Who is Gore Vidal

NOVELS:

Williwaw,1946
In A Yellow Wood,1947
The City And The Pillar, 1948
The Season Of Comfort, 1949
A Search For The King, 1949
Dark Green, Bright Red, 1950
The Judgement Of Paris, 1952
Messiah, 1954
Julian, 1964
Washington, D.C., 1967
Myra Brechinridge, 1968
Two Sisters, 1970
Burr,1973
Myron, 1974
1876, 1976
Kalki, 1978
Creation, 1981
Duluth, 1983
Lincoln, 1984
Empire, 1987
Hollywood, 1989
Live From Golgotha, 1992
The Smithsonian Institution, 1998
The Golden Age, 2000

SHORT STORIES:

The Robin, 1948
A Moment of Green Laurel,1949
Three Stratagems, 1950
The Zenner Trophy, 1950
The Ladies in the Library, 1950
Erlinda and Mr. Coffin, 1951
Pages from an Abandoned Journal, 1956
A Thirsty Evil, 1956
Clouds and Eclipses, 2006

PLAYS:

Visit to a Small Planet, 1957
The Best Man, 1960
Romulus, 1962
Weekend, 1968
An Evening with Richard Nixon, 1972

ESSAYS:

Rocking the Boat, 1962
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship, 1969
Homage to Daniel Shays, 1974
Matters of Fact and of Fiction, 1977
The Second American Revolution, 1982
Armageddon, (U.K. only), 1987
At Home, 1988
Screening History, 1992
A View from the Diners' Club (U.K. only), 1991
United States, 1992
The Last Empire, 2001
Dreaming War: Blood For Oil and The Cheney-Bush Junta, 2002
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 2002

MEMOIR:

Palimpest, 1995

ANTHOLOGY:

Best Television Plays, 1956

OMNUBUS VOLUME:

Julian/Williwaw/The Judgement of Paris/Messiah/The City and the Pillar, (1979)

WRITING AS EDGAR BOX:

Death In The Fifth Positio, 1952
Death Before Bedtime, 1953
Death Likes It Hot, 1954

Gore Vidal:

Literary and political critic at the New York Review of Books;
Has served on the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts;
Is a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute;
Is a board member of The Modern Library;
Published two novels, Lincoln and 1876, which were the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek, respectively;
Was noted for his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, as having written "one of the best first-person accounts of this century we are likely to get" by the London Sunday Times;
Was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1986 for his writing on the TV movie, Dress Grey;
Was nominated for an Oscar Award in 1964 for his writing of the screenplay, The Best Man;
Received an award from the Cannes Film Festival for best screenplay for The Best Man;
Won the National Book Award in 1993 for United States: Essays 1952-1992.

"We have a very interesting history, and luckily for me, I've lived by telling the history of the United States. But I ought not to be doing it. The schools ought to be doing it. I'm perfectly happy to hand over my megaphone any day of the week, but they can't tell the truth."

"I've written now is it 12 books I think, doing American history from the Revolution up to the Millennium. They're very popular because they don't get it in school and they don't get it from the media. So people do read my books. But there should be more by other people too. It is a terrible thing to lose your past, particularly when you had such an interesting one, as we did."

"Two generations have now grown up on television. They don't learn to read very well, if at all. If you don't enjoy reading by the time you're 13 or 14, you're not going to pick it up. And they watch television from babyhood, as a sort of pacifier. I think that a mind shaped by flashing images works differently than a mind that has been shaped by linear type. Don't ask me what the difference is because I haven't a clue, because I belong to one side and they're on another side."

"Television in the early 1950s ceased to be a novelty and became the principle agent for the simultaneous marketing of consumer goods and of national security state opinion."

"The news media has never been more corrupt or dishonest. It lies about everything. They start to sell the presidents the way they sell the detergents, and don't find much difference between them."

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent."

"Don't think we're a free country to say anything we want. We can say it, but it's not going to be printed and you're not going to get on television."

"There is also something in the water-let us hope it was put there by the enemy-that has made Americans contemptuous of intelligence whenever they recognize it, which is not very often. And a hatred of learning, which you don't find in any other country. There is not one hamlet in Italy in which you can fail to find kids desperate to learn."

"In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are."

"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true."

"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions."

"The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with - even using much of the same language.. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh - how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time - was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstagg fire."

"It was Benjamin Franklin, I think, who said that those who prefer security to liberty deserve neither, which is my view."

"There are movements of people, which go largely unrecorded. There are eloquent voices out there, but you don't see them in print, you don't hear them on the air."

