MAILER BLASTS BACK AT COMIC

NY Post: Page Six ^ | Richard Johnson

[Pharmboy]

May 9, 2003 -- DON'T invite Dennis Miller and Norman Mailer to the same party.

Miller trashed Mailer in a May 5 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal for the novelist's arguments against President Bush's liberation of Iraq. And now Mailer has responded with a "Dear Dennis" letter, published in the Journal yesterday.

[Pharmboy]

Surprised the Jew-hating Vidal would be in the same room with Mailer; I guess their combined hatred for the US trumps the other stuff.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

I am surprised homosexual Mailer isn't an editor at antiwar.com. Birds of a feather, and all that...

[Catspaw]

Miller retorted in the Journal that Mailer, like designer Mary Quant, was "kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s . . .

ow ow ow ow OW! That's gotta hurt :-))

[Asclepius]

Mailer may have drawn some comfort yesterday from two fellow World War II veterans - Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal.

The death of American letters, these three.

[Pharmboy]

Vidal is gay; I don't think Mailer is.

[KeyWest]

Miller was funny. Mailer is vitriolic. Classic liberal response.

[miss marmelstein]

Um, do you really think Mailer is gay?? As someone who once saw him doing the Frug with a fashion model at an Upper Eastside party, I can assure you he's a jerk but not gay.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Birds of a feather.....Hmmm.....sounds like your speaking from personal experience. It takes one to know one eh?

[AgThorn]

good piece giving a lot of Miller quotes, but where is anything of a retort from Mailer? Face it, it's an unfair fight!! ;-)

[doug from upland]

I think that Dennis will be further eviscerating the scum in public. This could be fun to watch. Dennis has to watch out that Mailer doesn't stab him, as he did to one of his wives, or help get another murderer out of prison so he can murder again. Mailer is totally morally bankrupt.

[mabelkitty]

And that means he isn't homosexual?

I would guess he's mysogynist to the bones.

He stabbed one wife in the breast, for G-d's sake. Talk about symbolic.

[skeeter]

Mailer may have drawn some comfort yesterday from two fellow World War II veterans - Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal.

Lest I become overly sentimental for the WWII generation.

You can add Studs Turkel & Walt Cronkite to this list.

[keithtoo]

Just about everyone in their 80's is a WWII veteran. That doesn't get you any mileage with me.

Mailer, Vidal et al are a bunch of self-absorbed, elitist, America-hating Euro-weenie-wannabe parasites.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Yes, you're correct. Birds of a feather in my life as well. I tend to hang around with Pro-American, Pro-Bush supporters who have their hearts set on liberating an oppressed people, and seeing an end to terrorist attacks on American soil.

Know any people like this?

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Rock Hudson. Sean Connery...

Don't worry, these people go by outward appearances.

[dead]

Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal.

Whole lotta cranky in that room.

[John Lenin]

Mailer is projecting his own insecurities on the rest of us. It must suck to be him.

[Billthedrill]

Good Lord - Vonnegut, Mailer and Vidal? Geriatric ex-trendoids whose talent is decades past its "sell-by" date. Love to have the Metamucil concession at that party.

Vonnegut, at least, has not fallen prey to the grotesque attempts on the part of the other two to project a macho image more appropriate to men fifty years younger and fifty IQ points lower. But all three seem blissfully unaware that the verities they have spent careers propounding as received truths are no longer the basis for a world-changing philosophy; that they have borne fruit and that fruit is rotten. Romantic youth overturning the ossified social structures of their elders ended up in the killing fields of Pol Pot and the literary and artistic holocaust of the Cultural Revolution. Anti-fascism enthusiasms ended up supporting despots. Anti-imperialistic passions ended up supporting communistic empires. Anti-militaristic slogans ended up in the massacre of Tiananmen Square and the brutal blitzkrieg that led to the final takeover of South Vietnam by the North. Brick by brick, piece by piece, each of the high-sounding nostrums promulgated by these three has been exposed for the sham that it is.

The stridency we now hear from these fading icons is that of failure and irrelevance, and that is precisely what Miller pointed out with respect to Mailer. They have retained their ideals untarnished by the horrors that the unrestricted applications of those ideals caused in the real world. It is sad that they think this to be laudable.

[John123]

Is this the same Norman Mailer that helped a convicted murderer in prison write a novel and eventually gain his release? This guy is a suspected psychopath who killed a NY waiter shortly after parole with a knife because he was asked to leave.

[billorites]

"He stabbed one wife in the breast, for G-d's sake. Talk about symbolic. "

I suppose I'd have to see the breast.