Interesting Vidal Review Explains Why He's Not Just a Paranoid Crank

[BurtWorm]

Which, I confess, I was seeing Vidal as more and more over the years. The McVeigh thing was way over the top. But there's a method to Vidal's madness, according to this review of Vidal's Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson by Edmund S. Morgan. It's a shame that Vidal has made himself into such a cartoon, because the ideas, as Morgan so fairly describes them, are absolutely vital:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16833

...

The irony of our loss of inherited liberties is that one, at least, of the Founders predicted it, and thereby presented Vidal with his most effective opportunity for contrast with the present. Benjamin Franklin, who does not otherwise figure largely in Vidal's story, sets the theme for it in his closing speech at the Constitutional Convention, read aloud for him by another member because, at eighty-one, he was already too frail to do it himself:

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a blessing to the People if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.


Vidal comments,

Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin's blunt dark prophecy has come true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as inevitable at our birth.

...

[drewb]

1. That certainly speaks volumes about the wisdom of Ben Franklin...

n/t

[tom_paine]

3. Yep, Old Ben was a brilliant student of human nature

He in fact, predicted the death of the Old Republic in such a way as to be a prophet now.

If the Founding Fathers were alive, they'd be part of the Resistance Movement against Bush.

[el_gato]

2. explain to me please

how, as you claim, vidal has made himself cartoonish.
I guess I missed that part...

[knowledgeispower]

5. Because he doesn't censor himself

That's all. I can think of a perfect example. I saw him on CNN's Crossfire once when he was talking about his book, "Dreaming Wars." Tucker Carlson had him read a passage in which he pretty much spells out 9/11 LIHOP, then Carlson went on to ask him "you don't REALLY think the President had something to do with 9/11, do you?" Vidal bluntly said that yes, he did think so. Carlson succeeded as painting him as a crazy loon for saying that and there was no way that Paul Begala was going to stand up for Vidal. Thus the cartoonish image, and all because he told the truth and stood up to the bullies.

On edit: book is "Dreaming Wars", not "Oil Wars"

[CaptainClark23]

6. We need more cartoons in this Country

Self-censorship in the cause of preserving face preserves nothing.

Would that more people had the balls to say what they believed, as opposed to what they didn't think they'd be ostrasized for.

When did avowal of one's position, no matter how unpopular, become cartoonish?

no wonder we're so fecked.

[knowledgeispower]

8. Indeed

It is the refusal to self-censor that makes the great political writers (Vidal, Chomsky, Krugman to a lesser extent, etc.) what they are. They refuse to work within the bullshit framework that has been established to obscure reference to any actual truths.

[SeattleRob]

12. The grassy knoll...

So because Tucker Carlson, propagandist and mis-imnformer, painted Vidal as a cartoonish character, that was good enough for you?

That is a classic Carlson (Propagandist) technique. When someone raises an legitimate issue to discuss, Carlson mentions something about "conspiracy" and the conversation is stopped dead in the tracks. There are many legitimate questions about 911 and weird things that happened.

[BurtWorm]

14. I don't think knowledgeispower was saying that.

I think he was lauding Vidal for saying what he damn well meant to say, no matter which media clown was trying to get him to play the game.

[BurtWorm]

7. I thought the sympathy for McVeigh thing was positively repulsive

even if perhaps somewhere, somehow he had a point. I also think, as Morgan points out, he's been crying wolf (saying "NOW the Republic is dead...No NOW it is...Okay, NOW it is REALLY dead.") for several years. In fact he's made a career out of playing the American Cato, the judge of it all from his safe little corner in Italy.

But that said...I really want to read this new book of his. Because even if the Republic is not dead, it is certainly dying, and the question is how did it get to this state and is there anything to do to save the patient?

[knowledgeispower]

9. Vidal thinks it died with Lincoln

From the essay that started this thread:

Vidal is an unreconstructed son of the South. "I am literally," he has written,

"a grandchild of the American Civil War, and I belonged to the losing side. Had the issue of that war been the abolition of slavery, I could not have faulted our defeat—morally at least. But Mr. Lincoln—the first of the modern tyrants—chose to fight the war not on the issue of slavery but on the holiness and indivisibility of a union that he alone had any understanding of. With his centralizing of all power at Washington this "reborn" (sic) union was ready for a world empire that has done us as little good as it has done the world we have made so many messes in."

I agree with this statement. But it is also much like his defense of McVeigh in that it has the side effect of sympathizing with bad guys (the slave owning Confederates), but that is only if you don't take into account his point that the Civil War was not really about slavery (much like Iraq-nam is not really about "WMD's" or "liberation").

[BurtWorm]

13. You're right about Vidal.

About the war, it seems that slavery was much, much more central (being an economic as well as a moral issue) to the Civil War than Iraqi liberation and democracy are to this one, which is so nakedly about imperial conquest. Vidal's points about the union, however, are well taken. The case is hardly closed about the meaning of the Civil war, but the points are well taken and should be out there, in the light, for all Americans to consider.

[el_gato]

10. all good responses, and yes, the truth must be exposed

regardless of what chickenshit assholes like tucker have to say

[Jerseycoa]

4. Just bought this book

And didn't Ben Franklin win a DU presidential poll yesterday?

[Zolok]

11. Good writer...even sometimes a great one

but an egomaniac and a none too liberal one at that.
Gore has many many poorly hidden libertarian hang-ups and if he trots outt hat frog in a pan of boiling water nonsense one more g@d d@mned time I think I'll have a stroke!

[drewb]

15. poorly hidden libertarian hang-ups

Hey! I resemble that remark....