"My grandfather lost his seat in the Senate because he opposed going into the First World War. And he won it back 10 years later on exactly the same set of speeches that he'd lost it. So, attitudes change.."

"Benjamin Franklin was shown the new American constitution, and he said, 'I don't like it, but I will vote for it because we need something right now. But this constitution in time will fail, as all such efforts do. And it will fail because of the corruption of the people, in a general sense.' And that is what it has come to now, exactly as Franklin predicted."

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"I think there is a very good chance that we won't get through the 21st century due to all the usual reasons, you know, environment gone wrong, the end of fossil fuels, inability to replace them with ethanol or whatever. I think going broke. We have already lost the Constitution of the United States. That is gone, and that is not going to return ever."

"I forget who it was in the 19th century who said that intellectuals are the only elite - the only minority on earth - that wishes to extend its ranks. Most elites want to shrink so that they have more to themselves. We are the only ones who want more and more of us, not less and less."

"Some interviewer for a magazine asked my father.... "Don't you find Gore terribly courageous for the positions he takes?" He said, "Well, what's courageous when you don't care what people think about you?"

"Anyone who worries about being remembered ought not to be born."

A few years ago, I picked up one of Gore Vidal's then most recent books at the local library. The book was an alternative history /science fiction novel titled "Smithsonian Institution", and I became
instantly engrossed in it. Gore Vidal's brilliant characterizations and engaging writing style enchanted me as usual, but the pleasant surprise of his venture into time traveling fantasy brought an added element of delight that made it a fun journey reminiscent of a good old fashioned Saturday afternoon matinee.

Set in the Washington D.C. museum for which it is named, "Smithsonian Institution" masterfully reveals a world where living guards turn to wax in the afterhours darkness, and the resident wax figures
of well known historical characters come to life. Of course, the political and historical commentary is ever present, but in a genuinely hilarious work of fanciful satire where the reality of the past determining the future is made thoroughly palatable rather than typically disturbing. Complete with philosophizing conversations between the come-to-life wax figures of former U.S. presidents and a time traveling teenaged math genius-come- hero,
"Smithsonian Institution" is both enjoyable "what if" history and clever fun. Even the cover artwork indulges in the satirical idea that the book is
some odd incarnation of a sci-fi romance novel. The entire effort makes for a great read, and another, if not even among the most notable indications that Gore Vidal is indeed one of the great writers of our time.

This week marks the anniversaries of three landmark events that paved the way for the further erosion of our personal freedoms we face today. Nine years ago, the FBI ended a stand-off that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had begun 51 days earlier, resulting in the deaths of 82 Branch Davidians, including 30 women and 25 children-guilty only of being members of a religious commune. Seven years ago this week, on the second anniversary of the killings at Waco, 168 men, women, and children were killed in Oklahoma City when the Murrah Federal Building was bombed-many believed in protest of those horrific events for which no federal employee had ever been held accountable. Timothy McVeigh, convicted and executed for the bombing, made no comment during his trial until his sentencing, when he quoted Supreme Court Justice Brandeis: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example."

Six years ago this week, in response to the Oklahoma City bombing (which, if indeed perpetrated by a lone nut armed only with a rental van and fertilizer, begs the question of why sweeping new legislation was necessary), Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, "antiterrorism" legislation which not only gives the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which prohibited the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement), but also selectively suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. As he signed it into law, Clinton attacked critics of the bill as "unpatriotic:" "There is nothing patriotic about pretending that you can love your country but despise your government." This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?

Thus began the latest chapter in the death struggle between the American republic, whose plainly ineffective defender I am, and the American Global Empire, our old republic's enemy. Since V-J Day 1945 ("Victory over Japan" and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." I have occasionally referred to our "enemy of the month club": each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly two hundred such military incursions since 1945 initiated by the U.S.

According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last September 11 when suicide pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called "Defense," there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two-missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons-the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked jetliners.

The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties: the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1996 and the recent USA PATRIOT Act (still being written after it was passed, and thus unread by the Congress which passed it), which among other things grants additional special powers to wiretap without judicial order; and to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors, and undocumented immigrants without due process. Even before signing the Anti-Terrorist Act, President Clinton revealed his disregard for the Bill of Rights (March 1, 1993, USA Today): "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans." A year later (April 19, 1994, on MTV): "A lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."

According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent of the people believed that "the federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens." Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, "It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms." Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events.

Bush himself, in an address to a joint session of Congress, offered up his interpretation of Osama bin Laden and disciples' motives: "They hate what they see right here in this Chamber." I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." If this is indeed the terrorists' motivation, they are succeeding beyond even their dreams, as each day, with each extension of "emergency powers," our Bill of Rights is shredded more and more. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.