Wit & Attitude Quote by Norman Mailer

Mailer doesn’t describe America as a hurricane to flatter it; he’s diagnosing a national self-image built on selective deafness. The metaphor is doing double duty: a hurricane is spectacle and terror, and it has an eye that feels eerily calm while everything outside it gets shredded. That “serene eye” is Mailer’s America-of-the-comfortable, a protected zone where stability is mistaken for normalcy and normalcy is mistaken for innocence.

The insult is calibrated. “Fortunate” lands first, then “incredibly stupid and smug,” then the sociological bullseye: “White Protestants who live in the center.” Mailer isn’t pretending neutrality; he’s writing like a novelist who understands that privilege is not just material but perceptual. The line’s sting comes from implying that ignorance is not a lack of information but an active lifestyle, subsidized by geography, institutions, and cultural default settings. You can be “fortunate” enough to mistake the quiet for the whole story.

Context matters: Mailer’s mid-century America is a superpower with domestic turbulence baked in - racial conflict, Cold War paranoia, urban unrest, Vietnam-era fracture. “Hurricane” suggests constant motion and recurring disaster, not a temporary crisis. His target isn’t only bigotry; it’s complacency as ideology. The people in the eye don’t merely fail to hear the wind; they treat everyone else’s wind as exaggeration, disorder, or bad manners.

Mailer’s intent is provocation with a moral edge: to force the insulated reader to feel implicated, to hear what their comfort has been muting.