Still Kicking

Gore Vidal has become a nutty old man. He's rich and famous enough to be considered eccentric, but if you heard his ideas on the street, you'd figure he's demented. (And as he lives in LA, maybe I will see him grumbling out on the boulevard some day.)

Still, as no one takes him seriously (which I sometimes think is what drove him around the bend, since his earlier writing could be perceptive), it's easier to chuckle than groan when he makes his crazy pronouncements.

He cynically eyes America, as certain of our venality and foolishness as he is of his superiority. I suppose it's just easier to call people names than engage in debate.

For example, there are plenty of reasons to attack John McCain, but Vidal prefers conspiracy theories:

We know the fool from Arizona is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.

While Vidal doesn't believe there's that much difference between the parties, he take time out to attack Republicans with this analysis:

Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred.

He fears that Obama is too weak and that, oddly, we will end up in a military dictatorship. Yet his advice seems more likely to lead in that direction:

...there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.

At least there are--or were--some good Americans, like Timothy McVeigh:

He was a true patriot, a Constitution man. And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought [sic] Oklahoma into the Union.

Good to know in the middle of his insanity he's not above a little name-dropping.