serum114

Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead
by Gore Vidal
I can recall that day in the 1930s when a “news” (sic) magazine appeared in Washington, D.C.; it was called Newsweek: meant to be a counterbalance to Time Magazine’s uncontrollable malice. In due course the two became sadly alike as Vincent Astor morphed into Henry Luce: Was it something in the water? I once asked Henry Luce why he called Time a news magazine when it was simply Uncle Harry’s means of venting his rage (this was 1960 or so) at liberals, and “degenerate art” like the plays of Tennessee Williams-he had no answer. At Newsweek Vincent Astor was far too stupid to answer any such complaint. Now here we are in the Newsweek of 2008, and it’s still lousy. There have been a few decent writers in between that were less nutty than today’s Newsweek hacks.

But why is Newsweek currently lousy? Here’s an example provided by an editor who keeps a sharp eye on their crimes. He sent me their recent obituary of William F. Buckley, a hero to those who feared democracies.

Buckley bridled at bullies [we are assured]. But one of the rare times he lost his temper was debating Gore Vidal, who “got under his skin,” says son Chris. When Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” But usually his public manners were genteel [I think they mean gentile]. With “Firing Line” guests who seemed nervous or over their heads, Buckley was gentle. Behind the scenes, he could show remarkable kindness. In 1980, a rising conservative star, Congressman Bob Bauman, was soliciting a 16-year-old [male] for oral sex. Bauman had been a gay-basher, and he instantly became a pariah. The next day, knowing what lay ahead for the disgraced congressman, Buckley quietly gave him an envelope containing $10,000. “He was a knightly man,” says Chris.

Unknown to them and everyone else who might read that publication, my views on many matters do not conform to the tired hacks who’ve taken over Newsweek, a magazine that has convinced itself that Bobby Kennedy Sr. was a great liberal. They love throwing about misunderstood terms like liberal and conservative that seldom suit their superficial, not to mention malicious, standards. Recently, their words of mourning for the fallen “genteel” paladin were incredible. As my editor friend knew that I seldom read the wilder attacks on me, he deconstructs Newsweek’s obituary of Buckley:

Parenthetically, I should note that, back in 1968, ABC TV had asked me and Buckley to “debate” each other at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Although Buckley was often drunk and out of control, he was always a spontaneous liar on any subject that his dizzy brain might extrude. When we were in Chicago during the Republican convention, the Chicago police decided it would be fun to attack the young co-ed demonstrators in Grant Park, not far from our studio. It was one of the worst displays of police brutality I’ve ever seen, and so I said on air; he liked what the police had done; in no time, the whole country was as shocked as I, but not Buckley. On air he was hissing like a cobra against the young people in Grant Park because, he said, they were egging on the Viet Cong to kill American Marines. They were not, of course. Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself. He sued me and got nowhere. He sued Esquire, in which our words appeared. By then the coming right-wing surge was in view. And so Esquire cravenly agreed to settle with him for a few paragraphs worth of free advertising for his weird little magazine The National Review, hardly the great victory he claimed.

Now, to Newsweek’s obituary of this late dishonorable American in which my editor-friend assures me that his brain-dead son Christopher had a hand: “Buckley bridled at bullies.” And who was the bully in context? Myself. He was also an expert at changing indefensible contexts. Buckley maintained that I supported revolutionaries who favored murdering U.S. Marines. Yet all the talk of Nazis etc. was started by Buckley. There was no lie he would not tell to get back at those who defeated him in debate.

The current editors at Newsweek appear to have listened eagerly to his son Christopher, who is guiding them to a benign view of what had been a most hysterical queen (WFB), much admired by a media that takes everyone at his own evaluation of himself as they did with Capote, who told them that he was a great writer like Proust (pronounced Prowst) and the hacks ate it up.

The correct assessment of any reputation today is so far from plausible reality that it might be a good thing if the hacks of a magazine like Newsweek steered clear of characterizing those disliked by the advertisers; hence his creepy son’s depiction of me as a “bully” when I was simply attending to one, and then-o, joy!- Buckley called me a “queer” and actually threatened me with physical violence, so great was his testosterone level. Next, the loyal son, suspecting that the pejorative use of “queer” is politically incorrect in mag-land, Christopher rambles into a story about his father’s kindness to a Mr. Bauman who had lost his seat in Congress after the congressman had been caught while soliciting Oral Sex from a 16-year-old male (note how prurient Newsweek’s prose is, in describing undesirable people). Chris weeps into his computer as he describes how Dad gave the poor sinner of the flesh an envelope containing $10,000 (I bet?) in cash adding, mysteriously, “He was a knightly man”: Who was-the cocksucker recipient of Buckley’s charity? Or his admirer, Mr. Buckley himself?-Bauman was very right wing, it is said. RIP WFB-in hell.

The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says “We gotta fight ‘em over there or we’re gonna have to fight ‘em over here.” This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with “news” magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be “good” Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.

I speak ex cathedra now, ad urbe et orbe, with a warning that no society so marinated in falsity can long survive in a real world.

