You can't expect a democracy from a society like this.
By necessity, the recent documentary Best of Enemies had to focus a lot of its attention on Gore Vidal's televised debates with William F. Buckley in 1968, so for those looking for a more general overview of Vidal's life and career, the existence of 2013's Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia is a positive boon. (As far as I can tell, there isn't a comparable documentary about Buckley, which I am perfectly fine with.) Even better, director Nicholas Wrathall was granted plenty of access to Vidal in the last few years of his life, so in addition to looking back on his long career as a novelist, screenwriter, public intellectual, provocateur, and bon vivant, he's able to share his observations about the state of the union under Bush/Cheney and the true cost of the War on Terror.
Since the film wasn't completed until after Vidal's death in 2012, it's rather eerie that Wrathall opens it in the Washington, D.C., cemetery where he is to be entombed next to his longtime companion, Howard Austen, who passed away in 2003. (None of Wrathall's footage is date-stamped, so there's no way of knowing how close Vidal was to joining Austen when it was shot.) In fact, it's a long time before any of the other interview subjects -- a roll call that includes Tim Robbins (who directed Vidal in Bob Roberts), Christopher Hitchens (Vidal's intellectual heir apparent, who actually predeceased him), Dick Cavett, Sting, and Mikael Gorbachev -- speak of him in the past tense, which is one way of keeping the film from turning into a 90-minute eulogy. Still, while it's sad to see him in frailer and frailer health, it's heartening to know that his wit continued to be sharp -- at least as long as Wrathall and his camera were about.