Mailer’s Masculinity

The always-marvelous Jane Galt just nails the problem with Norman Mailer’s claim that war with Iraq was all about the threatened masculinity of that vile and unpopular creature, the American white male:
This . . . is metaphor abused, used as if a metaphor could itself create a link between two things, rather than illuminating one that already exists in the phenomenal world. This is war described as if the most important thing about it were the description.
In other words, it’s idiotic. And it’s symptomatic. There is something about our literary culture that has caused its prominent members to believe that words are the same thing as facts, more important than the objects they describe. They seem to think that one can make up any theory, no matter how ridiculous, and unless it is dramatically falsifiable, it’s just as valid as a theory that starts with known facts and basic truisms about human behavior and builds from them. They think style is more important than substance.
And for some reason, they’re mad because the rest of us don’t take them seriously.