![]() Clusters of demonstrators dressed in Confederate gray and Union blue contribute to the Civil War imagery. The sound of a trumpet signaling the start of the march evokes in Mailer images of other trumpets announcing a legacy of battles leading back to the Civil War. Washington, D.C., monument honoring the sixteenth president of the United States, which serves as the starting point for the march on the Pentagon. According to the author, however, it is the size of the crowd that in the end is more significant than the participants, the speeches, or the government structures. Every feature of the building is described as “anonymous, monstrous, massive, interchangeable.” Even the parking lot, utilized by the demonstrators as a staging point for their final approach, is of massive proportions. ![]() Tellingly, it appears to have no need for visible guards, since the extensions of the edifice serve as its own defense. He notes in the beginning that it is not the demonstrators’ intent to capture it, but to symbolically wound it. On Mailer’s landscape, the structure sits as a mighty fortress. Nonetheless, the building’s overwhelming size appears to dwarf not only the capital’s monuments but also the demonstrators themselves. ![]() Norman Mailer refers to the structure as the “true and high church” of the military-industrial complex, “the blind five-sided eye of a subtle oppression which had come to America out of the very air of the century.” It is portrayed as a geometrical anomaly, an aberration rising from the Virginia fields, a misfit to its natural surroundings, and a creature deserving of its isolation. Armies of the Night, TheMammoth government building located across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., that houses the headquarters of the U.S. ![]()
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