JBM When you have an issue such as “End the war in Vietnam,” it’s a set goal. You know what you’re going for. One of the problems with this movement is that there’s no specific goal to be achieved, aside from “Get Bush out.” When I ask the protesters, “What exactly are you protesting at the Republican National Convention?,” no two answers are the same. Perhaps it is because there are too many abominations being committed to pick one.

NM When and how are you going to protest? Which group would you join?

JBM On August 30, I plan to march with KWRU.Org, the Poor People’s Campaign. That’s Cheri Honkala’s organization. After that, I’m not sure.

NM Okay.

JBM What could the protesters do that would further the cause?

NM What they could do is not what they’re going to be allowed to do. It won’t all be their fault. You can be damn sure Pataki and Bloomberg do not want to embarrass George Bush. If these demonstrations ever hurt Bush, and he still gets reelected, New York will be penalized in terms of receiving money from Washington. That’s one reason Bloomberg and Co. kept them from holding their protest in front of the Garden. If a million people were to walk down Fifth Avenue—which is where it should be—that could have a significant effect. Especially if it was a peaceful march. But the Republicans don’t want a peaceful demonstration with that number of bodies. One of the things about the Pentagon march back in ’67 is how peaceful it proved to be. Despite all the negative media hype that came out afterward, the second word that came, if slowly, was: “Peaceful—these people were peaceful.” The ideal is exactly to have a huge, passive demonstration. If it could take place without calamitous incidents, odds are Kerry will probably win. But a combination of riots with media coverage will give Bush a huge spike.

JBM Would you say New York is part of America, or is it its own entity?

NM You want to talk about great American cities, speak of Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco. Put up your own favorites, if you have any. Los Angeles, if you must. But New York is our only world city. It does not have a hell of a lot in common with the rest of America; it doesn’t even have much to do with upper New York State. Which is why all those years ago I said, let’s separate. I saw New York as eventually becoming comparable to Hong Kong, a semi-independent city-state. For better or worse, it may yet happen.

JBM Do you think Kerry or mainstream Democrats are going to associate with the protesters at all?

NM I think they’ll have people out there, trying to put a little oil on these very troubled waters.

JBM How so?

NM Well, they have contacts. Power is power. We were talking earlier about what people get out of a protest movement. A leader who’s pretty good at exercising a little local power doesn’t mind getting a little more. Hell, Kerry started as an activist. So there will probably be hints from his people: “We’ll treat you right when we get elected.” I can’t believe Kerry’s people will sit by passively and say, “Oh, dear, isn’t this awful,” like I’m saying right now.

JBM Are you going to come protest with me?

NM No. Even if I believed in the efficacy of the protest, I wouldn’t go. I can’t walk anymore without two canes. Standing in place is worse. It drives me nuts. Two arthritic knees. So, I’m out of it. I won’t go in a wheelchair. I want to be able to defend myself if things go wrong.

JBM What if there were no protests?

NM I’m not sure that would be a loss. There’s so much anger at Bush. It isn’t as if more anger has to percolate.

JBM Then what do you think will be the Democrats’ tactics?

NM I’d say they demonstrated their tactics during the July convention. They will look to catch the swing voters and those conservatives who are repelled by the Bush cabal but are still loyal to the Republicans. To do that, the Democrats will present themselves as the good, sensible, highly patriotic, serious party of the middle class, resolute about terrorism, strong for peace, reliable for war, and passionately loyal to the working class and the disadvantaged because—this may be their subtlest claim!—they are the true compassionate conservatives. These tactics do not fill me with joy, but given the brunt of my argument, I confess that I am obliged to go along. The Republicans, in turn, will do all they can to make the street protesters look like the disruptive, concealed, and explosive heart of the Democratic Party. You know, I can’t remember an election when the stakes were so high. There has been, after all, such mendacity about the entrance into Iraq. It sits like an incubus over the first week of November.

JBM Doesn’t Vietnam relate to this? In Iraq, aren’t we in the same kind of quagmire?

NM Bad as Iraq has been up to now, Vietnam was worse. We were there in force for ten years. Fifty thousand of our soldiers were killed and 2 million Asians. What is immediately comparable to Iraq is that the logic for being in Vietnam proved false. The domino theory did not play out. Southeast Asia may have been a mess afterward, but only Vietnam turned communist, and it was well on the way before we came in. The major difference is that in Iraq we have exacerbated the two major branches of a religion that has had power over its followers for more than thirteen centuries. Communism had only been in existence for fifty years. Its historic roots were not nearly so profound. It is not the size of the casualties in Iraq so far that weighs on us so much as the prospect of a century of unending terrorist acts that we do not know how to terminate by military force. Whether this fear will work to Kerry’s benefit, I can’t say. The question is how clear will it become in the awareness of Middle America that Kerry was a combat hero and Bush was in a National Guard flight suit. It will be interesting to see how the Republicans will look to tarnish Kerry’s war record. Not all the Republicans, however. I think a minority of conservatives are ready to go for Kerry.

JBM You really do?

