Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 106

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Popular Culture Review

was the beginning of America's second civil war, culturally speaking.
His lament was that Arnold's words from "Dover Beach"--”where
ignorant armies clash by night"--applied all too well to the
ideologies converging on the Pentagon. The most he could hope for,
among the best and the brightest, was a catharsis, the rite of passage
that he charts in Book Two. Thus nihilism could be transformed into
purposeful rebellion (Merrill, "Armies" 136).
This wishful thinking, framed as a personal and collective
conversion experience, involves more prophecy than mimesis.
Solotaroff charges that Book Two is indeed a fiction rather than a
history—fiction, that is, in the accidental sense of false prophecy
(233). Likewise, Mailer's seeming conversion incites Irving Howe's
charge that Mailer has been gulled into naive identification with
the new "charismatic" Left and its apotheosis of Mao and Castro.
Howe had watched in anguish as the old New Left shifted its
allegiance from nonviolent, "participatory democracy" to a quasiLeninist, "vanguard" politics of violent confrontation (xiii). Jerry
Rubin, the Project Director, attests that the Pentagon March was "the
first demonstration where it was the activists, not middle-of-theroad types, who determined what happened . . ." (qtd. Manso 460).
Corroborating Howe's suspicion, Rubin states that "the whole thing
was engineered to be as confrontational as possible. Our isolating the
Pentagon was designed to inspire your people to fly Vietcong flags..."
(qtd. Manso 460). An ironic footnote is that the SDS, under the spell
of Che Quevara, stood opposed to violent confrontation during the
March, for Che had denounced confrontation in the face of a superior
military force (Armies 282).
In any case, it was not just for amusement that Mailer took up the
esoteric banner of "left conservatism," which surely precluded the
kind of "vanguard" tactics that How R