ROY EDROSO

In a recent edition of National Review Online, one Jay Nordlinger brings up Norman Mailer's recent comments on the War on Whatchamacallit, and makes short work of them--or long work, depending on how you look at it. It is short work in that Nordlinger quotes only a sentence fragment of Mailer's, long work in that he annotates this fragment with a series of insults. (Among other things, he accuses Mailer of seeking to "bolster and legitimize the Soviet system.") "Is Norman Mailer still worth bothering about?" Nordlinger asks.

Let's see. Mailer has written a few dozen distinguished books, and has won two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award. Mailer also served in an actual war, as one recent web biography describes: "Mailer was inducted into the Army in March 1944, less than a year after graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.S. in Engineering. His experience in the Army as a surveyor in the field artillery, an intelligence clerk in the cavalry and a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains, gave him the idea for a novel about World War II."

Should these creds not convince, Mailer is also mentioned approvingly (as a "distinguished guest") in one biography of National Review's founder, alongside Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

As to Mr. Nordlinger, one may well ask, has he ever been "worth bothering about"? His biography is elusive, though I have found that he recently accepted "an award from the Chan Foundation for Journalism and Culture," and writes regularly for NRO. I have found no mention of any other honors for Mr. Nordlinger, or of any military service at all, though this last is perhaps unsurprising.

What is surprising, or would be in a sane universe, is that a writer of such meager attainments would talk unsubstantiated trash about Norman Mailer. But this is done all the time in the blogosphere. Dispatches says "Mailer may be his own worst enemy...nobody thinks these people are important. Students at all universities regard them not only as wrong, worse, they regard them as stale." (Like that grody old Bob Dylan, one imagines, or Sinclair Whatshisname) Eristic, like, totally agrees: "Norman Mailer likes to hear himself talk," he says, without posting a link to any of Mailer's allegedly self-pleasing comments. "Does Mr. Mailer have any clues? My opinion? No."

"Wacky" is the stinging rebuke delivered to Mailer by someone calling himself Profound Samurai. And Shots Across the Bow calls Mailer an "imitation" patriot (SATB's patriotic credentials are listed here).

Even Sgt. Stryker, who pseudonymously claims involvement with our armed forces, shows no respect in battle for his comrade-in-arms, calling him "old dude" and comparing him to Dr. Evil.

And so on. It's not that Mailer hasn't made some questionable comments in his time, nor that he is above criticism. But in the above-mentioned (and depressingly many other) cases, Mailer's antagonists feel no need to address his statements (some of which are not so "wacky") with anything but childish insults better suited to the who's-hot-who's-not section of an entertainment magazine.

A blogosphere enthusiast recently interviewed the Big Daddy of this phenomenon, who told him, "What I see in the Blogosphere is very much like the network of European coffeeshops in the 18th century." There is an obvious difference, though. If the eighteenth-century equivalent of Norman Mailer--Samuel Johnson, say--walked into such a coffee house, the denizens would pay some attention to what he was saying, and some would perhaps dispute his comments on their merits. In the blog "coffee house"--call it Starblogs, perhaps--they just throw crumb cakes and talk about how stupid he is. This may indeed portend a revolution, but to my mind, one of the wrong sort.