Calumnies and contretemps: a consideration of Gore Vidal.
Gore Vidal died on Tuesday, 31 July at the age of 86 due complications from pneumonia; the Internet pretty much blossomed on Wednesday, 1 August, with remembrances and "good riddances", which trickled to a stop by Friday, 3 August (or, in some quarters, Sunday, 5 August).
Given how much of his output I've read and how highly I valued his incisiveness and his mordant and sometimes searing wit -- I even have a tag for him, for Tehuti's sake -- I figured I'd better post something, no matter how inadequate, by way of commenting on his legacy.
To quote myself from the comments of marlowe1's blog this past Wednesday (I think that it is fair to say that he is very much in the "good riddance!" camp): I don't believe that Vidal was a conspiracy theorist -- he called himself a "conspiracy analyst" in his later years -- but I agree that he became increasingly sour, bilious, and unpleasant as he aged ([...] he wasn't the first person to do so, and I very much doubt that he'll be the last); he tended to sabotage the good points that he was trying to make ( why the rush to execute Timothy McVeigh? was 9/11 really such a bolt from the blue? was Pearl Harbor?), so that many people discarded everything that he said. He notably subscribed to the "lone gunman" explanation of who shot JFK (who was a friend), largely because of the conduct of RFK (who most decidedly was not) after Jack's death; he didn't consider until relatively late in his life that Bobby was utterly cowed by the murder of his brother, which was why he wasn't clamoring for a full-scale federal investigation into the plot that took down Jack. Bobby did apparently have a "road to Damascus" moment after 1963, evincing something of a 180-degree personality change; whether it was an actual or merely a superficial change remains a matter of speculation, owing to Bobby's own untimely demise.
Vidal was a polarizing figure; he notably did not make it easy for even his friends and admirers to like him (he was even more noteworthy in this trait than his one-time friend and heir apparent, Christopher Hitchens, whose death preceded Vidal's by seven-and-a-half months), and it should come as no surprise that even publications that were friendly to him and who provided an outlet for some of his polemics have, in the aftermath of his death, published ambivalent assessments of him. The Nation, for which magazine Vidal served as an editorial adviser as well as a regular contributor, has mostly published love letters to him (and even a regret that Vidal never realized his political ambitions); however, Slate published a rather vigorous push-back by David Greenberg ("Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal: He was a racist and an elitist, forever mourning the decline of his era of aristocratic privilege"; the headline when it was first published on Thursday, 2 August was: "Gore Vidal: Don't believe the rosy obituraries -- he was a racist and an elitist"), one which I feel is guilty of being overly reductive. It's worth reproducing some of Greenberg (as well as his links) here:
"Toward the end of Vidal’s life, he discredited himself even on the left with his embrace of loony ultra-right causes, such as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and eventually Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City Murrah building in 1995. Vidal feebly tried to justify these indefensible sympathies by pointing to the United States government’s abuses of power.
....
"Vidal’s extreme late-in-life beliefs, however, weren't deviations from an otherwise noble record. They were the natural progression of thought in a man whose worldview was fundamentally racist and elitist, motivated by the fear that the reign of his own caste was ending as the walls of aristocratic privilege crumbled in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Vidal was a paradigmatic, almost stereotypical representative of the traditional American elite-WASP lineage, prep schools, money, connections. Fashioning himself a latter-day Henry Adams, a valiant upholder of a civilization under siege-he compared America to Rome in its decadence-he repeatedly denigrated those arriviste groups he considered less than fully American."
I hardly think that it's "loony" to criticize the U.S. government's actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco, or to question the unseemly rush to execute Timothy McVeigh. One need not be an opponent of the death penalty or otherwise a "bleeding heart" to regret the rapidity of McVeigh's execution: spending the rest of his potentially long life in prison with no possibility of parole would have been far more punishing to McVeigh than a presumably painless and humane death; then too, someone imprisoned in such circumstances may well, as the cheerless days, weeks, months and years tick by, find himself overcome by a desire to talk, to finally disclose to the authorities heretofore unknown or obscure details of the atrocity for which he was convicted and jailed. One need not be "loony," I think, to wonder why exactly the U.S. government apparently didn't want this outcome, or to question if it was solely political expediency that prompted the swift meting out of "justice" to McVeigh.