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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

djack

That's a great article. But dig Buckley up and he'd be more eloquent than most of the 'live' Republicans. I like that part about Time and Newsweek calling themselves news magazines.

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serum114

He wasn't as vile as Rush,coulter or Hannity but the message was still completely flawed.

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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

Jonesy

Chock full of those stupid old propaganda labels 'conservative' and 'liberal'. These words have degenerated to the point they cover a broad group of diverse people, having almost nothing in common. The words are nearly 100% meaningless, and can only be used for propaganda.

ibex

Vidal is dead on when he calls the media mendacious. Most of the MSM is tied to big business directly as in the case of MSNBC whose parent company is General Electric, one of several corporate colonizers of the Pentagon. How could we possibly expect accurate coverage of the war in Iraq from a source with such a giant conflict of interest? What you wind up with in the end are right wing noise machines like Fixed Noise whose constant spewing of falsehoods create a climate of fear among the rest of the media or an implicit order from the corporate titans at the top of the food chain not to rock the boat lest their bottom line be threatened. Free market economics is a myth to the wealthy Fascists who actually run this country. When it comes to the truth, they like to have it socialized. If you tell a lie long and loudly enough, it becomes acceptable to the masses.

BillCosby

Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace:
How We Got To Be So Hated
by Gore Vidal (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books)

Does anybody remember the rules of cause and effect? Stated simply, it's the principle that every action has a reaction. Pretty basic stuff, really, and empirically verifiable in any number of ways, but what may seem elementary to some may seem like one of those off the wall "round earth" theories to others. So, in the spirit of the advancement of science and in keeping with the general rules of fair play, it appears that it may just be time to send our national press corps for a little refresher course on this subject, as they don't quite seem to grasp the concept.

The trouble, fellow citizens, is that it is beginning to appear increasingly certain that the mainstream media seem only able to understand the effect part of the equation, which means that the causes apparently are left to float in some sort of a-historical ether. Much like the coverage of the anti-globalization protests of the past few years, the media has generally only seen fit to deal with the after effects of the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center attacks, while ignoring the underlying causes for why the attacks occurred in the first place. Whereas Tim McVeigh (like Lee Harvey Oswald before him) has been portrayed as a lone maniac bent on evil, Al Queda is written off as the creation of an "axis of evil."

They hate and fear our freedoms, we're told. They hate our way of life, they hate our institutions, they hate our economic system, so they seek to destroy it. What are we to do but fight back? Sounds simple enough, and a pretty easy battle cry to rally around, as it couched in a "clash of civilizations" like rhetoric. But doesn't it stand to reason that all of this hatred and fear has some sort of underlying cause? Where did it come from? Fear not, trusting citizen! Don't concern yourself with the why's of McVeigh or the anti-globalization protests or a massive terrorist network bent on visiting death and destruction on our civilian populace—we're the good guys here. We're the ones who perfected democracy and seek (under the unfurled banners of democracy) free markets and tax shelters to export that which would help raise humanity out of the Hobbesian state of nature, where life can only be "nasty, brutish and short." The problem is that not everyone agrees with our methods in going about our self-appointed globalized neighborhood watch and beautification project. Just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, so to one government's foreign policy is another people's attack on their way of life.

It's a given that the people in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the WTC didn't deserve their fates. But neither did the 3,900 Afghan civilians killed by our recent bombing or the thousands killed and tortured by U.S. supported dictatorships in Latin America, Asia and the Middle east since the end of the Second World War. That's the problem of being a hegemonic power, in order to maintain a sphere of control, you must use unsavory methods to maintain the status quo—but it appears that our own methods are finally being used against us. "If I can understand why the managers of the state monopoly regard the privatization of terror as unwarranted poaching of their market," Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham says in a recent article, "as a prospective consumer presented with variant packagings of the product I find the same instruction on the labels." (Harper's Vol. 304, No.1822, March 2002, p.9)

Lapham's point is one we should all have begun to understand all too well. But that begs the question as to how are we to understand why certain people have felt the need to blow up a federal building full of civilians or crash two jet planes into commercial skyscrapers? The first step is to treat what many major media outlets tell you as lazy accounts of the facts.

Gore Vidal, one of the elder statesmen of a small handful of public intellectuals whose dissent has actually been given voice in the mainstream media, has never been lazy with the facts, though he does use them to advance his own cause. The latest imbroglio Vidal has found himself in comes at a time when many of our media outlets are performing an odd dance with the public while trying to redefine their own responsibilities as journalists operating under the muzzle tactics of the Bush administration. A perfect example of the media's new love it or leave it attitude is a piece (subtly titled "Un-American Ways") by Jeanette Walls of MSNBC.com, in which she claims in reference to Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace, "Gore Vidal can't get his latest book published here" because it is, as she says: "an Anti-American rant."

