More firebrand than elder statesman, Gore Vidal at 80 is proof that celebrity may not be such a bad thing. As “America’s most visible radical public intellectual,” to quote Doug Ireland’s description of him, Vidal has been exploiting his calculated celebrity “to explain to a large public the insidious effects of America’s domination by a ruling class of power elites bent on imperial expansion.”
That’s a mouthful, but only the half of it. The other half — to quote Ireland’s review of Dennis Altman’s new book, “Gore Vidal’s America” — is that the quasi-sovereignty of the power elites has led to “the destruction of any meaningful choice or genuine information in an electoral process which is increasingly irrelevant to most Americans.” (For an expanded version of the review, go here.)
Once upon a time — it was Oct. 28, 2002, at 11:36 a.m. ET, on MSNBC.com — we asked, “What kind of vitamins is Vidal taking?” He had just “leveled a 7,000-word attack against President Bush” (we weren’t referring to him yet as the Bullshitter-in-Chief, nor would we have been allowed to). Vidal’s attack was called, provocatively, “The Enemy Within” and “defied even his long track record as an armed and semi-dangerous gadfly,” we noted. “He has always been a maverick, a patrician-born traitor to the ruling class. But now, in his old age, he has outdone himself.”
Vidal was claiming that the failure to follow standard military procedures on the morning of 9/11 — procedures that required fighter planes to be scrambled without a presidential order as soon as an airliner has deviated from its flight plan — was deliberate and not a snafu. He was calling for “an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans.” He was arguing that “a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.” (Due to rights problems, Vidal’s piece was not online at the time. It is now.)
He maintained that 9/11 called into question not only “much of our fragile Bill of Rights” but also, as he put it, “our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.” The real motive for the Afghanistan war in Vidal’s view, according to The (London) Guardian, “was to control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia’s energy riches.”
“Depending on your point of view,” we wrote, “Vidal’s attack is either bold or paranoid. But whichever it is, how come we have two of America’s most prominent men of letters leading the attack on Bush? Last week we had Philip Roth calling Bush a ventriloquist’s dummy. Now we have Vidal accusing him of worse. (Let’s not even mention MIT’s Noam Chomsky, a linguist but no belletrist.)”
The reaction of the debunkers was swift. Ron Rosenbaum, for instance, went after Vidal two weeks later (exactly three years ago Friday) in a column in the New York Observer headlined “Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece,” calling him, more than nuts, a deliberate fabricator. Not long after, however, Edward S. Morgan gave the lie to smears like Rosenbaum’s, making the case both for Vidal’s sanity and the vitality of his arguments, as noted in VIDAL UNGORED.
For a gorgeous sample of Vidal’s sanity, have a listen to his take on the Bullshitter-in-Chief’s second inaugural address. “It’s a declaration of war against the entire globe,” Vidal says. “There’s not a word of truth in anything he said. … It goes in one ear and out the other as lies often do, particularly rhetorical lies thought up by second-rate advertising men …” What’s more:
I think he thinks and many of the American people appear to think that we’re in a movie, a lousy movie, but it’s just a movie, and once the final credits run, all those dead people, who are just extras anyway, will stand up and come home…. It isn’t a movie we’re in. It’s real life, and these are real dead people, and there are more and more of them, and the world won’t tolerate it.
Now, 11 months later, even the American people are at last beginning not to tolerate it. So, Ron, where’s your apology?
— Tireless Staff of Thousands