As to Vidal's presumed racism and elitism, it's true that he evinced little, if any, self-doubt or humility in his writings or his public persona, and that he thought much of his family in toto (even if he didn't think much of his mother, Nina Gore; the much-celebrated blind senator from the newly created state of Oklahoma, T.P. Gore -- who notably sparred with Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- was Nina's father); however, it's equally true that he called the elites of both "right wings" of America's single political party (as he referred to the Democratic and Republican parties) on their elitist, racist, demogagic, and criminal enterprises, as well as their propensities for "scaring the hell" out of the American public for political gain. Vidal's masterful essay on West Point -- originally published in The New York Review of Books on October 18, 1973, and collected in his National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992 (pps. 1080-93)-- is a blistering exposé of the U.S.'s military elites, who are not terribly dissimilar to what we think of as "Prussian" (or a generically European) military class.
Greenberg's singling out Vidal's notorious feuds with the neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter (albeit less well-known to the general public than Vidal's televised altercation with William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- an altercation remembered recently as being between men with very similar backgrounds and for the justice of Vidal's calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi") as "anti-Semitic rants" is more than a little disingenuous, as Benjamin Ivry, writing in the 10 August issue of the Jewish Daily Forward (though posted on their site on Thursday, 2 August) notes. It's also telling that Theodore Sayeed, writing in Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East, notes, "To the end he was a keen advocate of the Palestinian cause and enjoyed toying with degraded Zionists like John Podhoretz [the son of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter] and his gaggle." It's more accurate to say that Vidal had little use for those whom he called "sky godders" -- a trait that he famously shared with Christopher Hitchens.
Greenberg pointing to Vidal writing (in "A Cheeful Response," originally published in the March 22, 1986 issue of The Nation, in response to Norman Podhoretz's and Midge Decter's attack on his earlier essay "The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas," which is a version of the speech he gave "at the Royale Theatre in New York, under the auspices of PEN American Center" [United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992, p. 1017] published in the January 11, 1986 issue of The Nation): "For America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is the minority race and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don't band together, we are going to end up as farmers -- or, worse, mere entertainment -- for more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics" as proof positive of Vidal's racism is nothing short of willfully perverse: the irony dripping from this piece (as in much of Vidal's writing) is so acidic as to call to mind the blood of the titular extra-terrestreal in the 1979 movie Alien. To cite Vidal's footnote appended to the end of this sentence in United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992:
"Again, I was attacked as a racist, invoking the 'Yellow Peril." Simultaneously, the Japanese premier announced that the United States was a failure because there were too many inferior races in our heterodox land, while one of his cabinet ministers predicted that, in the next century, the United States would be Japan's farm, and Western Europe its boutique."
-- p. 1017
It would be helpful if Vidal or his editors provided a citation for these remarks; however, one should remember that, in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, a goodly chunk of Americans and American opinion leaders were a'flutter over the possibility of Japan overtaking the United States as the world's economic engine, if not the premier economic imperialist: such disparate events as the beating death of Vincent Chin in a Detroit suburb in 1982 and conservative alarmist Michael Crichton's 1992 novel Rising Sun (filmed in 1993, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes; incidentally, Crichton wrote: "I heard nobody say the book was inaccurate in its depiction of Japanese multinational practices in the late '80s and early '90s. But I heard lots of people say that I shouldn't say things like that.") serve as rough book-ends to America's most recent round of Japanophobia. That Japan subsequently lost a decade's worth of economic growth and that China has apparently assumed Japan's once preeminent economic position doesn't substantively refute Vidal's statement.
Critics who wish to pillory Vidal for a latter-day promulgation of "Yellow Peril" jeremiads as well as anti-Semitism should read both "The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas" and "A Cheerful Response" in full. Greenberg does not cite Vidal's account of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter dismissing the American Civil War as an important subject; Vidal writes that, in 1960, Podhoretz declared,
"'Well, to me...the Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.' I realized then that he was not planning to become an 'assimilated American,' to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel -- a country they don't seem eager to live in. Jewish joke, circa 1900: A Zionist is someone who wants to ship other people off to Palestine."
