Dennis Miller On Norman Mailer & Jerry Springer Running For OH Senate

Source: Wall Street Journal "'Why Are We in Iraq?': Meet Norman Mailer, Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed." May 5, 2003 http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003453

'Why Are We in Iraq?'
Meet Norman Mailer, Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed.

BY DENNIS MILLER
Monday, May 5, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

"With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in. . . .

"The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces."--Norman Mailer, writing in the London Times' op-ed page last week


When The Wall Street Journal asked me to react to Mr. Mailer's latest daft screed, I almost took a pass. I've never written an opinion piece for a newspaper before, and furthermore I know as much about Norman Mailer as I do about Mary Quant. I think they were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s.

Other than a vague recollection that Mr. Mailer once played Boswell to Jack Henry Abbott's Samuel Johnson, I really only remember one other pertinent fact about him. But, what the heck, if you're going to take a stab at something new, why not take a stab at it with Norman Mailer.

Mr. Mailer was the Father of the Nonfiction Novel and now he can also claim lineage as the distant, addled Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed. Studying at the Sorbonne as a young man obviously made a deep impression on him because this thing reads like Jacques Chirac's Dream Journal.

With six marriages under his belt, one would assume Mr. Mailer has a stranglehold on warfare. One would be wrong.

His basic contention is that we went to war with Iraq because with the dominance of white American men in the boxing ring, the office and the home front eroded, George W. Bush thought they needed to know they were still good at something. Mr. Mailer has a degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard so he had to know that argument wouldn't fly. But then again, maybe this claptrap is just a grand put-on. The fact that I and many others can't differentiate anymore does not augur well for Norm's legend.


You know something, the only "race" that really occurred to me during the war was our Army's sprint to Baghdad. Conversely, Mr. Mailer appears to see just race in our armed forces, right down to the "Super-Marines," as he calls them. It seems that Mr. Mailer notices color in people even when they're wearing camouflage. He then goes on to speak about racial subsets in the world of sports. Now, when I watch baseball, football and basketball, I see uniforms and skills. Mr. Mailer evidently sees races and nationalities. He's like a Casey Stengel/William Shockley hybrid. "Why'd you send the rook' back to Triple A, Skip?" "Well, he was gettin' around on the fast ball but he still couldn't hit the bell curve."

Ironically, Mr. Mailer seems to see everything in the world in terms of black and white, except of course, good and evil.

He also fancies himself a boxer, a "champeen," but stuff like this will just sully his record. He's now a club fighter, a pug, a tomato can that Warhol no doubt gave him. He constantly uses boxing metaphors and yet refuses to give President Sugar Ray Bush any credit for his startling TWKO (Three-Week Knock Out).

A guy like Mailer hates a guy like Bush because Mailer thinks of himself as infinitely smarter than Bush and yet President Bush is the most powerful man on the planet and old Normy's connecting through Atlanta and flying on prop planes to a community college that's so far out in the sticks the mail rider has yet to arrive with the message that The Great Mailer is currently more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis. All so he can scoop up a submicroscopic honorarium and the accolades of star-struck locals and 18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote "Gravity's Rainbow."

He feels there's no connection between the secular state of Iraq and radical fundamentalist terrorists. Not true. Abu Abbas was recently recaptured there after Europe practiced catch-and-release with him many years back. Abu Nidal was found shot to death last year in his Baghdad apartment. Police suspect fair play.

And while I don't want to appear to pick more nits than a father-and-son Spider Monkey team who know they're being followed by a National Geographic film crew, Mr. Mailer's wrong when he says that only one-half of our country was for the war: 70% is one-half only if the whole is considered to be 140%.


Mr. Mailer at one time challenged and provoked. Now he just provokes. Norman Mailer has become Norman Maine, a former matinee idol whom loved ones best keep an eye on, because if this is the best he can now muster, he'll no doubt be walking purposely into the surf off Provincetown any day now. And as Mr. Mailer's prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he's going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia.

I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully--i.e., "the question will keen in pitch"--to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.

Mr. Miller is a comedian.


Source: Wall Street Journal "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!: Is the Senate ready for the Pied Piper of Bottom Feeders?" July 19, 2003 http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003771

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
Is the Senate ready for the Pied Piper of Bottom Feeders?

BY DENNIS MILLER
Saturday, July 19, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

Well, Jerry Springer is mulling over a run for the Senate and John Adams is no doubt turning in his grave so furiously that if we could just hook up a turbine power cable to his headstone we would probably solve all our energy woes.

It's no secret that the gene pool, in addition to being a tad brackish as of late, is also so shallow now there doesn't even need to be a lifeguard on duty. Springer has stood astride that pool like a latter day Colossus Ignoramus of Rhodes for well over a decade now.

Now that's not to say I don't periodically find the "The Jerry Springer Show" intellectually stimulating. Indeed, how many times have I been walking through the parking lot of a laundromat and seen two obese women in halter tops slap fighting and thought, Wow . . . I wonder what the back story is on that?

But at this point, Springer would have to hire a team of sherpas to assist him on the long trek back up to the lowest common denominator. As a matter of fact, the last time I was channel surfing and stopped on the Springer show my channel flicker filed a restraining order against me.


The Pied Piper of Bottom Feeders, Ringmaster of the Cirque de Salieri, and now he's set his sights on Congress. Just think of it as Mr. Registers-at-Hourly-Rates-Hotels-Under-the-Name Smith Goes to Washington.

Well, one thing's for sure. Capitol Hill hasn't seen bouncers this big since the members of the House were kiting all that bad paper during the banking scandal of '92.

But is Jerry's pluck at the Grail really that aberrant a notion? His talk-show experience will at least allow him to commingle easily with his fellow senators, yet another studio audience of preening narcissists voracious for their 15 minutes but in truth needing an intermission to fill the time.

It's not like I think the Senate is a hallowed chamber where you have to be particularly smart to get in. To me, Congress is just a place where we send oft-times mediocre men and women to be Earl Scheibed into looking kinda, sorta, vaguely consequential.

There's also a geographical track record to consider here. The good citizens of Ohio in the past have seen fit to elect Jim Traficant to Congress and trust me, Traficant makes Springer look like Hammurabi.


So I'm torn. I can't decide if Springer is underqualified or overqualified. But here's My Final Thought. One thing I do like about Springer is that he always manages to convey that he's a wee bit sheepish about it all. Not sheepish enough to resist cashing the checks, mind you, but just enough to let you know that he'd like to settle up his societal karma deficit as he heads into the denouement of what has heretofore been a reasonably idiotic life.

Additionally, maybe if we one day glimpse C-Span and see Jerry Springer actually being sworn into the United States Senate it will shock us--like Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes" looking up and seeing the chimp on top of the pony--and trigger some much needed electoral reform. Say, an IQ Quizometer on the door of the voting booth where you have to get seven out of 10 current-events questions right before you're allowed in to cast your ballot. All right, settle down, liberals. Make that four out of 10.

Well, I have to go now. I'm cutting the ribbon this afternoon at the newly erected Morton Downey Jr. Memorial and Secretary of the Interior Wally George is picking me up in 15 minutes. "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!"

Mr. Miller is a comedian.