November 13, 2003

Where the Past Comes Alive

Another relatively crazy interview with Gore Vidal in the LA Weekly. I say relatively, because it doesn't quite meet this standard. Anyhow, with a little help from the passive, softball questions of Marc Cooper, Vidal addresses the important question on everybody's mind these days: if George Bush, John Ashcroft, and Dick Cheney had been born two hundred years earlier; and if they had attended the first Constitutional convention; and if they had tried to write the USA Patriot Act into the Constitution; well, what would have happened then?

Answer:

Vidal: The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

Hanged.

Cooper: So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

Vidal: No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans - most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

Cooper: Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

Vidal: I think of them as an alien army.


Presumably there's more sophisticated analysis like this in Gore's new book, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. If you're into that sort of thing.

Posted by Dr. Frank at November 13, 2003 04:26 PM | TrackBack
Comments

An idiot. Does he dare ignore the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed under the Adams Administration, and much worse than the Patriot Act? Yes he does.

Of course, he also singles out really only FDR for praise, even though the Japanese-American internment was worse than anything he can lay at the feet of Bush. (Similarly too Andrew Jackson's ignoring of the Supreme Court and illegal treatment of the Cherokee.)

Posted by: John Thacker at November 13, 2003 08:41 PM

This is the sort of thing that drives people to blog, you know. It's exactly why I started mine---these revered "public intellectuals" who are invited into various media venues to spout historically ignorant claptrap. I began to wonder what, exactly, made them so worthy of reverence, if they couldn't do any better than this. Hell, I could do better.

Is Vidal really this ignorant? Has he always been ignorant? Is he lying? On drugs? Off drugs?

Posted by: Angie Schultz at November 14, 2003 03:29 PM

I have been told by those who value such things that Vidal is supposed to be a wonderful public speaker, with a poetical, nay, godlike command of language, yadda yadda. That always made me thought -- "Well, so was someone whose nom-de-tyrant began with 'H,' or so I have read."

Posted by: Andrea Harris at November 15, 2003 01:42 AM

That always made me think. Damn sinus medication.

Posted by: Andrea Harris at November 15, 2003 01:43 AM

I've only heard Vidal speak on radio and television, and one thing you can say for him is that regardless of how crazy what he's saying might be, he hardly ever raises his voice. Even when William F. Buckley is threatening to punch him in his god damn mouth.

There's a clip of his famous lawsuit-generating TV debate with Buckley in 1968 on this page: http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/tapes.html "Lyndon Johnson is simply an agent of nature," he says, and predicts disaster for the American Empire. Same schtick after all these years, pretty much.

As for public speaking, I'm not very impressed with the effete, prissy accent/delivery (which both of these guys have)-- they're upper class northeast accents, I guess, and there may have been a time when this manner was more impressive. But these days it sounds like a joke or a parody or something. Vidal doesn't crank the namby-pamby knob quite so severely these days, which brings up the question of which mode is more of an affectation. (Some more recent examples: http://www.truthtree.com/sound-gore.shtml.)

As for command of language, maybe so: he's quite skilled at conjuring a spirit of measured, well-modulated incoherence, I'll give him that.

Posted by: Dr. Frank at November 15, 2003 05:13 PM
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