Wednesday February 6 6:58 AM ET

America Too Patriotic, Says Norman Mailer
LONDON (Reuters) - Influential American writer Norman Mailer has criticized the ``patriotic fever'' gripping the United States following the Sept. 11 attacks.

``What happened on Sept. 11 was horrific, but this patriotic fever can go too far,'' Britain's Daily Telegraph quoted Mailer, 79, as saying Wednesday.

``America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big powerful country that is as patriotic as America?'' Mailer asked in an interview.

``You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.''

Mailer, renowned for his macho image and stabbing the second of his six wives 40 years ago, said America's right wing had benefited from the attacks on Sept. 11.

``The right wing benefited so much from Sept. 11 that, if I were still a conspiratorialist, I would believe they'd done it,'' he said.

Mailer is widely recognized as pioneering the genre known as New Journalism, where writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion blurred the distinction between fact and fiction and peppered prose with their own opinions.

Mailer's best known works include ``The Executioner's Song'' and ``The Armies of the Night.''