Goodbye to Gore

Gore Vidal has gone with the wind.  The world woke up a little worse.  I admit to reading only one of his novels, the scandalous and deeply troubling book for a teenaged boy called Myra Breckenridge.  To even tell you what the novel is about constitutes a mortal sin.  He wrote lots of bigger, heavier books—in both senses of the word—like Burr and Lincoln.  But I read about Mr./Ms. Breckenridge instead, feeling deeply strange and conspiratorial, like I was cracking the secret code of adulthood perversion at the ripe age of fourteen. It would be much later before I discovered that this purveyor of smut was a great public intellectual/sometime actor, the senator running against hyper-conservative Bob Roberts, the highbrow professor of With Honors (remember that one all you Joe Pesci or Brendan Fraser fans?).

Vidal was a great essayist, perhaps one of the finest ever in the English language.  He famously sparred with William F. Buckley on live television in 1968, Vidal accusing Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley retorting that Vidal was a “queer” and a low-rent pornographer (for the aforementioned Myra).  Ah, the good old days.  Vidal notoriously interviewed and sympathized with Timothy McVey, the terrorist behind the Oklahoma City bombing.  He was an adamant conspiracy theorist about the murder of JFK.  He spoke in a very droll, sardonic manner, with perfect diction and an f-you attitude to anyone who’s views didn’t truck with his own.  He lived abroad and smited the United States with all the power his pen could offer.  People on the right loathed him and people on the left at times did not like him much better.

He was a great man indeed.  And with his passing, and Buckley’s, and Howard Zinn, and with Chomsky not long for the big sleep, this country is losing a generation of public intellectuals that it may not be able to replace.  The 24 hour news media, and Twitter, and the Blogosphere, have warped our entire sensibility towards public intellectualism.  Everything is a sound bite, a slogan, a platitude, a talking point.  Intellect in miniature, haikus of big subjects like “freedom” and the “free market”.  Decent commentary shows like the early morning weekend shows on MSNBC get labeled “nerdville”, too wonky for their own good.  The public largely tunes out, retreating to its “intellectual ghettos” as Chris Hedges dubs them.  Give us Rush, give us HuffPo, give us the Drudge Report, give us the damned NFL, just please for the love of all that’s holy don’t give us anything that might turn the worm.  Ideology is indeed the mother’s milk of contemporary politics.  We suffer tinnitis from the reverberations inside the echo chamber we occupy. 

This must be why it is not a national outrage that the very night Obama was inaugurated key Republicans in the House and Senate held a cabal where they pledged to do nothing but ensure a one-term presidency.  Smack dab in the middle the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator, my senator, was playing Oz.  Halleluiah for the new Republican Party, the Scorched-Earth Party, the Nero Party.  Whatever you do, keep on fiddlin’…

Vidal was making similar criticisms up until the day he died, but who was still listening? He was a relic of a time before I was even born.  And in this season of contempt for Americans writ large—I mean can you believe some of the presidential ads?—we need such relics more than ever, folks with real honest to goodness intellectual credentials who can speak truth to power.  And we need a real media platform to put them on. What we don’t need are a million blogs like this one, a blip in the din of white noise circulating through our beloved World Wide Web.  We need Titans, people who can recite Latin and understand Hegel and don’t whore themselves out to lobbying firms or charge six-figures for a speaking engagement at the MGM Grand convention center.

You will be missed Mr. Vidal, even by people who don’t care that you’re gone, or ever were.  We need you snobbish, elitist SOBs more than ever, because we are drowning in the mean season of presidential politics, and there’s no one on board to throw a rope.

A eulogy from Peter Scheer:  “I don’t feel sad for Gore Vidal today. He lived to 86 and he had the kind of life people ask Santa Claus for. It was not without hardship, loss or suffering, but he leaves behind great works and a million smiles. If anything, I feel sad for my country, which lost one of its truest patriots.”

Selah.