-- pps. 1018-19
That there was -- and is -- no unified school of thought regarding Zionism among the Jews should come as no surprise; but it might be useful to read Amos Oz's 2007 "fictionalized memoir" (largely in how it imagines the motivations for his mother's suicide) A Tale of Love and Darkness to get an idea of the countervailing schools of thought among the founders of the Jewish state. (It should be noted that Oz is something of a prophet without honor in Israel, given that he has, since 1967, advocated "a two-state settlement with the Palestinians") Oz hails from a Zionist family of good standing, since he is the grand-nephew of Joseph Klausner, a candidate for the first president of Israel in 1949.
The most telling paragraph from "A Cheerful Response" is perhaps this one:
"Since spades may not be called spades in freedom's land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews*, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives and attack the likes of Mailer [who spoke alongside Vidal at the aforementioned PEN American Center forum] and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and Greater Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too."
-- p. 1020
Vidal's footnote to "a small number of American Jews," in United States, reads: "This sentence has since been carefully revised by publicists like W. Safire and M. Peretz and C. Krauthammer to mean 'all Jews,' thus demonstrating my 'virulent' anti-Semitism. Well, ours is a sectarian society" (ibid).
That Vidal is, at this late date, not the only voice sounding the cautionary note about the collusion of far-right Christian evangelicals with far-right Israeli political interests -- I point to Victoria Clark's 2007 book Allies For Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism as but one book in what has proved to be something of a cottage industry -- will perhaps surprise only those among his detractors who wish to believe that he was nothing but an anti-Semitic (then why his latter-day truce with Jewish author -- and unapologetic macho shithead -- Norman Mailer? why his fifty-year live-in relationship with Jewish advertising executive Howard Auster, whom Vidal convinced to change his name to the goyish "Austen" in order to get hired on Madison Avenue?), anti-Catholic (as witness his public feuds with William F. Buckley, Jr. and his son Christopher Buckley, as well as celebrity and crime-among-the-celebrities chonicler Dominck Dunne), conspiracy-addled crank -- and a "third-rate" novelist in the bargain.
As regards Vidal's supposed aristocratic elitism (which I think can be chalked up more to the man's egotism than a true sense of aristocratic entitlement), it's useful to set that against the closing sentences of his essay "West Point," first published in the October 18, 1973 issue of The New York Review of Books:
"Although I have always found poignant (yes, even honorable) the loyalty of West Pointers to one another, I could not help thinking as I walked away from them for the last time that the harm they have done to this republic and to the world elsewhere far outweighs their personal excellence, their duty, their honor. But then the country that they never understood was always last in their affections and so the first of their loyalties to be betrayed."
-- United States, p. 1093
It would be interesting to learn just how many of the same people who dismiss Vidal are also fans of Spider Jerusalem, the vituperative and buffoonish celebrity journalist created by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson for their celebrated science fiction comic book series Transmetropolitan; Jerusalem addresses the unnamed Nixonesque U.S. President, dubbed by him "The Beast," in Transmetropolitan #21, after he asks Jerusalem why he called him "The Beast":
"It's how I think of you. A big black animal squatting in the heart of America, shitting huge steaming green turds into the country. Licking your own balls, jacking off with the Constitution, shooting great boiling wads of poison sperm in the faces of the assholes who voted for you. You're the... thing in us that votes to fuck other people in the gall bladder. The lizard brain that says nothing but eat-kill-hump-shit...the Beast."
p. 12, panels 3-4; p. 13, panels 1-2 [collected in Transmetropolitan {Vol. 4}: The New Scum, 2009; pps. 63-4]
That someone could actually condemn Vidal for being a disrespectful, even "vile" crank, and cheer the clownish, obscene, and scatalogical invective that Ellis puts into Jerusalem's mouth is nothing short of mind-boggling; then again, this phenomenon is illustrative of the fact that most of us would not want to actually meet our fictional heroes in the flesh.
Gore Vidal was far from being a saint, or being wholly defensible in every utterance he gave or position he took; but neither does he deserve to be consigned to what he once called "Time's wingéd dustbin." I, for one, will miss his continued presence, no matter how far he pushed himself to the margins towards the end of his life.
*NOTE: The quote that I used for my LJ-cut tag is taken from Vidal's essay "Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self" ("Glorious Bird" being a nickname for his friend, playwright Tennessee Williams), originally published in The New York Review of Books on February 5, 1976, and reprinted in United States, pps. 1131-48; the quote itself is taken from p. 1141.
