October 9, 2020
Notes on “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” covid-19: day 202 | US: GA | info | act
Reading notes on Norman Mailer’s 1960 essay.
Mailer opines that politics is like nicotine: it “quarantines on from history.”[1] It seems, that in order to understand the convention, we must reconsider some of its events at a distance. Mailer seems to suggest that the convention itself, representing “politics,” was boring, but might be the “most important” convention in America’s history.[2] America is now the supermarket—a homogenous marketplace of the same—and Los Angeles, that “capital of suburbia,” might be its quintessence.[3] Mailer characterizes the Democrats as a kind of inbred family gathering in the “ugliest hotel in the world” to wallow about in a depression about their own insecurity for their nominee.[4]
John F. Kennedy is unlike any presidential candidate ever nominated, and this is the heart of Mailer’s essay. Written shortly after The White Negro, “Superman” takes up some of the essay’s concerns and applies them to Kennedy and the willingness of Americans to take a risk in choosing an unknown value for president.
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notes
- ↑ Mailer, Norman (2013). "Superman Comes to the Supermarket". In Sipiora, Phillip. Mind of an Outlaw. New York: Random House. p. 109.
- ↑ Mailer 2013, p. 110.
- ↑ Mailer 2013, p. 114.
- ↑ Mailer 2013, p. 116.
