Coming just 10 days after the death of Alex Cockburn, came the literary star of The Nation and New York Review of Books, the vile Gore Vidal. His life has been celebrated and heralded in scores of obits and articles. The most despicable is of course from The Nation, and the pen of historian Jon Weiner, who concludes that Vidal “wrote as a citizen of the republic and a critic of the empire. We won’t have another like him.” Thankfully, and now Vidal’s vicious attacks leave only Noam Chomsky as his remaining successor.
But coming to the rescue with a first-rate analysis of Vidal is a real historian, David Greenberg of Rutgers University. Writing in Slate, Greenberg pleads readers to ignore the rosy tributes to Vidal, whom he rightfully calls an elitist who was not on the Left, like Weiner thinks he was, but as a man who “Toward the end of Vidal’s life, … discredited himself even on the left with his embrace of loony ultra-right causes, such as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and eventually Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City Murrah building in 1995. Vidal feebly tried to justify these indefensible sympathies by pointing to the United States government’s abuses of power.”
I suspect Greenberg hadn’t as yet read Weiner’s praise of Vidal, which of course leaves out most of what Vidal believed and stood for. Greenberg writes:
The Sage of Ravello was an equal-opportunity apologist for terrorists, taking up the obscene theories (which, in an exquisite Orwellism, go by the name “truther”) that the Bush administration was complicit in al-Qaida’s 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Unfortunately, this delusion was excused in some quarters as eccentricity, the confusions of advancing age, or forgivable derangement brought about by the misdeeds of American politicians and policymakers which, one was perhaps supposed to infer, embodied the more proper targets of our censure.
Vidal’s views, Greenberg writes, “were the natural progression of thought in a man whose worldview was fundamentally racist and elitist, motivated by the fear that the reign of his own caste was ending as the walls of aristocratic privilege crumbled in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.”
That The Nation and NYRB ran his pieces and gave him credibility testifies only to how any critics of what they see as the US Empire will publish anyone who a smart reader knows immediately is beyond the pale is testimony to the shoddy nature of their own world-view.
Any further celebrations of Vidal’s life will now have to contend with that written by Greenberg.
I have avoided G. Vidal since the 80′s. Avoided him to the point that I didn’t know that he was still alive and spewing, nor would I have cared.
– FDR and Lincoln for their exercise of dictatorial powers. Said so, wrote so in his novels. Others like him still live on.
I know who my enemies are, and the who enemies of my posterity are.
Perhaps I am alone, a thought that I very much doubt, but I am nearly out of patience with the fact that we harbor such vipers among us.
When we have run out of patience and out of tolerance of the intolerable, perhaps there will be mnore than rebuttals to the glowing prose in the obituaries of dead monsters.
Sorry, but when it comes to Gore Vidal, my mother taught me only to speak good of the dead. He’s dead. Good.
Thou bettest, JPL17. Once upon a time, I too believed in restraint and kindness when a life had ended. But the Left taught me the error of my ways when they demonstrated their gentleness, tolerance, compassion, and exquisite good taste over the body of my hero, Andrew Breitbart. I’ll never let one of them pass without a celebration ever again.
For better or worse, werewife, we’ll never outdo the Left in expressing hatred towards political enemies. The Left probably set the world record when Breitbart died. So I wouldn’t even try to compete with them on that score.
It’s far better to devote ourselves to crushing the Left at the polls, than to celebrate the deaths of their icons. One might say, “Winning elections is the best revenge.”
That said, occasionally a figure on the Left will die who’s so completely execrable, that we’re forced to ask (and give) forgiveness because we’re unable to observe “restraint and kindness” on his death.
Gore Vidal was such a figure.
Well expressed again, JPL17. Trouncing the bad guys at the polls is also the most satisfying release of all. I’m deep in enemy territory here (downstate NY), but am prepared to help open the proverbial big can o’ whoopass come November!
Sorry. Me again.
Will stop wasting everyone’s attention now.
Not wasting anyone’s time, werewife! Although you’re stuck living in deep blue enemy territory with little hope of affecting local elections, posting on political blogs is one way you can help the national effort. (And of course there’s always donating to state + national campaigns and volunteering in electoral districts outside your own.) So keep it up! Crushing the Left electorally this fall is our priority #1.
– put him in his place.
“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
–Mark Twain
That’s a good one. Thanks for posting! Never heard it before.
Few could turn a phrase as well as Mark Twain or Winston Churchill! I’d never heard it before either, but as far as Gore Vidal goes, it was well said!
Never liked Vidal’s works. Mailer’s either. Actually returned a copy of Mailer’s ANCIENT EVENINGS to the used book store from which I bought it after reading just two pages. The only other time I did that was when I read just one page of THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY. Their celebrity overshadowed their output. Guys like that get lionized while excellent writers like Nelson Algren and Flannery O’Connor get relegated to B-list literary status.
How are Ruby Ridge or even Waco “loony ultra-right causes”?
Randy Weaver and, even more so, David Koresh, may not have been sympathetic individuals but I would hope that the real issue (the right not to be shot by the Federal government because you’re an unsympathetic character or happen to be standing next to one) is neither a loony nor an ultra-right one.
“They buried him at noon today
So far, so what?” – Victor Buono
“If I could live my life half as worthlessly as you,
I’m convinced that I’d wind up burning too.” – Paul Williams