Norman Mailer: His Last Rolling Stone Interview

That your death will be without meaning.

Do you see a comparable thing going on today with the war on terror?

9/11 is a perfect example of that. The horror, the shock, is that you get up in the morning, you say goodbye to your children, you kiss your wife, you go off to work, and you are dead. That was an intolerable shock. That is why terrorists are so hated, because they destroy the idea that you are going to have a meaningful ending to your life, so therefore, what's the sense in working hard, if you're not doing it in the name of a higher purpose? That is why Bush can keep pushing the button: "Terrorists! Terrorists!" In a certain sense, Bush is a terrorist, because anyone who keeps evoking the word "terrorist" all the time is pressing a button to get a reaction, without any higher moral intent.

The intent is creating fear.

He is creating fear where fear may not necessarily need to reside. The advantage of being a novelist is you form the habit very early in life in trying to look at everything from every side. And particularly in hearing about somebody who i s god-awful, you have this curiosity of what are they like. And so in that sense, what is the story of the terrorists? The story of the terrorists is that they are working against immense odds, relatively speaking. They don't have large resources. What they have is the possibility to do some dirty things in some dirty places and kill off a few hundred or a few thousand people, and if they can do that, they can feel they are immensely successful, because given the multiplication of the result that cheap politicians like Bush go in for, it will work to a degree. But that is their limit. They can't destroy us. We can destroy them, but not through war. We can destroy them through endless careful police work for decades . But instead we go to war, because the war has served so many purposes for people whose motives are neither clean nor illumined. But profit-oriented.

So what is the story of Bush, then, if that is the story of the terrorists?

Bush is a terrorist.

Do you think he is the worst president of your lifetime?

He is a spiritual terrorist.

It is interesting that, in retrospect, he makes someone like Nixon look pretty good.

Nixon was a mean son of a bitch whose inner life probably smelled of old urine, but he was intelligent as hell, and he was serious, and he could recognize the limits that were incumbent upon him whenever he got into a venture. So looking back on him then, yes, we would be far better off with Nixon than we would be with Bush.

I just watched an old debate that you did with Marshall McLuhan -

My God.

It was a black-and-white television show from 1968, and you were both talking about the "electronic envelope" and information overload. And I was watching this on Google Video, so it was very surreal. Do you think the technological changes of the past five years have been a net positive?

Oh, I don't know if it is positive at all. There is a loose connection you can make between gathering information and gathering sexual knowledge. There is a certain point where if you gather too much sexual knowledge, you vitiate the impact of it. And I think the same is true with information. When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either to use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it . I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening. And I would say if there is one thing that is wrong with the technological changes, it is just those two words, "slightly deadening."