.

It's Really Old One-Hit Wonder Day on the Altercation playlist:

Here's a fun video of "Take a Letter, Maria
" by R.B. Greaves.

And one of "Worst That Could Happen "
by Johnny Maestro & The Brooklyn Bridge.

The incredible Plastic Bertrand with the classic "Ça Plane Pour Moi
."

My all-time favorite one-hit wonder of all time with the lamest
video-a song that, incidentally, got its own lyrics wrong in the
title: "Reach Out of the Darkness " by
Friend & Lover.

Runner-up in both categories: Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky
."

Not so fast, you say, Eric. What about Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to
Billie Joe "? Not at all a one-hit
wonder, I reply. Many country hits, in fact even the girl from Chickasaw
County , have massive box sets.
OK, you retort. What about Jeannie C. Reilly's "Harper Valley PTA
"? Fine, I'd say, you win (extra
points for that hair). There is no all-time favorite. It's a silly
notion. I apologize, but I do wonder if they are teaching critical race
theory in Harper Valley these days ...

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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