The best art lingers awhile before connecting. The best infotainment packs a fierce, quick punch. Both deliver the goods, however: they take you there. Of course art, having taken you “there,” delivers catharsis, which is a somewhat different experience than the “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” delivered by infotainment. But I digress.

What’s “there”?

“There” is the place you want to go because you’re curious but also don’t want to go because it makes you feel unbearably sad or unbearably excited or unbearably fearful or unbearably regretful or unbearably vulnerable or unbearably angry or unbearably alone at the edge of the abyss.

“There” is where Oprah said she would go before asking abducted teen Shawn Hornbeck’s parents whether they thought he was sexually abused by the man who held him captive for more than four years.

And while no one asked Shawn if he’d been sexually abused by The Monster, Oprah did, in fact, ask his parents, saying, “OK, I’m going to go there and ask you, what do you think happened? Do you think he was sexually abused?”

They indicated that they thought he had been.

“There” (the heart of darkness) is also where the often courageous, sometimes nutty, and always honest work of Norman Mailer has taken us many times during his sixty-year writing career, as Lee Siegel writes in today’s New York Times Book Review.

FOR Mailer, a novelist fanatically committed to the truth, the problem of the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self.

As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion. “The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he has written. “It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given. Perhaps we are meant to clarify a world which is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.”

And once you have authentically presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person. So Mailer the man has — sometimes not happily — transgressed social norms, just as his books have crashed through the boundaries of alien identity and literary genre. Yet for all the cross-pollination between his art and his life, Mailer has always insisted on true art as a form of honest living. The writer, as he once put it, “can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”

Mailer has never, like the dandy, tried to live aesthetically. When he stabbed his wife at a party in 1960 and when he helped get released from prison a literarily gifted killer who then stabbed an aspiring young playwright to death, it was because he followed the wrong impulses, not the wrong ideas. He never committed the ugliness of insinuating that he screwed up for art’s sake. He let the ugliness and the imprudence of his actions speak for themselves.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Despite the fact that I share Nick Cohen’s rage at my once-upon-a-time bosom buddies on the left, I am no conservative and certainly not a Republican. So I don’t “have to” speak up. Nevertheless, I stand with Alan Wolfe in his criticisms of Dinesh D’Souza’s lame-brained attack of the “cultural left”:

Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Andrew Sullivan links to a devastating column by Nick Cohen. It’s devastating for those like me and Cohen, who are infuriated by the deranged detachment of our fellows on the liberal left, and devastatingly on-target about my liberal-left cohort, which has abdicated moral responsibility and taken on the ill-fitting cloak of moral purity in the wake of 9/11 rather than face the realities that challenge its 30+-year-old worldview:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? …

Why is the world upside down?

Of course Cohen has some answers:

My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day. The philosophical answer is that communism did not feel as bad as fascism because in theory, if not in practice, communism was an ideology that offered universal emancipation, while only a German could benefit from Hitler’s Nazism and only an Italian could prosper under Mussolini’s fascism. I’m more impressed by the matter-of-fact consideration that fascist forces took over or menaced Western countries in the Thirties and Forties, and although there was a communist menace in the Cold War, the Cold War never turned hot and Western Europe and North America never experienced the totalitarianism of the left.

Indeed. Never having experienced totalitarianism of the left, my cohort is unable—or unwilling—to take the leap of imagination necessary to confront the fact that totalitarianism, whether from the right, the left, or the fanatically “religious,” is a scourge on humanity.

The good fight today is against the forces of darkness that seek to deprive individuals across the globe of their excruciatingly hard-won political and personal freedoms—supposedly in the name of Allah but actually for bloody revenge and in quest of raw power.

I am a child of the dark forces of the 20th century. Rocked in the kindly bosom of America, I was able to rise above and to soar through my American dreams along with my cohort. But I can never forget where I came from.

You might call me your guilty conscience.

On the other hand, you might call me the unexploded ordnance of the 20th century.

We’re here. We won’t shut up. Get used to it.