New York
Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since the second world war, a country full of ‘50-storey high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses’. He told me he was opposed to the notion of an American empire because of the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful Americans corporations. ‘There are no cathedrals left for the poor â” only 16-storey urban-renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a left-conservative as a left-medievalist.’
Being a left-conservative, he told me, is an oxymoron, ‘but there are elements in the remains of left-wing philosophy that are worth maintaining’. Such as? I asked him. ‘Such as the idea that a very rich man should not make 4,000 times as much in a year as a poor man.’ I remember sitting outdoors in the brilliant sunshine with him, and, after he said that, I told him that my father, who employed some 5,000 to 10,000 workers, made sure the disparity was never enormous because that is what breeds not only communism but also hatred for the haves. ‘Try telling that to Henry Kravis,’ he snorted.
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