Gore Vidal: American Prophet
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
I read a biography of Vidal a few years ago and wrote a little post about it, which you might find interesting:
“Gore Vidal was everywhere and now he is nowhere” - https://onthearts.com/p/gore-vidal-was-everywhere-and-now
Sad to say that with the recent passing of Lewis Lapham, there seem to be very few/zero political commentators on the level of him and Vidal, in the sense of being a true public intellectual and not just a partisan blog/substack trying to get subscribers and sell books. Of course Vidal and Lapham had books and magazines, but they brought a much deeper respect for history than the average commentator today.
Which is a shame, as I think if Vidal was twenty or thirty years younger, he would be immensely popular in a TikTok and YouTube world. He had a real charisma that comes through in his many video interviews. Here’s my favorite one: https://youtu.be/E76ArLbSABA?si=3FRQYNce1CThryJo
Chomsky famously said for decades: “The average teenager would rather be at the mall than at the library”
In the wise words of the dude:
How are you going to keep her on the ranch after she’s seen ‘logjammin’
It’s an interesting conundrum though because I’d argue most of the kind of people that watched “firing line” read “the nation” and watched the PBS newshour just don’t exist at numbers that make them viable anymore
But back then, politics (like the internet of the early days) was a game reserved for the intellectual elite.
Now, both internet and politics, have successfully been democratized.
For better or worse.
Nowadays the (ersatz) equivalents that come to mind are generally plugging away on Youtube Shorts, Podcasts and monetised platforms in lieu of structured debate or moderated talk show punditry - e.g. Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry and Dawkins on the 'academic' side. This has changed the consumption, the engagement, and often the context depending from what angle you consume the soundbite.
The ones on the 'political' side as neocons I barely dare to mention like George Galloway, Douglas Murray etc... so as to avoid sullying Hitch's reputation by mentioning it in the same contexts as advocates of Great Replacement and other Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.
The high brow stuff, which absolutely exists and more than ever, are not being forced on you by taste makers anymore. Cavett/Cronkite etc.. was the only thing to watch so whomever passed that filter was shown to the world.
Now it’s mingled in with all the porn, ragebait, trash so never gets really highlighted because people have a choice now and they are choosing brainrot.
Hence my point that whereas in the past you may have never thought about it but we’re “forced” to watch it because there just wasn’t anything else on. Now if someone is on a “boring” distribe about politics, people swipe to look at butts and cats because it’s easier
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/02/lost-heart-o...
"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."
"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."
The incredible universality of his appeal is captured beautifully by Hitchens in 'Hitch 22' in relation to the odious and bellicose Newt Gingrich:
"I was once seated in a television studio with Newt Gingrich, waiting for the debate between us to get going, when the presenter made an off-air remark that was highly disobliging to Gore. The former Republic Speaker abruptly became very prim and disapproving, and said that he would prefer not to listen to any abuse of the author of 'Lincoln' - a novel that he regarded as being above reproach. I conveyed this news to the author himself, who took the tribute as he takes all tributes: as being overdue and well-deserved."
As for the contention re: TikTok, he'd certainly be a regular on Bill Maher in the same vein that Hitchens was in the early 2000s. He was particularly prescient and open in speaking about the separation of sexual acts from the state of being - a thesis more easily digestible now than then.
"There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices."
This is the great man theory[1] from the left.
But yes, there was some "unnecessary roughness" to the piece, perhaps the author wanted to assert intellectual independence.
That would go down better if he understood that there have been aristocrats who were political populists for all of recorded history, most notably a certain Caius Julius Caesar who started out with the bluest blood and thinnest purse in Rome.
(* besides I've run out of new material, having a while ago snarfed the Edgar Box mysteries, 1950s potboilers where Vidal just had to portray power-adjacent milieus.)