NM I’ve been saying for a couple of years that Bush is not a conservative. He’s what I call a flag conservative, a Flag-Con. He’s not as interested in conservative values as in empire-building. The classic conservative, someone like Pat Buchanan or, to a more complicated degree, Bill Buckley, does believe that certain values in society must be maintained. The classic conservative believes in stability. You make changes grudgingly and with a great deal of prudence. Don’t move too quickly, is the rule of thumb, because society, as they see it, is essentially a set of compromises and imbalances that can be kept going only by wisdom and, to use the word again, prudence. So you don’t go off in wild, brand-new directions. None of this characterizes Bush. As a Flag-Con, he is surrounded by the tycoons of the oil industry, plus neoconservatives, plus gung-ho militarists who believe that since we’ve created the greatest fighting machine in the history of the world, it’s a real shame not to use it. These three different groups came together on a notion that I would call “exceptionalism.” The more ideological among them believe that when the Cold War ended, it was America’s duty to take over the world. They believe God wanted America to run the world. All too many Americans do believe that. Just look at the patriotic fever every time there’s an occasion for people to show their flags. Very few fascist nations ever failed to put a huge emphasis on getting people to wave flags. This is not the same as calling America fascistic—we are not next door to fascism yet—but even as certain people fall into a pre-cancerous condition, I would say America could be approaching a pre-fascistic condition. And the basic notion behind such an impetus, what the Flag-Cons fear, is that America is going to lose its preeminence in the world unless drastic steps are initiated. As, for example, taking over the oil of the Middle East, as well as enlarging our reputation as a superpower to such a degree that China, India, Japan, and Europe will not be ready to stand up against us in any important way. These flag conservatives would argue, I expect, in their private colloquies, that if they don’t embark on such steps, America’s control of world economics could be lost forever. There are many indications that the Chinese and the Japanese are much more suited to live in a technological world than we are. Our long prosperity has one irony built into it. We have become a pleasure-loving nation. Fifty years ago, Americans were more hardworking. They still believed it was good in and of itself to work for most of your life. That’s no longer so true. In science, our college youth are weak when it comes to studying the so-called stem subjects—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Living with technology is, after all, not always so agreeable. If one’s going to sum it up in four words: More power, less pleasure. And Americans are pleasure-loving. The majority of Chinese have not had that opportunity. Perhaps they can put up with monotony, boredom, and cruel, repetitive working environments far better than we can. I think the exceptionalists feel the need for America to become a Roman power in contrast to other nations, who will serve as our hardworking Greeks. Let China be our Greeks, and Japan, England, even—while we’re about it! After all, the Romans used the intelligence of the Greeks to carry out tasks that Romans no longer had the desire to fulfill.

JBM But I don’t think it’s possible anymore to take over the world with military force.

NM Can it be that Iraq is telling us as much?

JBM Let’s go back to why the Republicans selected New York for the convention. Do you think they still have hopes of cashing in on the memory of 9/11?

NM A couple of years ago, New York may have seemed like the perfect place to go; the event had been so traumatic. And there is a large political profit in offering emotional closure to a national nightmare like the fall of the Twin Towers. Nine-eleven felled the two most opalescent pillars of the American economy. It also attacked the implicit assumption that if you worked for the corporation, you were part of a new upper class. To offer an analogy, let us suppose that in the seventeenth century, Versailles had been razed and sacked overnight by latter-day Huns. France would have been emotionally gutted. So it was with us. After all, those Twin Towers spoke of America’s phallic hegemony in the world even as Versailles declared the divine right of kings. Many an American male felt gelded by the event. Equally, the average American housewife was desolated by the terrifying possibility that one could work for years to build a family and lose it all in an hour. How could the Republicans not choose New York as the place to hold their convention? Given the heroic deaths of the New York firemen and police, the site will also appeal to working-class votes. The Republicans will certainly not fail to make the connection that the protesters are besmirching the memory of 9/11. But a couple of years have gone by, and we’ve also learned that there are a few things wrong about the picture we’ve had of 9/11. A new set of conspiracy theories are building. There are just too many facts that are not readily explicable. There may well be room after the convention for the protest movement to look into 9/11 with some critical incisiveness. I am no longer a conspiratorialist—I spent too many years wandering around in the byways of the Warren Report. But there are elements here which are not easy to explain. I don’t believe for a moment there was direct complicity. In America, we don’t go in as yet for major political coups—there’s too much to lose for the powers that be, and we are still a democratic society. But there may have been a sentiment in the administration—let them scream and squeal over this one—that maybe the worst thing in the world might not be that we suffer a disaster. Pearl Harbor, after all, galvanized America. Without Pearl Harbor, we might never have been able to go to war in the company of the Russians. Indeed, Roosevelt was accused of knowing about Pearl Harbor in advance and welcoming it. Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think the administration knew that the World Trade Center was going to be attacked. Still, some odd things did happen that day. Immensely odd. There was more than unbelievable inefficiency. I don’t know that the 9/11 Commission did all they could with that. They were determined, after all, to bring in a unanimous report. That always means that the radical ends are cut off. It’s like playing poker without the aces, kings, and queens, the twos, threes, and the fours.