Free Republic

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious. A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She...

“One Thousand Killed in 5 days of Fierce Street Fighting!” read a New York Times headline on Jan 4, 1959. The fake news headline dealt with the (utterly bogus) “battle” of Santa Clara in central Cuba where Ernesto “Che” Guevara earned much of his enduring (and totally bogus) martial fame. “Commander Che Guevara appealed to Batista troops for a truce to clear the streets of casualties,” continues the breathless The New York Times article. “Guevara turned the tide in this bloody battle and whipped a Batista force of 3,000 men!”A year later, Che’s own diaries revealed that his forces (which actually numbered...

On the Friday after Thanksgiving 1962, Cuban agents planned to detonate 500 kilos of TNT inside Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba's "Foreign Liberation Department" at the time. On September 11th 2001, roughly 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center. Macy’s alone gets roughly 50,000 shoppers on Black Friday. Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" Castro had dreamed of yelling at us in October of 1962, right before he imagined...

The Village Voice, a New York journalism staple and the country's first alternative newspaper, announced Friday it will no longer continue to publish stories after more than 60 years. "This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers. The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world," said the Voice's owner, Peter Barbey, in a statement. "As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing." "Although the Voice will not continue publishing, we are dedicated to ensuring that its legacy will...

This is in some respects a political show, and we are in the throes of hands-down the most insane presidential race in history. What do you make of it, and more specifically, of the rise of Donald Trump? It seems to me that, given the relentless 24-hour news cycle, it was only a matter of time before we had a media-savvy reality star ascend to this perch. Man, I don't know! Trump leaves me speechless. When he came down that escalator to announce that he was going to run for president, I thought to myself that it was a smart...

...For readers who did not witness his elevation to the role of literary-political culture hero, it is difficult to appreciate the awe with which Norman Mailer was regarded by the literary and academic establishment from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. A typical paean is Diana Trilling’s convoluted 1962 essay on “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which concludes by comparing Mailer to the prophet Moses “with a stopover at Marx.” “His moral imagination,” Mrs. Trilling assured her readers, “is the imagination not of art but of theology, theology in action.” Which means … ? Very little,...

In memory of the late Norman Mailer who passed away yesterday, I present this video in which he is fighting actor Rip Torn on the set of his forgettable Maidstone movie which Mailer wrote and directed in 1970. It was supposed to be an improvised fight that got out of hand when Rip Torn slammed Mailer in the head several times with a hammer. The result is more entertaining than a Bum Fights video! Here is an explanation of this scene in WIKIPEDIA: While filming Maidstone, Torn, apparently unhappy with the film, struck director and star of the film...

NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the pugnacious prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song," has died at the age of 84. Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, J. Michael Lennon, the author's literary executor and biographer, said. "He was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking" and other works, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death. From his classic debut novel to such masterworks...

MIDI - NORMAN He hates this nation, there is little doubt Just watch him pout…he's burned out I see his face and then I think of trout That's Norman Mailer Yes, he is a guy who's had six wives They must have all had such hellish lives There remains a question about Adele Why did he stab her, oh, do tell Norman, why are you unpatriotic Norman, you are truly idiotic Norman, Norman, you suck He's getting thirsty and he needs some booze It's rum he'll choose…then he'll snooze He has his fill and throws up on his shoes...

<p>NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead," died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.</p>

NEW YORK — Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.

On a recent visit to New Zealand, I happened across a book that I had long intended to read, In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. (Before the advent of the Internet, which equalised world prices, New Zealand used to be the best place in the English-speaking world for second-hand books.) The name probably faintly rings a bell. He was a career criminal, and had spent the vast majority of his life in penal institutions of one kind or another. At the time he first wrote to Norman Mailer, he was serving a sentence of up to...

I'm beginning to see why one would want to write a blog. At present, I have a few thoughts I can certainly not prove, but the gaffe over the Michael Isikoff story in Newsweek concerning the Koran and the toilet is redolent with bad odor. Who, indeed, was Isikoff's supposedly reliable Pentagon source? One's counter-espionage hackles rise. If you want to discredit a Dan Rather or a Newsweek crew, just feed them false information from a hitherto reliable source. You learn that in Intelligence 101A. Counter-espionage often depends on building "reliable sources." You construct such reliability item by secret item,...

Author: Hollywood's Castro Collaborators Revealed What do Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover, Chevy Chase, Norman Mailer and Naomi Campbell have in common? They're all charter members of the Fidel Castro fan club. Appearing on the Fox News Channel's "O'Reilly Factor" Tuesday night, author Humberto Fontova detailed the Castro-loving proclivities of America's literati-glitterati class, as described in his new book, "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant." Fontova laid the groundwork for why the "Hollywood pinheads," as O'Reilly called them, think Castro is so great: because Castro is "the cool anti-American." And, as we all know, Hollywood is a firm protectorate of the 'blame America...

Couple things. I was stationed at Pearl from 1991 to 1993 on the USS Chosin. During times when the ship went into the yards, the command had us sleeping in barracks at Ford Island. This was the early 90's and I do not recall a sign or anything signifying historical significance. When my wife came over from CONUS to visit, we toured the Arizona Memorial. Looking at pictures on the wall, I noticed an aerial shot of the same barracks I was sleeping in. The last time I was there in early 92 - and when I was in shape...

NO WAITING NORMAN Mailer doesn't like to be kept waiting. The literary lion arrived on two canes at the Provincetown, Mass., Town Hall expecting to take the stage to address the gathered citizenry. But it turned out Amy Goldman's "Democracy Now" diatribe was only about half over. Mailer finally lost his patience. "You told me I was on at 8:45. I have a 9:30 appointment," he told the loquacious Goodman. When she yielded the floor, Mailer said: "John Kerry is not Jesus or Joan of Arc, but Democrats must learn guile. They've always been funnier, but if rage erupts, they...

Before he became a simpering dottard the once lucid Norman Mailer wrote a book entitled: “Why Are We in Vietnam?” The snide defeatism of that title and the content spewed after it are, for the moment, out of fashion with the majority of Americans. But should the apologists and appeasers among us have their way, this will not always be the case. Still, that will be then and this is the now. For now, were I to take the time to pen a short treatise in the Mailer vein, mine would be titled, “Why Are We Not Killing More of...

Can you recognize this excerpt from an essay published in an intellectual magazine of Liberal persuasion, The New York Review of Books? And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male....For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports...

Why the Left Loves Osama [and Saddam] by Daniel Pipes March 19, 2003 Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far Left to the fatalities of 9/11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein? Right after the 9/11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos." Eric Foner, an ornament of Columbia University's Marxist firmament, trivialized it by announcing himself unsure "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." Norman Mailer called the suicide hijackers "brilliant." More...

<p>July 10, 2003 -- LOUDMOUTHED literary lion Norman Mailer is still whining that we waged war on Iraq to assuage the white male ego. "There were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant," he writes in the New York Review of Books. "These reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male." Mailer's theory - which he's been rewording and republishing in every forum that will tolerate him - is that the war was fought, in part, because black men are better at sports. "We white men were left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation," he gasses. "If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology . . . We knew we were likely to be good at it."</p>