Mailer is stricken by their slovenly nerve. He sits in Chicago's bars, drinking too much and telling himself the reason he isn't joining in is because his role in this great social upheaval is to write about it; he can't missing deadline by getting injured or detained. "Besides," he writes, "a variety of militant choices would now be present for years. One simply could not make the dangerous choice every time; he would never do any other work." He goes on:
And then with another fear, conservative was this fear, he looked into his reluctance to lose the America he had had, that insane warmongering technology land with its smog, its superhighways, its experts, and its profound dishonesty. Yet, it had allowed him to write -- it had even not deprived him entirely of honors, certainly not of an income. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine. A revolutionary with taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke; he belonged in England, where one's radicalism might never be tested...
