Norman Mailer on Charlie Rose Part 2

[streetwhereulive]

i sometimes wonder why CR bothers to interview anyone.  He's always interrupting or speaking for them. His guests can't get a thought out before he starts to put what he thinks they're going to say into his own words. Charlie in this interview takes the moral highground of what is akin to flag waving instead of looking through the glass darkly, but face to face.

[streetwhereulive]

i sometimes wonder why CR bothers to interview anyone. He's always interrupting or speaking for them. His guests can't get a thought out before he starts to put what he thinks they're going to say into his own words. Charlie in this interview takes the moral highground of what is akin to flag waving instead of looking through a glass darkley, but face to face.

[tofubandito]

NORMAN

[pmkaka]

Charlie had te corporate Bush view and so even though he was wrong

his fans made fortunes

pathetic Charlie Rose

[Commando303X]

"If [Americans] do it, they'll win the war easily." Apparently not.

[Conail23]

such a pompass little puke

[ShaggyDo1971]

@naibastie ...you mean he expounds his ideas, not exposes. I think you are right and the interview would have been much better if the interviewer was able to say simply..."I don't know I haven't thought about that". Or better still, a different interviewer altogether, who actually had, and could've helped Mailer along. Mailer was slightly agitated and needed to not educate his interviewer on the hoof, so ot speak. Vietnam was fought largely by poor Americans who didn't bother to avoid the draft.

[lanser87]

Fascism is easy. Freedom is hard. Never forget that sentiment. 

[Rasscoco]

Norman Mailer was trying to be a social critique in all his objectivity of a professional un-simple savant, but Charlie is always using the same technique in interviewing great men. I have a feeling that the only man with whom Charlie would agree fully would be Amis.

[cocoabeacher]

Well Charlie..I guess you realize now what an IDIOT you were.

[xtrmsprts]

Charlie Rose seems more comfortable in the company of like-minded (small-minded) men with stubborn views and little depth like William F. Buckley. No wonder he was weeping like a child at that right-wing lunatic's end. These people yell "freedom! we want our country back! america! " all day and they'll be the first to violate human rights and break all norms of decency. I saw fuck em, I don't want America back , I want America forward!

[SadClownMovies]

charlie rose is like a little child, totally ignorant and it's totally bliss for him it would seem.

[jerryhello100]

Mr. Mailer was pretty close to hat would happen.

[ChadIvory]

God, I HATE Charlie Rose. Is there a more vapid, uninteresting, pseudo-intellectual on American TV? His constant interruptions only serve to AMPLIFY his incompetence and lack of education and intellectual curiosity. The only reason I would ever watch Charlie Rose again is if someone promised they were going to set him on fire.

[TheWorldFarOff]

Privilege, monarchy, democracy/mobocracy = totalitarianism.

[raylena15]

The obnoxious, self absorbed Charlie Rose has spent years interrupting guests, being impenatrably thick. Hilariously, he hasn't the slightest idea how out of his depth he is. It's a hoot. Norman fucking Mailer, for God's sake! Old lion of literary history. An ACTUAL intellectual. Even at his age, runs mental circles around Charlie, not even exerting himself. I shouted at the computer, "Stop swimming, you've fallen off the ship, you're in the ocean Charlie, you're dead. You'll only prolong it!"

[raylena15]

Furthermore, this was amazing in as much as it underscored the very truth of what Mailer is saying: America is now an ignoble, "loutish" nation in which people cling to childish rhetoric, cliches, and hypocritical sentimentalities rather than trying to muster up enough mental energy to do critical analysis. Norman comes from a time in our history when it was commonplace for Americans, and particularly artists and writers, to do critical analysis. Language to a man like Norman Mailer was a tool.

[raylena15]

Mailer is like his contemporaries--Phillip Roth, or Gore Vidal, or Jesus bless her, Susan Sontag). To these people language was not an ephemeral mish-mash of leftover advertising jingles patched together in a blustering and nonsensical yawp of tendentious claims (such as Charlie's moment of blankness before hastily repeating Dick Cheney's dumb-ass boast, "they'll cheer us in the streets". Charlie's childlike discomfiture over Norman's very reasonable criticisms proves what a nitwit Rose is.

[raylena15]

What an intellectual flyweight Charlie is in a conversation about America not as slogan but as a civilization--as Norman approaches the discussion! Rose has for years has been punting and bunting his Long Island lock-brain way through interview after thoughtless interview with people who tower over his middlebrow self. Most of these esteemed guests let him off the hook by either being humorous with him or ignoring him altogether, waiting for him to shut up so they can get a word in edgewise.

[raylena15]

NORMAL FUCKING MAILER, after all is of a mostly deceased generation that regularly took pikes at one another in the streets, and saw debate--hell, saw regular conversation--as boxing. Norman was the Ali of mental and verbal boxing. In fact, he actually would get into boxing rings when he was young and BOX!! How many Americans now engage in coversation as a BLOOD SPORT (how many of us even CAN now, failed public school dolts that we are)? Mailer doesn't even notice how he bloodies Charlie here.