Given how much of his output I've read and how highly I valued his incisiveness and his mordant and sometimes searing wit -- I even have a tag for him, for Tehuti's sake -- I figured I'd better post something, no matter how inadequate, by way of commenting on his legacy.
To quote myself from the comments of marlowe1's blog this past Wednesday (I think that it is fair to say that he is very much in the "good riddance!" camp): I don't believe that Vidal was a conspiracy theorist -- he called himself a "conspiracy analyst" in his later years -- but I agree that he became increasingly sour, bilious, and unpleasant as he aged ([...] he wasn't the first person to do so, and I very much doubt that he'll be the last); he tended to sabotage the good points that he was trying to make ( why the rush to execute Timothy McVeigh? was 9/11 really such a bolt from the blue? was Pearl Harbor?), so that many people discarded everything that he said. He notably subscribed to the "lone gunman" explanation of who shot JFK (who was a friend), largely because of the conduct of RFK (who most decidedly was not) after Jack's death; he didn't consider until relatively late in his life that Bobby was utterly cowed by the murder of his brother, which was why he wasn't clamoring for a full-scale federal investigation into the plot that took down Jack. Bobby did apparently have a "road to Damascus" moment after 1963, evincing something of a 180-degree personality change; whether it was an actual or merely a superficial change remains a matter of speculation, owing to Bobby's own untimely demise.
Vidal was a polarizing figure; he notably did not make it easy for even his friends and admirers to like him (he was even more noteworthy in this trait than his one-time friend and heir apparent, Christopher Hitchens, whose death preceded Vidal's by seven-and-a-half months), and it should come as no surprise that even publications that were friendly to him and who provided an outlet for some of his polemics have, in the aftermath of his death, published ambivalent assessments of him. The Nation, for which magazine Vidal served as an editorial adviser as well as a regular contributor, has mostly published love letters to him (and even a regret that Vidal never realized his political ambitions); however, Slate published a rather vigorous push-back by David Greenberg ("Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal: He was a racist and an elitist, forever mourning the decline of his era of aristocratic privilege"; the headline when it was first published on Thursday, 2 August was: "Gore Vidal: Don't believe the rosy obituraries -- he was a racist and an elitist"), one which I feel is guilty of being overly reductive. It's worth reproducing some of Greenberg (as well as his links) here:
"Toward the end of Vidal’s life, he discredited himself even on the left with his embrace of loony ultra-right causes, such as Ruby Ridge, Waco, and eventually Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City Murrah building in 1995. Vidal feebly tried to justify these indefensible sympathies by pointing to the United States government’s abuses of power.
....
"Vidal’s extreme late-in-life beliefs, however, weren't deviations from an otherwise noble record. They were the natural progression of thought in a man whose worldview was fundamentally racist and elitist, motivated by the fear that the reign of his own caste was ending as the walls of aristocratic privilege crumbled in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Vidal was a paradigmatic, almost stereotypical representative of the traditional American elite-WASP lineage, prep schools, money, connections. Fashioning himself a latter-day Henry Adams, a valiant upholder of a civilization under siege-he compared America to Rome in its decadence-he repeatedly denigrated those arriviste groups he considered less than fully American."
I hardly think that it's "loony" to criticize the U.S. government's actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco, or to question the unseemly rush to execute Timothy McVeigh. One need not be an opponent of the death penalty or otherwise a "bleeding heart" to regret the rapidity of McVeigh's execution: spending the rest of his potentially long life in prison with no possibility of parole would have been far more punishing to McVeigh than a presumably painless and humane death; then too, someone imprisoned in such circumstances may well, as the cheerless days, weeks, months and years tick by, find himself overcome by a desire to talk, to finally disclose to the authorities heretofore unknown or obscure details of the atrocity for which he was convicted and jailed. One need not be "loony," I think, to wonder why exactly the U.S. government apparently didn't want this outcome, or to question if it was solely political expediency that prompted the swift meting out of "justice" to McVeigh.
