Norman Mailer on Propaganda and the Media

[Paul Krassner’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krassner) [Impolite Interviews](https://www.amazon.com/Impolite-Interviews-Paul-Krassner/dp/1888363924/ref=sr_1_1/103-8547822-4850260?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174920482&sr=8-1) features 21 interviews that first appeared in [The Realist](https://www.discord.org/~lippard/realist.html). Everyone from [Hugh Hefner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Hefner) to [Arianna Huffington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington) is included in the book, but one of the more significant interviews in [Norman Mailer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer). His statements about propaganda and the media seemed especially relevant. In a bad time a leader is responsible to his own services of propaganda. He doesn’t contest them. In a modern state, the forces of propaganda control leaders as well as citizens because the forces of propaganda are more complex than the leader. In a bad time the war to be fought is in the mass media. If anyone is a leftist or a radical, if a man becomes an anarchist, a hipster, some kind of proto-communist, a rebel, a wild reactionary, I don’t care what – if he’s somebody who’s got a sense that the world is wrong and he’s more-or-less right, that there are certain lives he feels are true and good and worth something, worth more than the oppressive compromises he sees before him every day, then he feels that the world has got to be changed or it is going to sink into one disaster after another. He may even feel as I do, that we are on the edge of being plague-ridden forever. Well, if he feels all these things, the thing to do if he wants political action is not to look for organizations which he can join, not to look for long walks he can go on with other picketers, although that’s obviously far better than joining passive organizations, but rather it is to devote his life to working subtly, silently, steelfully, against the state. And there’s one best way he can do that. He can *join* the mass media. He can bore from within. He shouldn’t look to form a sect or a cell – he should do it all alone. The moment he starts to form sects and cells, he’s beginning to create dissension and counter-espionage agents. The history of revolutionary movements is that they form cells, then they defeat themselves. The worst and most paranoid kind of secret police – those split personalities who are half secret policemen and half revolutionaries (I’m talking of psychological types rather than of literal police agents – enter these organizations and begin to manufacture them over again from within. It’s better to work alone, trusting no one – just working, working, working not to sabotage so much as to shift and to turn and to confuse the mass media and hold the mirror to its guilt, keep the light in its eye, never, never, never oneself beginning to believe that the legitimate work one is doing in the mass media has some prior value to it; always knowing that the work, no matter how well intended, is likely to be subtly hideous work. The mass media does diabolically subtle things to the morale and life of the people who do their work; few of us are strong enough to live alone in enemy territory. But it’s work which must be done. So long as the mass media are controlled completely by ones enemies, the living, tender, sensuous and sensual life of all of us is in danger. And the way to fight back is not to look to start a group or a cell or to write a program, but instead it is to look for a job in the heart of the enemy.