Norman Mailer is dead. Like Hemingway half a generation before him, he cut a large swath through life and American literature. While Hemingway’s persona is tempered by the larger than life heroism emanating from the international socialism movement between the world wars, Mailer’s was sculpted by the beat generation and the anti-Vietnam War movement. It is like the “selfless” versus the “self” even though both are egotistic self-centered chauvinists who happen to be able to write, and write fabulously.
Call it different UI (user interface) in IT lingo— underneath it’s the same drunken stupor, the same womanizing, and yet, different. Perhaps the differing UI explains why Hemingway seems to have a larger worldwide following and better name recognition.
Hemingway was a Nobel Laureate and that should provide a significant PR edge over Mailer. Beyond that, they both wrote about pasty regional conflicts in novels that affirmed their positions within the Parthenon of American literature. The difference is that the war that Hemingway wrote of in For Whom the Bell Tolls is the war of good against evil, of the volunteers of the International Brigade marching towards certain demise against the Fascist military machine in the Spanish Civil War. Yet, they persevere, sacrificing for International Socialism and the spirit of Man.
Mailer, on the other hand wrote about the anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon—a war that is murky in cause and outcome. There is no romanticism and heroism to counter the destruction and despair of war, any war. This is the reality where there is no “just” war with distinct “good” or absolute “evil” on either side of any conflict.
For that matter, not even the Spanish Civil war is purely a struggle of good vs. evil. In the view from the rear view mirror it is not clear that the Republicans are good and the Nationalists are bad. Yet, thanks to the work of Hemingway and others, there’s certainly a patina of goodness layered on the Republican cause.
If good and evil are indistinct in war, they certainly give writers, historian and journalists ample opportunities to spin them in whatever way appropriate for their purpose or point of view. The only reality is the human suffering endured by the populace — be it in the struggle against Fascism, Communism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Capitalism, or any other “-isms” — that man in his unquenchable thirst for power chooses to create.
In IT, unfortunately, we lack the Hemingways or Mailers to skillfully take a literary position on whether our applications are good or bad. However, like war, we can count on the fact that certain users will be impacted by the effect of bad application performance, and the only real question is how much and how often. You have to know, and more importantly, anticipate what users are experiencing in order to effectively manage and control the application and infrastructure. Thinking that you don’t have a problem does not really mean much.
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