As to Vidal's presumed racism and elitism, it's true that he evinced little, if any, self-doubt or humility in his writings or his public persona, and that he thought much of his family in toto (even if he didn't think much of his mother, Nina Gore; the much-celebrated blind senator from the newly created state of Oklahoma, T.P. Gore -- who notably sparred with Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- was Nina's father); however, it's equally true that he called the elites of both "right wings" of America's single political party (as he referred to the Democratic and Republican parties) on their elitist, racist, demogagic, and criminal enterprises, as well as their propensities for "scaring the hell" out of the American public for political gain. Vidal's masterful essay on West Point -- originally published in The New York Review of Books on October 18, 1973, and collected in his National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992 (pps. 1080-93)-- is a blistering exposé of the U.S.'s military elites, who are not terribly dissimilar to what we think of as "Prussian" (or a generically European) military class.
Greenberg's singling out Vidal's notorious feuds with the neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter (albeit less well-known to the general public than Vidal's televised altercation with William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- an altercation remembered recently as being between men with very similar backgrounds and for the justice of Vidal's calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi") as "anti-Semitic rants" is more than a little disingenuous, as Benjamin Ivry, writing in the 10 August issue of the Jewish Daily Forward (though posted on their site on Thursday, 2 August) notes. It's also telling that Theodore Sayeed, writing in Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East, notes, "To the end he was a keen advocate of the Palestinian cause and enjoyed toying with degraded Zionists like John Podhoretz [the son of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter] and his gaggle." It's more accurate to say that Vidal had little use for those whom he called "sky godders" -- a trait that he famously shared with Christopher Hitchens.
Greenberg pointing to Vidal writing (in "A Cheeful Response," originally published in the March 22, 1986 issue of The Nation, in response to Norman Podhoretz's and Midge Decter's attack on his earlier essay "The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas," which is a version of the speech he gave "at the Royale Theatre in New York, under the auspices of PEN American Center" [United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992, p. 1017] published in the January 11, 1986 issue of The Nation): "For America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is the minority race and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don't band together, we are going to end up as farmers -- or, worse, mere entertainment -- for more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics" as proof positive of Vidal's racism is nothing short of willfully perverse: the irony dripping from this piece (as in much of Vidal's writing) is so acidic as to call to mind the blood of the titular extra-terrestreal in the 1979 movie Alien. To cite Vidal's footnote appended to the end of this sentence in United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992:
"Again, I was attacked as a racist, invoking the 'Yellow Peril." Simultaneously, the Japanese premier announced that the United States was a failure because there were too many inferior races in our heterodox land, while one of his cabinet ministers predicted that, in the next century, the United States would be Japan's farm, and Western Europe its boutique."
-- p. 1017
It would be helpful if Vidal or his editors provided a citation for these remarks; however, one should remember that, in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, a goodly chunk of Americans and American opinion leaders were a'flutter over the possibility of Japan overtaking the United States as the world's economic engine, if not the premier economic imperialist: such disparate events as the beating death of Vincent Chin in a Detroit suburb in 1982 and conservative alarmist Michael Crichton's 1992 novel Rising Sun (filmed in 1993, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes; incidentally, Crichton wrote: "I heard nobody say the book was inaccurate in its depiction of Japanese multinational practices in the late '80s and early '90s. But I heard lots of people say that I shouldn't say things like that.") serve as rough book-ends to America's most recent round of Japanophobia. That Japan subsequently lost a decade's worth of economic growth and that China has apparently assumed Japan's once preeminent economic position doesn't substantively refute Vidal's statement.
Critics who wish to pillory Vidal for a latter-day promulgation of "Yellow Peril" jeremiads as well as anti-Semitism should read both "The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas" and "A Cheerful Response" in full. Greenberg does not cite Vidal's account of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter dismissing the American Civil War as an important subject; Vidal writes that, in 1960, Podhoretz declared,
"'Well, to me...the Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.' I realized then that he was not planning to become an 'assimilated American,' to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel -- a country they don't seem eager to live in. Jewish joke, circa 1900: A Zionist is someone who wants to ship other people off to Palestine."