[raylena15]

Bravo. Charlie is exposed as the inveterate child he really is--a fellow who from the look of him I have always speculated must have fallen off some ivy league cabbage cart--possibly Harvard or Princeton from the waxy face he often displays, I speak from some knowledge too, because I've Ivy League degrees--Cornell. Charlie is walking through his interviews with the diffident, blind and dumb arrogance of a man who has never been punched in the face by life.

Well, Norman sure punches him here.

[ThinLynottFan]

"How did Vietnam change America?"

Such a powerful statement, why wasn't Mailer made president? He was right.

[reedkennethia]

Mailer was a dick, but he's right.

[macsm]

This is a typical example of the way people who really struggle to bring the truth, (when it matters), are shot down by the establishment. How prophetic Norman's words were, but in reality there is nothing surprising about this, it's not like it was revelation for people of his age and even Charlie Rose's age group. How we are doomed to repeat history time and time again...

[BahmanG]

He was so right.

RIP, Norman Mailer.

[chasebizzy]

Holy hell! Was Charlie Rose arguing in favor of invading Iraq?

[nmrkg]

How right was Norman, and how wrong was Charlie...

[loptow]

I don't understand the resentment towards charlie in this clip. He's an interviewer,(and a damn good one at that) and after voicing his opinion about it he let Norman Mailer voice his.

[macsm]

You should see Charlie Rose's attitude to people like Milton Friedman, or a neoconservative, or anybody from the right.;.. markedly different...

[MetaMorphy]

Starting something you can't finish---like attacking your wife with a penknife, perhaps.

[Horsemanray]

What are you talking about? He finished that argument right then and there.

[Hapworth1924]

dat's the best comment I've read in a long time... though he'd never have admitted it Mailer would have been proud of dat...

[naibastie]

Mailer exposes his ideas loud and clear.Thats why I like and respect him.

[geniuschristie]

This is amazing! i remember watching this when it was on- thanks so much for posting this- Norman Mailer has been vindicated

[quickseafood]

Charlie Rose...I believe your ASS just got wipped by Mailer.

[johnmcb15]

All of Mailer's predictions on the war have come true. Charlie seems quite foolish in this clip.

[loptow]

To a certain degree everyone looks foolish in hindsight.

[icantfindanamethis]

wow charlie seemed for it

what does he think now?

[lonelywan]

What's fascinating here is that two extremely bright individuals - like many other bright individuals - expected the war in Iraq to be a walk in the park. Mailer was a little certain of the outcome, but not much. Funny how superpowers always forget that those wimpy little far-away countries can fuck you up bad.

[marxbitesall]

IDIOTS! - the Democrats, in case you forgot, were ALL gung ho in 1998 for regime change in Iraq - Clintons, Ted, Kerry, all of em!!!

Both parties are controlled by the CFR, who taps, grooms and places presidents and their cabinets that will do what they are told - blackmailability is a huge plus!

mises dot org can set your political mind free. Liberty is what America was all about - not wars for profiting elites who never fight.

Isn't 100 years of genocide enough?

Ron Paul 2008!

[marxbitesall]

Rose is a CFR/NWO shill bastard.

Read Murray Rothbard's "Wallstreet, Banking and American Foreign Policy" at mises dot org, and get the real education the CFR/NWO controlled govt, media and academe least want Americans to understand.

The CFR has always been about seeking monsters to destroy since their puppet Wilson got us into WW1 after campaigning he wouldn't. Parties are irrelevent when the CFR controls them both as it has for 100 years.

Ron Paul 2008!!

[ioriorioriorio]

The old boy nailed it again....normie's a many-faceted beast...he has that wildman , brawler side, but then he goes on a show like this and speaks right on the money. I would have loved to have a night on the town with him!!

[silentdrum]

Yeah, Mailer nailed it, prophetically. At that age he'd seen enough and was sagacious enough to see all the way to the end of it. Charlie Rose seems arrogant and defensively "patriotic". In addition, he doesn't let Mailer finish out his thoughts. He used to be a much better interviewer. "Cheering on the streets"!! What a laugh. And what a great tragedy.

[concerrned123]

you know what chaps my ass is we cant go up to all of these millions of republicans and war cheerleaders and show them how stupid they sounded and how right we where. in fact those same people perdicted nothing correctly, are telling the people who perdicted everything right that there wrong. put down the magic ball neo-cons

[comedyguy21]

hey mr rose u need to start doing video or audio podcast of your fulltime shows ASAP PLEASE STARTIGN WITH THIS SHOW FROM ABOUT 4 DAYS AGO

[steveconn]

"Changing the nature of American Democracy by the time we're done." He sees the future...

[tommynogo]

He's afraid that by the time we're finished with Iraq, our democracy will have been damaged. I didn't hear anybody else predict that, and he turned out to be right. That's amazing.

[AlphonseZukor]

Charlie Rose was still riding high on patriotism back then (like a lot of people). But Mailer nailed it, right on. For better or worse we are going to see what Mailer was talking about, for decades.

[Xenu]

I was talking to people on the streets in '03 telling them the WMDs line was a sham. John Prados' painstakingly documents the evidence in his book "Hoodwinked." I was also talking then about a guerilla resistance which would drive the US out. It was clear from before the beginning the US would not allow a democracy it could not control because it wanted control of Iraqi oil. I'm no genius, but the fact that Charlie Rose lives in a complete la-la land should be strikingly obvious to all.