Gore Vidal and the Decline of America

Wednesday, 30 September 2009 21:08

Gore Vidal Book What goes around comes around. Naturally, those who have it coming to them are going to complain about it. And, unfortunately, those of us who don't deserve it, end up as collateral damage.

A case in point comes from the recent interview given by Gore Vidal to the London Times. Americans, who Vidal despises (calling them "dim-witted and ignorant"), may not even remember his name these days. And in truth, there is no reason why they should. The man is a bitter, washed up has been whose sole accomplishment was popularizing and celebrating perversion in his novels, as well as in his personal life. The Times notes, rather dryly, that Vidal "was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25." Ignoring his corrosive life and career, they celebrate him in print, calling him "The grand old man of letters."

Vidal, who hated the Bush administration with a passion, has likewise been a great supporter of President Obama. Falling, apparently, for the "hope and change" line, he switched his support to Obama from Hillary Clinton. "I was hopeful," he told the Times in retrospect about his support for Obama. "He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time."

It should be noted that he also hated, and still hates, the Republicans with a passion. John McCain, he says, is a liar. "We know the fool from Arizona," he says, referring to McCain, "is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane and was held captive."

As for Bush, he remarked to the Times that the former President is "the stupidest man in the country." And the Republicans in general raise his ire: "The Republican Party," he says, is "a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred -- religious hatred, racial hatred."

His views are extremist versions of those held by the millions who voted Obama into office. But now some of them, Vidal among them, regret their electoral choices. The man he supported, Vidal says, is doing "dreadfully" now that he is in office. Currently, he says, the country has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon," he told the Times.

If that comes to pass, Vidal can find the culprit staring back at him from the mirror in his bathroom. As a member of what once proclaimed itself as America's "intellectual class," his work during his abominable career contributed directly to undermining the nation's values. In 1948 he wrote the novel The City and the Pillar, described by the Times as "one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire." This is the type of thing that passed for intellectualism for Vidal and those of his era, but what it really amounted to was titillation, scandal and rebellion pretending to be intellectualism. Vidal's work can be counted among the early seeds of the rot that he now laments.

Likewise his electoral preferences, and those of the millions of Americans who have blindly and stupidly confused support of political parties with principle. Reflexively hating the Republicans, as he admits, Gore and millions of Americans like him could be counted on to reliably vote Democrat, no matter what. So too, could millions of Americans on the opposite side of the aisle be counted on to vote reflexively for the Republicans. What both sides of the aisle have shared, and continue to share, is a belief in illusion that the Party is everything. In that, Americans blinded by political affiliation have progressed no farther than the Roman and Byzantine citizens who rabidly supported either the Blues or the Greens. Or, to put it in more modern terms, the slavish devotion to party displayed by most Americans for the last several decades finds more common ground with Soviet style politics than with traditional independent Americanism.

Moreover, Vidal, despite being lionized by the Times, should not be looked upon as some sort of Delphic oracle dispensing incisive prophecy. While complaining about the state of affairs and making lurid comments about the approach of dictatorship, he also admits that he would welcome a greater centralization of power in the hands of the Presidency.

Discussing Obama's vision for the future of the country, Vidal says: "Maybe he doesn't have one, not to imply that he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. 'I am President of the United States. I have full power and never forget it, because I will exercise it.' That's what Obama needs -- a bit of Lincoln's chill," Vidal says, pining for an ever more imperial presidency — that is, as long as the empire of his dreams is ruled by an iron fist in the glove of a Democrat.

On the contrary, what America needs is a President, and a Congress, and a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution. That, necessarily, starts with an electorate that can put aside party politics, and can ignore the "advice" spewed by dubious public "intellectuals" like Gore Vidal.

If that doesn't happen, sooner or later we're bound to get what Gore Vidal has coming.