Empire building
America and its war with the invisible kingdom of Satan
by Norman Mailer

Vivid hypotheses. None held up. We did not learn then and we still do not begin to agree why we embarked on this most miserable of wars. Occam’s Razor does suggest that the simplest explanation which is ready to answer a variety of separate questions on a puzzling matter has a great likelihood of being the most correct explanation. One answer can emerge then from the good bishop’s formula: it is that we marched into a full-sized war because it was the simplest solution the President and his party could find for the immediate impasse in which America found itself.

The first problem was that the nation’s scientific future, and its technological skills, seemed to be in distress. American factory jobs were in danger of disappearing, outsourced to Third World countries, and our skills at technology were suffering in comparison to Europe and to Asia. Relations between American labour and the corporation threatened to go on tilt. But that was not the only storm cloud over the land.

Back in 2001, before 9/11, the divide between pop culture and fundamentalism was gaping. In the view of the religious Right, America was becoming heedless, loutish, irreligious, and blatantly immoral. Half of all American marriages were ending in divorce. The Catholic Church was suffering a series of agonising scandals.

Faced with the spectre of a superpower, our own superpower, economically and spiritually out of kilter, the best solution seemed to be War. That would offer an avenue for recapturing America — not, mind you, by unifying the country, not at all. By now, that was close to impossible. Given, however, that the country was deeply divided, the need might be to separate it further in such a way that one’s own half could become much more powerful. For that, Americans had to be encouraged to live with all the certainties of myth while bypassing the sharp edge of inquiry implicit in hypothesis.

Full story here.