Two clips (the first brought to my attention by Danny
Hellman) of the late Gore Vidal pissing people off, no doubt posted by half the
people on the Internet but still worthwhile:
Ironically, Buckley and Vidal had rather similar
demeanors. I saw Vidal interviewed
onstage by Maureen Dowd in Austin, TX several years ago, and, well, I’ll just
say the show was not entitled Humility.
People forget, I think (since he was on the left) that his
strange and radical mix of views included the conviction that the white race
should unite across the divides of political and economic systems in order to
combat the menace of the Asian horde (maybe I’ll do my part to thwart his brand
of nationalism by buying the final issue of Justice League International today and going to the Mandarin
Oriental Hotel bar tonight).
At the same time, his opposition to American empire and to
Lincoln’s militarism has earned him some paleoconservative admirers, I gather –
and I would guess he was an influence on leftist-yet-racist anti-imperialist George
Lucas. So in a sense Gore Vidal also
gave us Phantom Menace. Truly he has been influential.
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