“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Daniel Flynn at Front Page Mag
(Note: I absolutely do NOT subscribe to Front Page Mag’s views on US foreign policy).
And here is a glimpse of the great writer’s great art. [I DELETED THIS LINK TO AN EXCERPT OF VIDAL’S MYRA BRECKENRIDGE]
UPDATE
Further substantiating my accurate analysis that Vidal’s “anti-establishment” stance (including his “antiwar” stance) was not in anyway a principled objection to abusive power, notice from this report that he craved the status granted by elite institutions like Harvard (not having gone to college himself); notice that his hatred of the state was mixed with feelings of thwarted ambition because he’d always wanted to be president; notice that his anti-establishment rants were mingled with constant remembrances of status symbols and the upper-class gilded life to which he belonged and in which he reveled; notice the opulent life-style he lived (not that I have anything against that) and his $37 million estate); notice the deep alcoholism and madness in which he ended his life.
Now put against that the FACTS about Gandhi:
1. Was in excellent physical and mental condition late into life, when he was undergoing month-long fasts.
2. Was repeatedly offered leadership positions in the state and turned them down. Counseled against imitating Western state structures.
3. Although once prosperous, gave away most of his belongings and was left with nothing more than a watch, his glasses, his loincloth and shawl, and a bowl out of which he ate.
4. Died not from alcoholism and insanity, but from a bullet delivered by an assassin. His last words were “He Ram” (Oh God).
No need to demonize Vidal, of course.
He was a talented, clever, witty man, who said many true things about history and government and he was a prolific, popular novelist of varying ability. He was a fine essayist, no doubt.
But he was also a compulsive promiscuous pedophile (and most likely a child rapist) who publicly defended other child rapists (Roman Polansky, Catholic priests).
He was nasty to friends and foes, envied others and relentlessly slandered them. He harbored demons to the end of his life that he was too weak to overcome. He deserved the prayers and intervention of his friends and family in life, not the mindless adulation of strangers in death. He doubtless victimized scores of children, Thai children, whom we’ll never hear about. Safe Horizon, so exercised about the Indian nanny fake-slaver case should perhaps be called in about this compelling example of real child-sex tourism.
The American media can keep Gore Vidal for a hero. He fits their values.
I’d rather look among hundreds of unsung activists/writers for mine.
ORIGINAL POST
Gore Vidal’s family supports the long-standing rumors of Vidal’s pedophilia that I published here and that I decided, after analysis, were credible.
For that, this blog was hacked, and a week or so later, some spooky electronic harassment took place. I’m not really sure how that happened. I only know it took place.
I think I was alone among antiwar bloggers, most of whom praised Vidal to the skies, ignoring everything except the fact that his position on war was theirs.
I usually wouldn’t criticize a man on his death, but the universal praise of such a deeply flawed man, just after the contemptible and untruthful slurs against Gandhi, cried out to be corrected.
So here’s the post I wrote: Vidal, Polanksy and Kinsey, August 4, 2012.
In contrast, here’s Justin Raimondo’s piece “The Last Jeffersonian,” August 3, 2012
[I have always liked Raimondo’s investigative pieces on the Israeli lobby, one of the more dangerous areas for writers, so this isn’t meant as an attack on him.]
Here’s another libertarian Bill Kauffman on Vidal.
Now for the main points from the Daily Mail piece on Vidal:
“In a feature that appeared in the New York Times, Ms Straight – who had a ‘turbulent though close relationship’ with Vidal – said the openly-gay author had had sex with underage men.
“She described the alleged circumstances as ‘Jerry Sandusky acts’, referring to the former Penn State assistant football coach convicted of child molestation.
“Mr Steers – who directed the Zac Efron film Charlie St Cloud – said that conservative columnist William F. Buckley – who had a long-running public feud with Vidal, which also played out in court – had evidence linking Vidal to the alleged crimes.”
AND
“The New York Times article also says that the ever-opinionated Vidal had a strange and controversial take on the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests.
“‘He would say that the young guys involved were hustlers who were sending signals,’ Mr Steers said.
