Forty years later, base still strong

"No, so far as there was an American faith, a belief, a mystique that America was more than the sum of its constituencies, its trillions of dollars and billions of acres, its constellation of factories, empyrean of communications, mountain transcendent of finance, and heroic of sport, transports of medicine, hygiene, and church, so long as belief persisted that America, finally more than all this, was the world's ultimate reserve of rectitude, final garden of the Lord, so far as this mystique could survive in every American family of Christian substance, so then were the people entering this Gala willynilly the leaders of this faith, never articulated by any of them except in the most absurd and taste-curdling jargons of patriotism mixed with religion, but the faith existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some."

Mailer's long, winding description of the conservative Republican base on pp. 33-34 could have been recycled to describe attendees at the 2008 Republican National Convention.  The group Mailer observed at the delegates' dinner forty years ago would no doubt support John McCain, American war hero, and embrace unabashedly religious and socially conservative Sarah Palin as one of their own and a wonderful ambassador for their Christian-themed, family values patriotism.

David Brand