Norman Mailer, circa 1969

This from the American Conservative Magazine...

… the old confidence that the problems of our life were roughly equal to our abilities has been lost. Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our entertainments, to derive from that remote abstract power, remote as the other end of a television tube. We are like wards in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us—we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to look to criticize the lack of our power to criticize. We cannot—the words are now a cliché, the life has gone out of them—we cannot forge our destiny. …We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us…

In an age when evolving problems need new approaches perhaps more than ever, one hopes that the artists and the businessmen, the plumbers and the architects, the house-painters and the restaurant owners, rather than wait for their problems to be solved from above, might look to the Mailer-Breslin campaign for inspiration. They can make their city a better, more interesting place, one block at a time.

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