Having read this, one might be led to believe that Vidal has penned a new screed that is so controversial as to make it virtually unpublishable. As usual, however, the truth is a bit less interesting than it may at first appear. First published in November 2001 in Italy under the title "The End of Liberty—Toward a New Totalitarianism", the book was soon translated into 12 different languages and became a European bestseller all before an American publisher would 'dare' take it. If the American public in general were in the least interested in stories like this, this would be seen as a colossal turtleing maneuver by our media establishment. But, as we know, the polity at large couldn't care less about such matters, c-cause there's a WAR on, dont'cha know! While Vidal barks as loudly as ever, the bite will most likely prove negligible, as he'll just be preaching to the converted, anyway.

In all, the rather slim book consists of five essays captured under two main sections: "How I Became Interested in Tim McVeigh and Vice Versa" which features two previously published articles from Vanity Fair concerning the McVeigh case and Vidal's startling, if anyone out there is listening, uncovering of the FBI's refusal to follow many leads which point in the direction of a large group of co-conspirators; and "Fallout" containing another Vanity Fair article and a piece from The Nation addressed as an open letter to the next President (published just before the Florida recounts ended and the Supreme Court declared Bush our beloved "President-Without-Mandate"). Both of these sections are updated from their original text and contain brief introductions as to why they are relevant in light of recent events.

The point of the book is captured in the first and only new essay - "September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday)", and it is this essay that, presumably, kept the book from being published in this country until now. Has anyone noticed how quiet Vidal has been since 9/11? Well, it wasn't by choice. Just after the 9-11 attacks on the United States, Vidal's initial comments appeared in Portuguese when he shared his views with a Brazilian publication. Those comments were then translated into Spanish and published in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. Vidal later revised and expanded these early remarks for a piece intended for Vanity Fair. The magazine—among others, including The Nation, where Vidal is a longtime contributing editor—passed on the piece as a result of its "anti-American sentiments", thereby keeping our leading publishers and primary voices of dissent in lockstep with the rest of the mainstream media's newfound desire to censor itself for the supposed good of the country. Even in those heady days immediately following the attacks, and given the "unified front" rhetoric that has enveloped the country since (a united front that has since made shopping, and consumption in general, as the way to return to those happy-go-lucky days of last summer), it seems astounding that a major American literary figure and cultural critic would have a hard time placing one of his works concerning the most significant domestic event since W.W.II.

With a little digging, you could have found Vidal's original article translated (rather poorly) into English on various web sites over the past few months. Significant revisions have been made since, but the overall tenor of the piece remains the same. In truth, Vidal says little in the new piece that he hasn't said elsewhere dozens of times, the only difference being the timing. The chapter and the short introductory pieces that open the two sections of the book are rife with that old Vidalian fire and brimstone, but there is one slight difference that separates this text from others. The old man seems to be getting a bit desperate to get his message across. Perhaps the impending reality of his own mortality (Vidal is in his 70's, and by some accounts in frail health), but there seems to be something of an exasperated, pleading quality to the new material here that to some degree replaces the bemused disgust that has heretofore been his signature. "I've listed in this little book about four hundred strikes that the government has made on other countries.' Vidal told Reuters in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. 'War, undeclared. Generally with the excuse that they were harboring communists. You keep attacking people for such a long time, one of them is going to get you back,'' Vidal has been humming the same tune for the better part of the 20th century. He hums it well, to be sure, but the melody seldom changes.

So, why has it taken the book so long to see publication here? As Vidal told The Guardian in December, 2001: "What I say the advertisers don't like and the publishers don't like." True enough, and for once, perhaps an understatement on Vidal's part. Due to Bush's USA Patriot Act and the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act that Bill Clinton signed into law, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Vidal could be brought up on charges for being so critical of the US government and its illegal storming of the Weaver home at Ruby Ridge (in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the governments use of military force against its citizens), and the murder of the Brach Davidians (including dozens of children) at Waco just weeks later. Oh yeah, anyone remember those hundreds of Middle Eastern men being held without bail and without charges filed against them currently sitting in American jails?

Clinton's Ant-Terrorism Act defines as illegal and worthy of punishment any acts which "appear to be intended toward violence or activities which could intimidate or coerce a civilian population; or to influence the policy of a government." The vague wording leaves any person or group of persons who demonstrate or speak out against the government open to police harassment or arrest.

"Bin Laden," Vidal told Reuters in a November, 2001 interview "strikes at America at the moment we are entering a world depression...it is the most fragile moment in the West. For someone who does not wish us well that was brilliantly timed."

Considering that the strike was planned well in advance, it's doubtful that the economic health of the country had any factor in the attacks of September 11, but what is well timed is the long-overdue publication of Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace from the leading dissenting voice of our times. It's a shame that the fact that the book is being published at all is a story in itself, but the way in which Vidal traces the slow erosion of our constitutional rights and its acceleration over the past few years in the name of combating terrorism does offer a wake-up call to those of us paying attention.

Will be published on March 10, 2002

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

chrisbb

perpetual war for perpetual peace is a fucking great read

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'Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.’ - David Rockefeller, 'Memoirs', Random House, New York, 2002, page 405

BillCosby

LOL............. I have recently downloaded many of his talks & speeches & will be listening to them over the next couple weeks when I do my little run..........

He is very witty & has a sense of humor I like as well........

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror