Remembering the Dead, from Selma

[Geee]

PjMedia:

I confess this is the first time in my life I will break the old Hellenic rule: ton tethnvêkota mê kakologein (speak no ill of the dead). That Vidal was a cruel person is no excuse for not refraining from criticism after his recent death, but here I sin nonetheless.

I could never finish any of Gore Vidal’s fiction, even his best, Julian — although I grant that he was ironic, at times shocking, and could be a valuable corrective to unmerited reputations. But Robert Graves (even at his worst with Count Belisarius) and Peter Green were probably superior historical novelists. To compare similar contrarian essayists, the late Christopher Hitchens was a better writer. He was more widely informed and more honest about the public intellectual’s propensity for caricaturing the very ribbons and medals — and cash — that he so covets.

Many praised Vidal’s essays. Some were insightful, but more were self-indulgent, full of pathetic aristocratic references, and tinged with anti-Semitism and passive-aggressive gossip about those with better bloodlines and more money. Among the latter, Vidal eagerly sought opportunities to play the court jester. Somehow all of that was central, rather than incidental, to his arguments.

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For all his claims of erudition, Vidal suffered the wages of the public autodidact. I noticed he quoted Latin ad nauseam — and nearly always with his nouns and adjectives not just in the wrong cases (especially the confusion of the accusative and ablative in preposition phrases), but predictably in the fashion of those who like to copy down Latin phrases but cannot read a complete Latin sentence. By his sixties, Vidal had degenerated into a conspiracy theorist, and his embarrassing late-life infatuation with Timothy McVeigh caught the eye of the goddess Nemesis.

Vidal said he was nauseated by American imperialism and gloated over our decline, but his real pique was that the mannered East Coast snobbishness that he loved to shock had given way to a socially mobile, no-holds-barred popular culture that did not so much ignore his world of blue-blood repartee, but had no clue that it had ever existed. He liked being hated; he hated being irrelevant.

Otherwise, it is hard to find any commonality in Vidal’s corpus of work other than a certain disdain for what he would term the “grasping”: the supposedly wannabe Jewish intellectual, the upper-middle class suburbanite who sends his kids to State U, or the American can-doism that sought to “improve” itself through intellectual and artistic awareness — about which brings me to my sole Gore Vidal story.

I met him once. Or rather my family did. In the early 1960s, my father, William F. Hanson, a former teacher, farmer, and then administrator at Reedley Junior College, proposed to the local JC school board “a lecture series.” The Central Valley farming community was innately conservative. But nonetheless, in the classically liberal spirit of those pre-Vietnam times, the farmers on the board not only funded my dad’s proposed lecture series, but encouraged him to invite controversial, and often liberal, voices — over the objection of the careerist president of the college at that time.

There was only a small ramshackle college motel in Reedley (population around 6,000 then). Consequently, often my father asked the speakers whether they wished instead to stay at our Selma farmhouse, 16 miles away, on the night before the lecture. A lot did.

So it followed that, from about age 9 to 15 (e.g., 1962-1968), I listened to every word, at dinner and the next morning’s breakfast, from the likes of Ansel Adams (I remember a short, bearded bald man in cowboy hat who railed all evening against James Watt), Pearl Buck (two strange aides who would not let her out of their sight), Louis Leakey (suffering from terrible dental pain and around the house wearing a blue jump suit), Bernard Lovell (stared out about two feet over our heads when speaking), Rod Serling (refused to answer our constant questions about the Twilight Zone, and instead went on a nonstop invective against Richard Nixon), Mark Van Doren (gracious, polite, and a beautiful speaker of the English language), and about 30 or so others in rural Selma.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

Victor at his best!

I like the way he calls Gore Vidal a jerk...without actually calling him a Jerk.

 

BTW I'm sure we've all known people like Gore Vidal. People who are smart and they make damn sure you know it....and you should be thrilled to be in their august presence.

 

 

"Gore Vidal may not have been as poor a writer as I allege, or John Keegan as gifted an historian as I have argued. I met the former at ten, the latter as an adult. One did nothing for me, the other everything. So be it: I will miss not reading another new sentence from Keegan as much as I am unconcerned about the absence of another 500-page book from Vidal."

 

 

MARVELOUS!!!

[Geee]

@Valin. Gore Vidal WAS a jerk. WFB always made him look like a rabid dog and an idiot.

[Valin]

@Valin. Gore Vidal WAS a jerk. WFB always made him look like a rabid dog and an idiot.

 

[Geee]

His voice still grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard

[Valin]

His voice still grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard

 

I love people like Gore Vidal. They provide hours and hours of evil twisted fun...which puts it right up my ally. It's like shooting fish in a barrel!

[Valin]

Gore Vidal and the Sky God

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

August 7, 2012

 

 

(Snip)Most of the media coverage after his death dealt extensively with his homosexuality and radical politics. He claimed, for example, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance of Pearl Harbor and that President George W. Bush knew in advance of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Many also mentioned his antipathy to Christianity.

 

But the true nature of Gore Vidal's theological protest was largely, if not totally, missing from the national coverage. In his 1992 Lowell Lecture at Harvard University, Vidal attacked not just Christianity, but the very notion of monotheism.

 

In his essay, "Monotheism and its Discontents," based on the lecture at Harvard, Vidal perceptively and blasphemously blamed the existence of a binding sexual morality on monotheism.(Snip)

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

The thing I've noticed is very often atheists no matter New or Old, put up a God acceptable understandable to a 7 year old, then attack this God. Then think they have really done something. The God of a 7 year old is not the God of a 37 year old...or at least shouldn't be. Karl Barth talked about God as "The Wholly Other", and I don't think we really understand just how Wholly Other God is. But I'm looking forward to finding out! It will be I have no doubt a Light Bulb Moment.

[pollyannaish]

What a fascinating article!

 

One thing that strikes me...was America in general more in touch with the intellectual side of themselves 40 years ago?

 

It seems to me that writers and artists are absent from our culture today and that in their place are actors who pretend to be so. Am I romanticizing the past?

 

There just is very little fodder for the brain in our popular culture anymore.

[Valin]

What a fascinating article!

 

One thing that strikes me...was America in general more in touch with the intellectual side of themselves 40 years ago?

 

It seems to me that writers and artists are absent from our culture today and that in their place are actors who pretend to be so. Am I romanticizing the past?

 

There just is very little fodder for the brain in our popular culture anymore.

 

I bet you 40 years ago people were saying the same thing.

[pollyannaish]

What a fascinating article!

 

One thing that strikes me...was America in general more in touch with the intellectual side of themselves 40 years ago?

 

It seems to me that writers and artists are absent from our culture today and that in their place are actors who pretend to be so. Am I romanticizing the past?

 

There just is very little fodder for the brain in our popular culture anymore.

 

I bet you 40 years ago people were saying the same thing.

 

Ok good. I figured that it was just because I was getting old.

 

I'm not sure if I should thank you...or curse you.

[Valin]

What a fascinating article!

 

One thing that strikes me...was America in general more in touch with the intellectual side of themselves 40 years ago?

 

It seems to me that writers and artists are absent from our culture today and that in their place are actors who pretend to be so. Am I romanticizing the past?

 

There just is very little fodder for the brain in our popular culture anymore.

 

I bet you 40 years ago people were saying the same thing.

 

Ok good. I figured that it was just because I was getting old.

 

I'm not sure if I should thank you...or curse you.

 

Those are both certainly valid responses...but money works better for me. Send me enough and I can either A. be your best friend or B. never talk to to you again. Being a good Republican, I'm only in this for the money.

[pollyannaish]

What a fascinating article!

 

One thing that strikes me...was America in general more in touch with the intellectual side of themselves 40 years ago?

 

It seems to me that writers and artists are absent from our culture today and that in their place are actors who pretend to be so. Am I romanticizing the past?

 

There just is very little fodder for the brain in our popular culture anymore.

 

I bet you 40 years ago people were saying the same thing.

 

Ok good. I figured that it was just because I was getting old.

 

I'm not sure if I should thank you...or curse you.

 

Those are both certainly valid responses...but money works better for me. Send me enough and I can either A. be your best friend or B. never talk to to you again. Being a good Republican, I'm only in this for the money.

 

Sadly, so am I. So. I will greedily keep my own money because I earned it.

 

(I've got this down.)