-- pps. 1018-19
That there was -- and is -- no unified school of thought regarding Zionism among the Jews should come as no surprise; but it might be useful to read Amos Oz's 2007 "fictionalized memoir" (largely in how it imagines the motivations for his mother's suicide) A Tale of Love and Darkness to get an idea of the countervailing schools of thought among the founders of the Jewish state. (It should be noted that Oz is something of a prophet without honor in Israel, given that he has, since 1967, advocated "a two-state settlement with the Palestinians") Oz hails from a Zionist family of good standing, since he is the grand-nephew of Joseph Klausner, a candidate for the first president of Israel in 1949.
The most telling paragraph from "A Cheerful Response" is perhaps this one:
"Since spades may not be called spades in freedom's land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews*, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives and attack the likes of Mailer [who spoke alongside Vidal at the aforementioned PEN American Center forum] and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and Greater Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too."
-- p. 1020
Vidal's footnote to "a small number of American Jews," in United States, reads: "This sentence has since been carefully revised by publicists like W. Safire and M. Peretz and C. Krauthammer to mean 'all Jews,' thus demonstrating my 'virulent' anti-Semitism. Well, ours is a sectarian society" (ibid).
That Vidal is, at this late date, not the only voice sounding the cautionary note about the collusion of far-right Christian evangelicals with far-right Israeli political interests -- I point to Victoria Clark's 2007 book Allies For Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism as but one book in what has proved to be something of a cottage industry -- will perhaps surprise only those among his detractors who wish to believe that he was nothing but an anti-Semitic (then why his latter-day truce with Jewish author -- and unapologetic macho shithead -- Norman Mailer? why his fifty-year live-in relationship with Jewish advertising executive Howard Auster, whom Vidal convinced to change his name to the goyish "Austen" in order to get hired on Madison Avenue?), anti-Catholic (as witness his public feuds with William F. Buckley, Jr. and his son Christopher Buckley, as well as celebrity and crime-among-the-celebrities chonicler Dominck Dunne), conspiracy-addled crank -- and a "third-rate" novelist in the bargain.
As regards Vidal's supposed aristocratic elitism (which I think can be chalked up more to the man's egotism than a true sense of aristocratic entitlement), it's useful to set that against the closing sentences of his essay "West Point," first published in the October 18, 1973 issue of The New York Review of Books:
"Although I have always found poignant (yes, even honorable) the loyalty of West Pointers to one another, I could not help thinking as I walked away from them for the last time that the harm they have done to this republic and to the world elsewhere far outweighs their personal excellence, their duty, their honor. But then the country that they never understood was always last in their affections and so the first of their loyalties to be betrayed."
-- United States, p. 1093
It would be interesting to learn just how many of the same people who dismiss Vidal are also fans of Spider Jerusalem, the vituperative and buffoonish celebrity journalist created by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson for their celebrated science fiction comic book series Transmetropolitan; Jerusalem addresses the unnamed Nixonesque U.S. President, dubbed by him "The Beast," in Transmetropolitan #21, after he asks Jerusalem why he called him "The Beast":
"It's how I think of you. A big black animal squatting in the heart of America, shitting huge steaming green turds into the country. Licking your own balls, jacking off with the Constitution, shooting great boiling wads of poison sperm in the faces of the assholes who voted for you. You're the... thing in us that votes to fuck other people in the gall bladder. The lizard brain that says nothing but eat-kill-hump-shit...the Beast."
p. 12, panels 3-4; p. 13, panels 1-2 [collected in Transmetropolitan {Vol. 4}: The New Scum, 2009; pps. 63-4]
That someone could actually condemn Vidal for being a disrespectful, even "vile" crank, and cheer the clownish, obscene, and scatalogical invective that Ellis puts into Jerusalem's mouth is nothing short of mind-boggling; then again, this phenomenon is illustrative of the fact that most of us would not want to actually meet our fictional heroes in the flesh.
Gore Vidal was far from being a saint, or being wholly defensible in every utterance he gave or position he took; but neither does he deserve to be consigned to what he once called "Time's wingéd dustbin." I, for one, will miss his continued presence, no matter how far he pushed himself to the margins towards the end of his life.
*NOTE: The quote that I used for my LJ-cut tag is taken from Vidal's essay "Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self" ("Glorious Bird" being a nickname for his friend, playwright Tennessee Williams), originally published in The New York Review of Books on February 5, 1976, and reprinted in United States, pps. 1131-48; the quote itself is taken from p. 1141.