Norman Mailer bloviates on Sartre and God in yesterday's The Nation:

I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, talent and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a berth to Heidegger's thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy's buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his tropism toward the nonrational.

Let's face it, too many have contested Sartre's character for it to be a given. He certainly derailed existentialism because he also, err, set it on its rail tracks through his novels, plays, and generally being the archetypical intellectual about the left-bank cafe. As a cultural phenomenon existentialism incontestably owes more to him than anyone else. He started existentialism, and he abandoned it, but it barely had anything to do with Heidegger, apart from some superficial borrowings of Sartre's.

Today, with this stuff, it's hard to imagine that Mailer was once a voice-of-his-generation. Still, the image of Heidegger as a Crumbian Snoid is probably the most entertaining thing in the morally-superior-to-thou Nation in ages.  ¶ 6:28 AM