On Experiencing Gore Vidal’s Favorite Word
Matt Drudge highlights the usual rambling Gore Vidal interview, spotlighting Vidal’s worn-out épater le bourgeois tactic of saying that there’s a dictatorship looming just around the corner:
Melvyn Bragg has interviewed the American author Gore Vidal many times over the years – including for three separate South Bank Show films. For his guest-edit of this week’s New Statesman, Bragg called Vidal at his home in Los Angeles, where Vidal claimed to be working on perfecting “the telephone essay”.
The resulting interview is a wide-ranging conversation, replete with Vidal’s usual wit, that covers his life and career. But perhaps — as always — his political views are the most striking. Here’s what he had to say on the Republican Party:
These are the small-town enemies of everybody. They just dislike everyone. They couldn’t come out and say: “We don’t want a black president” — we’ve finally got past that roadblock. So what they did was set out to slaughter the opposition party, the Democrats.
Vidal’s contention is that Obama’s opponents, motivated by racism, have set out to discredit him:
Repetition. They keep saying he’s really a terrorist and they even deny he’s black. He’s obviously brown in some way — a vicious way — because we know what they are like; those are terrorists.
This febrile political atmosphere, combined with economic turmoil, is a recipe for disaster:
I should not in the least be surprised if there were a kind of dictatorship at the end of the road, which seems to be coming more and more quickly as we lose more and more wars.
But Vidal said in June 0f 2008 that we were already in a dictatorship:
It will take the United States a century to recover from the damage wreaked by President George. W Bush, US writer Gore Vidal said in an interview published on Saturday.
“The president behaved like a virtual criminal but we didn’t have the courage to sack him for fear of violating the American constitution,” Vidal told the El Mundo newspaper.
The author, a trenchant critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, said it would take the United States “100 years to repair the damage” caused by Bush.
“We live in a dictatorship. We have a fascist government …which controls the media,” he said.
Vidal also said presidential aspirant Barack Obama was “intelligent” adding that it would be a “novelty” to have an “intelligent” person in the White House.
Has the novelty worn off yet for Vidal?
Incidentally, according to Vidal, the Civil War was fought by the “Tragic vision of Lincoln as Orphic dictator,” Reagan was a dictator, America in the 1980s was a “heterosexual dictatorship,” Richard Nixon was also a dictator, and FDR was “the first American dictator.” (Never mind Lincoln the Orphic dictator. And of course, there was his infamous run-in with William F. Buckley, whom Vidal dubbed a crypto-Nazi, in-between losing his libel suit to WFB.)
Don’t bother trying to connect the dots — no one in the MSM ever will, otherwise they wouldn’t keep running his proto-Oliver Stone conspiracy theories so blindly over the decades.
Update: More on the 85-year old Gore and other “Liberals at Twilight” from Andrew Klavan at Ricochet, who adds:
Lefty celebrities of the sixties age badly. Really badly. Once their wit or talent or gift for invective is gone, they have nothing left but crotchety and unreasoned distaste for the Others who disagree with them. They have become, in fact, conservative in the pejorative sense of that word: inflexible, immovable, cantankerously defiant of change.
I’m not sure if conservative is the right word here — but reactionary certainly seems like a perfect fit.
Related: “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
For years I thought he was wincing in fear and dread that someday a dictatorship would surely come, but as of late I get the distinct impression that he’s actually wistfully pining and hoping for a dictatorship and he’s kinda sad to see that its …just…not… happening….
In point of fact, just the opposite is happening. If the “tea party” is anything, its a reaction to overreaching power. Its not an attempt to consolidate it in the hands of a few, its an effort to take it away from the few, which is kind of a problem if you consider yourself one of the few, the noble, those who should rule rather than the rabble.
I dont think he’s complaining anymore, I think he’s campaigning – for a dictator!
oh when will a strong jawed intellectual warrior poet dictator come and save us from all these flyover country hillbilly hicks like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin…sigh…life is so unfair…
It’s been downhill for Vidal ever since he stopped writing characters for Jerry Lewis 50 years ago. Though lord only knows what an updated version of that would look like.
It’s an inapt metaphor, since it’s unlikely he drives, but the man would think it’s a fascist dictatorship if he got a speeding ticket under a Republican administration, and he’d think it was a wonderful view if a Democratic/Communist administration stood him up against a wall.
Ever now and then we get an update on Vidal’s current state of senile decay. It won’t be much longer before we see a feature story with a headline like Gore Vidal: The Hospice Maundering.
Gore Vidal, didn’t he invent the internecine?
Vidal is a good argument against government by an inherited aristocracy. Generations of creative talented courageous and patriotic people labored to create and preserve and improve the United States. They were honored for doing so. No matter what they did though their legacy will be judged by the conduct of their descendants.
Gore Vidal has proven deeply disloyal to the United States, the Constitution and the American people. His loyalty that he protests is not to what is but to his personal vision of what it should be. That vision is not rooted in a reasoned conviction of what best serves the greater good but rather what indulges his particular vanity. He does not seek to enlarge the space of Liberty in the future. That is served by strengthening the best friend of Freedom anywhere, the United States. He seeks only to exalt his pretension to deserve deference in the present.
Gore Vidal seeks to obscure criticism by charging that it is motivated by bigotry due to his homosexuality. That charge is false. As Erik Erickson trenchantly tweeted about a different issue, “What’s not acceptable coming from straight males can’t become acceptable just because it’s coming from a homosexual male instead.” Vidal deserves public condemnation not for his private acts but for his public conduct. The device of preempting criticism of public behavior because of some private attribute is incompatible with democratic behavior.