Gore Vidal took great delight in demolishing the fragile confections
of ‘mainstream’ politics. While corporate journalists typically portray
US Presidents as benign demigods, Vidal
described George W. Bush as ‘the stupidest man in the United States’. In 2008, Vidal
said of the 2003 war on Iraq:
‘You can see little Bush all along was
just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how
you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for
the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a
firing squad… They - Cheney, Bush - they wanted the war. They’re
oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also extraordinarily
stupid. These people don’t know anything about anything.'
When
asked how he wanted to be remembered, Vidal replied: ‘I don’t give a goddamn.’
Just as well. As the above comments make clear, not only did Vidal's
analysis lack any semblance of what corporate journalists call ‘nuance’,
he poured scorn on their entire profession:
‘I tried to explain to the press club
what it is they do that they don't know they do. I quote David Hume:
“The Few are able to control the Many only through Opinion.” In the
eighteenth century, Opinion was dispensed from pulpit and schoolroom.
Now the media are in place to give us Opinion that has been manufactured
in the boardrooms of those corporations - once national, now
international - that control our lives.’ (Vidal, Virgin Islands - Essays
1992-1997, Andre Deutsch, 1997, p.188)
This, of course, is the same 'press club' that has been reviewing Vidal's life and work since his death on July 31.
Sex, Flag, Foetus
A celebrated novelist, essayist and screenwriter, Vidal's primary
focus in the last two decades of his life was overwhelmingly on radical
political analysis. He wrote books with titles likes ‘Perpetual War
For Perpetual Peace’ (2002), ‘Dreaming War – Blood for Oil and the
Cheney-Bush Junta’ (2003), and ‘Imperial America: Reflections on the
United States of Amnesia’ (2004). Vidal argued that corporate power had
overthrown democracy in the United States and was waging a permanent
war for profit around the planet.
So how much attention would we expect the corporate media to afford
Vidal's political dissent in accurately and honestly reviewing his
oeuvre? This comment from 1998 indicates his own expectation:
‘When a ruling establishment will not let
daylight in on their workings because they own the media as well as the
permanent rental of most of Congress, judiciary and executive, that
doesn’t leave much to talk about at election time except sex, the flag,
the foetus and, in the good old days, Communism. So the fact that
Clinton’s sex life is now central to our political discourse is par for
the current course.' (Vidal, ‘New World Ordure,’ The Observer, January
25, 1998)
And indeed reviews of Vidal’s own life have mostly focused on ‘sex,
the flag, the foetus’, as it were, with literary editors leading the
way. In the Independent, Boyd Tonkin
opened with:
‘One evening, when I dined with Gore
Vidal, he told me all about the time he outpolled his good friend Jack
Kennedy. There: does that capture the late Master's sleek tone of
name-dropping omniscience?’
Gaby Wood, Head of Books at the Telegraph,
wrote:
‘There was a time when a visit to Gore
Vidal at his villa in Ravello was the literary equivalent of Lourdes… He
was related to Jackie Kennedy, he campaigned (unsuccessfully) with
Eleanor Roosevelt. He would shake his head over stars of Hollywood’s
golden age as if he were their maiden aunt mourning an unfortunate
choice of boyfriend (“Well, Rita [Hayworth] never had any luck”)… ’
And so on…
Thus is the life of an important political dissident boiled down and
strained through the ‘culture’ pages of the one per cent press, leaving a
glutinous residue of ‘celebrity’ and ‘glamour’. Wood added:
'It does not, perhaps, fall to strangers
to wonder whether the great literary socialite was bitter because he
was lonely. But eventually, his famous bon mots became so outlandish
that they rattled many of his sometime admirers. Was it the drink,
the passing of time, or a consistent commitment to the holding of
unpredictable opinions? Some rolled their eyes, others laughed, and
one or two, at least, took it upon themselves to hold him to account.'
In the Telegraph, Philip Hensher
noted
that Vidal was ‘the man who knew everyone’. But there was a dark side:
‘an immense series of perverse, but massively well-informed,
anti-readings of American history’ and ‘even more perverse essays on
public and literary matters’.
This recalled Steve Crawshaw’s comment in the Independent on how
‘Chomsky knows so much... but seems impervious to any idea of nuance.’
(Crawshaw, ‘Furious ideas with no room for nuance,’ The Independent,
February 21, 2001)
Hensher had nothing serious to say about
why Vidal’s reading of American history should be considered ‘perverse’. In the Independent, Christopher Hawtree
described
how Vidal would often look at the country of his birth ‘askance’.
Again, readers had to work out for themselves what that might mean, with
Vidal’s ‘opposition to the Israeli lobby within America’ offered as a
throwaway clue.
Quoting Vidal in the Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan provided a rare
mainstream glimpse of what Hensher and Hawtree surely had in mind:
‘There is only one party in the United
States, the Property Party... and it has two right wings: Republican and
Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire
in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats... But,
essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.’ (Andrew
Sullivan, ‘The twin sources of Vidal's vitriol; The death of a young
love and despair for his country gave the writer his voice,’ Sunday
Times, August 5, 2012)
Clearly, then, Sullivan observed, when it came to covering 20th
century America, Vidal’s ‘anger, bile and resentment got the better of
him’.
