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Mailer felt a wrenching change in his own politics. It came to him when he was waiting for the Rev. Ralph Abernathy to show up for a press conference. "It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him," writes Mailer. "He was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? He was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late for appointments, so depressed with Black inhumanity to Black in Biafra, so weary of being sounded in the subways by black eyes, so despairing of the smell of booze and pot and used-up hope in bloodshot eyes of Negroes bombed at noon, that he must have become in some secret part of his flesh a closet Republican—how else account for his inner 'Yeah man, yeah, go' when fat and flatulent old Republicans got up in Convention Hall to deliver platitudes on the need to return to individual human effort?" Mailer's only second thought was a postscript remark that he "would probably not vote—not unless it was for Eldridge Cleaver."
Return of the WASP. Though no writer has spoken more disparagingly of the small-hearted WASPs of small-town America, Mailer begins to seem almost sympathetic toward them. "They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous, ruminating government gut of every cow-like Democratic Administration. Perhaps the WASP had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy—which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear a child—yes, take that root off the high attic shelf of some Prudie Parsely of a witch-ancestor and plant it in the smashed glass and burned brick of the 20th century's junkyard."
Happily, Mailer remains a minor character in his work. He indulged, it is true, in a bit of cop-baiting at the Democratic Convention and got into a scuffle with a hippie-hater. But it was mercifully brief and it is briefly told. Otherwise, his subject matter keeps him too occupied to find much time for self-dramatization. In the process, he may have become an uncertain friend of the left. To youth's search for spontaneity and sensual gratification, he offers a 45-year-old's caution: "The best things in life were most difficult to reach, for they protected themselves, so beware of finding your true love in a night." In fact, Mailer provides no comfort for any cause or creed. "There is no history without nuance," he writes, and in all his nuances there is the darkness of many nights.