By way of my brother John: New York magazine has a great conversation between Norman Mailer and his son John Buffalo Mailer (I wonder if my kids would have liked to be called Buffalo?). The main topic is how the expected massive protests at the Republican National Convention will play out now and over the long term. But there’s plenty more about where we’re headed in our history and our world:
“A good many people of the right, not flag conservatives but true conservatives, can feel in accord with men and women on the left concerning one deep feeling. It is that the corporations are stifling our lives. Not only economically, where corporations can claim, arguably, that they bring prosperity (and frankly, I’m certainly not schooled enough in economics to argue that point pro or con), but I can say the corporation is bad for us aesthetically speaking, culturally speaking, spiritually speaking. Just contemplate their massive empty architecture, their massive emphasis on TV commercials, which are a seedbed for interrupting one’s conversation, and their massive complacency about their virtues. They tend to flatten everything. They are the Big Empty.”