Alas, the same weakness afflicted the late Harold Pinter. In The New
York Times, James Traub found the playwright’s politics ‘so extreme...
it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would
not choke on Pinter's bile’. (Traub, ‘Their Highbrow Hatred of Us,’ New
York Times, October 30, 2005)
The sage minds of the corporate media occasionally puzzled over
Pinter’s malfunctioning moral gallbladder. In the Independent, the
precocious Johann Hari
wrote:
‘Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he has
been relentlessly contrarian, kicking out violently against anything
that might trigger his rage that day.’
Pinter was just a classic left loon, then, the target of his ire incidental.
Sullivan at least found a little more method in Vidal’s madness:
‘Why such anger? That's the question of his life.’
‘His soulmate died in warfare at the age
of 19… Vidal carried this wound for a lifetime - building an armoury of
wit, bile and erudition to protect himself from another. But another was
coming. For Vidal, his other great love, the American republic, died of
warfare in 1941. So much of his writing after that is rooted in anger.’
To this psycho-political babble, Sullivan added the standard smear:
‘Vidal ruined his case by exaggeration,
of course, and absurd moral equivalence. There were times when he
blithely dismissed the horrors committed by America's enemies - such as
the Vietcong or Al-Qaeda - while never failing to note America's own
hypocrisy and paranoia and occasional clumsy cruelty abroad.’
It is tempting to psychoanalyse Sullivan’s own view of America’s
cruelty as ‘occasional’, ‘clumsy’ and 'abroad'. He concluded of Vidal:
‘his [gay] sexual orientation was surely central to this: it fuelled a
grief that he could never be the statesman he once yearned to be, in a
country he subsequently loved to hate’.
There is an alternative explanation: Vidal had a functioning brain
and heart, and a sufficiently independent mind to perceive the mass
killing of innocents in pursuit of maximised US profit.
David Aaronovitch wrote in The Times:
‘Bit by bit Vidal transformed himself
from thinker to polemicist. His political essays, much loved in the
anti-American press over here, began to take on a mildly unhinged
quality.’ (Aaronovitch, ‘Praise to the man who beat about Mr Bush; Gore
Vidal dazzled in his early novels and essays, but gradually turned into a
mildly unhinged isolationist,’ The Times, August 2, 2012)
Readers will struggle to find a better example of what psychologists call ‘projection’.
Echoing the standard obsession, a Guardian
article was
entitled: ‘Adam Mars-Jones my lunch at the Dorchester with Gore Vidal.’
Mars-Jones commented: ‘few writers have shown so much flair in using
television to maintain their public image’.
In fact, as Vidal made clear, his political analysis had long been banished from our screens:
‘The press won't report me, television is
shut to me, I've been erased. Noam Chomsky never had a chance, he never
had a great public; but I had one through my books and movies and plays
and of course essay writing. Now I am no longer a guest on anything
where I might cause trouble, where I might say something that they would
find embarrassing, which would be practically anything I would say
about how the country is run. So I am the perfect example of censorship
in the United States.’ ('I am the perfect example of censorship in the
United States'. Gore Vidal talks to Michael March about history, the
cold war and who really runs America, the Guardian, March 29, 2001)
Consider, as discussed, that Vidal was a rare honest and articulate opponent of the Iraq war. In October 2002, we
checked the
Guardian/Observer website and found that it had mentioned Iraq in some
2,381 articles in that crucial year of propaganda hype before the war
was launched in March 2003. By October 19, the words ‘Bush’ and ‘Iraq’
had been mentioned in 1,263 of these articles. The words ‘Gore Vidal’
and ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned in seven articles.
Precisely because Vidal's dissent was excluded by the media, the Telegraph
obituary was able to get away with this dumbed down version:
‘By the 1980s, Vidal observed, politics
had become trivialised by television, its substance and debate replaced
by flickering images, its figures transmuted into talking heads allowed
only seconds to make arguments about the future of the nation and the
world.’
He ‘detected a failure of education, manners on the decline, and
political leaders cynical, ignorant and blinded to the realities of the
outside world’.
The analysis was itself a good example of the kind of trivialisation
it was describing. Quite simply, since Vidal's death the corporate media
have had nothing serious to say about his political dissent warning
against the dominance of corporate power.
Vidal's
summing up certainly generalises to UK politics and media:
‘The bullshit just flows and flows and
flows, and the American media is so corrupt and so tied into it that it
never questions it.’
Heizer speaks in the slowed cadence of someone who puts a lot of medication into his body. He recently lost his car after crashing it into a fence. His life with his two roommates is sedentary. The three men each have a television in their bedrooms and two more they share, including the big-screen television that, along with an electric piano for Hovack, were bought with Heizer’s first disability check. The men spent the $20,000 from the check in a few days.
