By Debbie Schlussel
I and many others often employ comparisons between the way the media and pop culture treat Islamic terrorists versus the way they treated the Nazis. I frequently write something like this:
Can you imagine them doing that with Hitler/the Nazis?
Well, now leftist novelist Norman Mailer has made that imagination a reality. Yes, the ultra-ludicrous continues to be realized--in this case with the publication of his "The Castle in the Forest," out next week.
Norman Mailer & His New "Novel": One Toy Short of a Happy Meal (Sorry, McDs)
In this absurdity on paper, Mailer writes a fiction book about how Hitler was abused as a child, molested, and was the son of an incestuous relationship. And it's not even true. Mailer made it up. But he uses this phony account to get us to understand the reason why Hitler turned out the way he is--to excuse it all.
And this is the novel Mailer says he's wanted to write for 50 years. Not sure if he's currently in a mental state to really remember the last 50 years accurately. But one thing's for certain: At age 84, he ain't all there. Clearly, dementia or Alzheimer's or some other sort of mental disability has set in.
As I previously wrote, during the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial jurors were given a book by Moussaoui's brother, claiming that Moussaoui had an abusive childhood. Nine jurors said it influenced their decision to spare Moussaoui's life. I believe that book was a carefully crafted fiction written just for that purpose by his loving brother.
Now, Mailer is acting as Hitler's modern day Frere Zacarias Moussaoui, trying to absolve Hitler. And it's all made up--even though Mailer is now trying to claim there's some truth in it. Pop psychobabble absolves the Holocaust?! OY.
Here are some ridiculous excerpts from today's USA Today French kiss to Mailer and his absurd book:
In the novel, incest runs strong in Hitler's family. His mother is his father's daughter. "Adi" is beaten by his father, adored by his mother, treated cruelly by an older stepbrother. He doesn't do well in school. He excels only at playing war in the forest with other boys. He has no girlfriends and masturbates frequently. The novel has a seven-page bibliography listing books that, as Mailer writes, "enriched many a fictional possibility."
Whatever that means.
He spent two years reading about Hitler because "you should know how someone turns out if you're writing about him as a child." . . . What's true in Castle and what's made up? Mailer circles the question like a veteran prizefighter sizing up a younger opponent: "Look at it like this: I'm a novelist. I can take three facts and write a story. Is that story factual? No. But it's based on facts. It can get at the truth."
As for the incest in Hitler's family, Mailer says "that can't be proven, but the facts of his life suggest it. There's a great likelihood that Hitler was a 'first- or second-degree incestuary,' " a word Mailer made up for the novel. "It sounds good. It sounds German."
All of the novel's major characters actually existed, with one exception (a beekeeper with a passion for honey and young boys). Mailer says he finds it easier to "make up something about a person than to conceive the person." . . .
Mailer also may have contemporary political leaders in his sights.
In the novel, DT discusses wartime leaders "who have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification - patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction."
Is that a slap at President Bush, who Mailer has said has surpassed Ronald Reagan as "the most ignorant president we ever had"?
"To ask the question," he replies, "is to answer it."
Just one thing to say to all of this. PUH-LEEZE.
Remember, this guy is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for non-fiction. Which tells us all we need to know about Pulitzer Prize-winning "non-fiction."
Unfortunately, Mailer says he is already writing a sequel. USA Today calls him the "Devil's Advocate," but I say they can drop the "advocate" part.
