printDespite his surprisingly mundane and misguided ideas on politics and economics, brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal, at 83, still manages to dazzle with his original insights. In a country in which homegrown retardation is more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism, that’s quite something.
Vidal recently gave an interview to the British Times from which it was clear that he no longer sees signs of the divine in Obama. Nevertheless, absent from the dismal score card he gave the president was a realistic appraisal of the putative gifts of Obama, a charmer who was elected based on his ability to sweetly say nothing much at all.
To his credit, Vidal is scathing about Obama’s talismanic, “solve that [war] and you solve terrorism” treatment of the Afghanistan war. At the same time he wants to see Obama, Lincoln-like, lord it over the people (especially with respect to health care). But those kinds of images go with the homoerotic territory.
In any event, his weak protestations over Obama are the least interesting of Vidal’s comments, the ones about Timothy McVeigh and the love that dare not speak its name the most interesting.
Read the interview.
Update I (Oct. 1): Some respect for Gore Vidal, please. He belongs to a generation of intellectuals who SERVED. Bravely. As a matter of interest, “Some 450 out of 750 Princeton graduates in the class of 1956 served in the military.” Samuel Huntington, one of America’s greatest scholars, served in the army. “All four of the Kennedy brothers served in the military; not one of the thirty Kennedy cousins has.” [Excerpted from Are We Rome?The Fall of An Empire And The State of America by Cullen Murphy, 2007, p. 82.]
Most of the neocon-minded war mongers have not served.
Of course, “our freedoms,” such as they are, do not come courtesy of our armed forces leveling this or the other far-flung protectorate abroad. That’s yet more neocon nonsense on stilts. Cheap sloganeering.
Update II: The proverbial Orwellian Ministry of Truth decrees how the peons think about the issues of the day. When it comes to Timothy McVeigh they’ve had the same degree of success as in ensconcing Rosa Parks as the new Founding Mother of America.
Vidal is rare and courageous in recognizing the legitimate effrontery against life and liberty that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents. Here is McVeigh on the American experiment gone wrong (haven’t you read the interview?):
I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.
The characters involved in the Waco massacre—our “brave” law and order officers and their puppet masters—deserved to be put to death too, but were not. Vidal has my respect for recognizing what the decidedly mediocre mind of a Rich Lowry has been incapable of. If Vidal were of a younger generation (like myself), his iconoclasm would have consigned him in mindless America to obscurity.
Update III: MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government is akin to conflating MY causes with those of, in Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” and I would add Al Gore (to round off the profile, and to poke at the humorless).
What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin (and Al Gore) were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that? Kudos to Vidal, however confused he is about all else, for recognizing this.
Another example of how the “very smartest” really have little understanding of the real world, and how it is they have the freedom to do and say as they please. Too many errors and incongruities to even begin to list.
Ah hah! I am more perceptive than Gore Vidal; I wrote in Ron Paul.
Obama is merely a synthesis of his culture which he assumes is good. Wrong!
A few selections from the right side of the menu (war, police state, etc) plus a few from the left (state run health care, etc.) won’t cut it when both sides of the menu are bad.
According to Vidal, Obama is not a liar.
Maybe and hopefully not, but that is the opinion of a man who regrets voting for him. I suspect Obama is just deluded but frankly the man bores me just as Bush did.
Reminds me of Truman Capote and his interest in Perry Smith, who, along with Richard Hickock murdered the Clutter family of “In Cold Blood” fame. Interesting that these odd birds, Capote and Vidal, exhibit all the pathologies of women who become pen pals and even wives of death row inmates. That may be one of the great mysteries of the female psyche – in whomever it is detected.
Vidal is in the same neighborhood of statism as Paglia. He may be a little quirkier. And yes, he served.
He was dumb enough to vote for Obama and now regerts the things that ought to have been apparent at the get-go. He hails McVeigh’s love of the Constitution, yet laments the lost opportunity on nationalized health care, a decidedly unconstitutional endeavor. He labels Americans as the dumbest people on earth, yet cites their supposed support of national health care as a reason it ought to have been accomplished. He’s a blowhard of the first order who happens to be right on a few things.
“I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.” Tim McVeigh
Indeed. But why? Hint: 1913
I respect Gore Vidal. He would probably respect that I would prefer sexual proclivities be kept in the closet. And I respect him for that too.
It’s interesting that many gays are despondent over Vidal’s interview:
http://www.queerty.com/its-not-that-gore-vidal-hates-gays-marriage-he-just-hates-americans-who-want-it-20091001/
This is a man whose views can’t be fit into a nice, neat little box, consistently supportive of some faction or other. That is probably the characteristic about Vidal that ticks off people the most. Iconoclasm, as Ilana correctly calls it.
My thoughts on Vidal: He is amusing, witty, perceptive, and a tad nutty – like Christopher Hitchens – sometimes on the mark and sometimes way off in deep space.
He also got confused on Suez (that was under Ike).
Afghanistan is Obama’s chance to do a Nixonian “Vietnamization” following Lyndon Baines Bush. Vidal sees it – Obama is just trying to escape responsibility (by having the guts to leave).
The “agenda” of gay marriage, hate crimes laws, and the like are a way of going beyond respect for private autonomy into the realm of ramming government “tolerance” down everyone’s throat.
MacVeigh was a mass murderer – whether his “cause” was “the Constitution”, anti-abortion, healthy dieting, appreciation of Mozart…. – does not erase that fact. The Unabomber loved nature, Hitler like paved highways, and Stalin supported rural electrification – fine – and all those can be debated on their merits, apart from the crimes.
I meant to say that NOT having the guts to get out of Afghanistan is an escape from his responsibility (together, of course, with the gutless and compliant Congress).