Free Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer Page A

whether they had lost the war through betrayal or through material weakness. Through betrayal, Hitler had told them: Germans were actually strong and good. The consequences would never be counted.
    Now if suburban America was not waiting for Georgie Wallace, it might still be waiting for Super-Wallace. The thought persisted, the ugly thought persisted that despite all legitimate claims, all burning claims, all searing claims, despite the fundamental claim that America’s wealth, whiteness, and hygiene had been refined out of the most powerful molecules stolen from the sweat of the Black man, still the stew of the Black revolution had brought the worst to surface with the best, and if the Black did not police his own house, he would be destroyed and some of the best of the white men with him, and here—here was the sleeping festering hair of his outrage now that Abernathy was scandalously late in this sweaty room, over-heated by the hot TV camera lights, the waiting bodies, yes, the secret sleeping hair of this anti-Black fury in himself was that he no longer knew what the Black wanted—was the Black man there to save mankind from the cancerous depredations of his own white civilization, or was the Black so steeped in his curse that he looked forward to the destruction of the bread itself? Or worst of all, and like an advance reconnaissance scout of the armies of the most quintessential bigotry, one soldier from that alien army flung himself over the last entrenchment, stood up to die, and posed the question: “How do you know the Black man is not Ham, son of Evil? How do you really know?” and the soldier exploded a defense works in the reporter’s brain, and bitterness toward Negroes flowed forth like the blood of the blown-up dead: over the last ten years if he had had fifty friendships with Negroes sufficiently true to engage a part of his heart, then was it ten or even five of those fifty which had turned out well? Aware of his own egocentricity, his ability to justify his own actions through many a strait gate, still it seemed to him that for the most part, putting color to the side—if indeed that were ever permissible—the fault, man to man, had been his less often, that he had looked through the catechism of every liberal excuse, had adopted the blame, been ready to give blessing and forgive, and had succeeded merely in deadening the generosity of his heart. Or was he stingier than he dreamed, more lacking in the true if exorbitant demand for compassion without measure, was the Black liberty to exploit the white man without measure, which he had claimed for the Black so often, “If I were a Negro, I’d exploit everything in sight,” was this Black liberty he had so freely offered finally too offensive for him to support? He was weary to the bone of listening to Black cries of Black superiority in sex, Black superiority in beauty, Black superiority in war ... the claims were all too often uttered by Negroes who were not very black themselves. And yet dread and the woe of some small end came over him at the thought itself—it was possible the reporter had influenced as many Black writers as any other white writer in America, and to turn now ... But he was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black in-humanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subway by Black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in blood-shot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, so envious finally of that liberty to abdicate from the long year-end decade-drowning yokes of work and responsibility that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican—how else account for his inner, “Yeah man, yeah, go!” when fat and flatulent old Republicans got up in Convention Hall to deliver platitudes on the need to return to individual human