[Lila: Based on this statement alone, I would give credibility to the charges against Vidal.]
“However the author of the article, Tim Teeman, wrote that ‘other friends of Mr. Vidal told me they doubted he had sex with underage men’.
“I”Vidal suffered from dementia and alcoholism towards the end of his life.
“Mr Steers said he would drink single male scotch ‘until he collapsed’.
Vidal also had ‘wet brain’ – proper name Wernicke-Korsakoff – a syndrome characterized by a number of symptoms, including confusion and hallucination.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2496631/Family-Gore-Vidal-allege-pedophile-challenge-writers-37-million-will.html#ixzz2q2g6wNOz
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Vidal was not only a pedophile, it seems he beat up gays, so intense was his own self-loathing.
[Lila: I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not his “pedophilia” but his involvement in even worse – violence against male child prostitutes that might be the real story and the “yes he was a pedophile” simply a diversion. After all, pedophilia apologias have already appeared in mainstream media, like The Atlantic.]
Consider the reverential treatment given to this insane, addicted, unpleasant man, who was a self-confessed pederast. His well-documented compulsive lifestyle was passed over in silence by the establishment media, since he was “one of them,” from the ruling class.
But of Gandhi, a man who fought his devils all his life bravely, with the utmost candor, and engaged, successfully or not, in one of the biggest social upheavals in modern history, the same media has recently had nothing but scurrilous and easily discredited innuendo.
Malicious critics called him a bisexual pedophile molester, based on deliberate falsification and exaggeration of historical evidence. They called him a hypocrite, whereas the truth was he was compulsively open to his critics, even begging them to write the worst they knew about him.
Why so much venom? Because Gandhi was Indian and the media in the West has over the last two years been engaged in a systematic campaign of vilification and half-truths against India, along with literal provocations, as I’ve amply documented.
While Vidal, a hero of modern liberals, lived in terror of the truth about himself coming out, Gandhi courageously reported every passing sexual feeling in his diaries, urged his critics to say the worst about him that they could, and berated himself endlessly for even mental failures of continence.
Here’s more about the new claims about Vidal:
“Vidal accused Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi”; Buckley responded by labelling Vidal a “queer” and telling him to stop his insults or Buckley would “sock [him] in the goddamn face”.
Their argument ended up in the courts, where Buckley first lost an expensive lawsuit against Vidal for libel, before winning a settlement from a magazine that republished Vidal’s written attack years later.
Vidal once estimated he had slept with 1,000 men before he was 25, and boasted of having had sex with Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Noel Coward, according to Mr Teeman.
While enjoying a 53-year relationship with his long-term partner, Howard Austen, before Austen’s death in 2003, he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, that he was “attracted to adolescent males”…….
…Buckley’s son, Christopher, has said that while clearing out his late father’s study, he found a file labelled “Vidal Legal”, which he threw into a dumpster…….
An unidentified “longtime friend” of Vidal’s added that the author had once shocked a guest at his home in Ravello, Italy, by announcing: “You know I’m a pederast”.
This friend focused on Vidal’s time spent in Bangkok, Thailand, a city notorious for its sex trade. “He did go to Thailand every year, and he was definitely having sex with male prostitutes there, and they weren’t older male prostitutes,” the friend said.”
Evil people lie about good people for one principal reason – vanity.
They cannot stand being shown up by anything or anyone better than they are. A couple of years ago, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote about the profound intolerance of sin for anything that rebukes it, in an essay, “Evil preaches tolerance only when it’s weak.”
So also lies cannot tolerate truth.
But the world is not built on lies. And man cannot live on lies.
At the end, when the mud and the bile and the envious distortions of petty men have had their day, the truth will be vindicated.
Gore Vidal died.
He said some accurate things about American foreign policy [which I admired], wrote some famous books I’ve never read [well, actually I did read “Myra Breckinridge” and disliked it] and was a clever fellow altogether, at least, all the clever people say so.
But, hmm…I don’t really have anything to say except, let’s see…
I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young
hooker decrepit old pansy man dies? feels as though she’s been taken advantage of ?
[That was Gore Vidal defending his good friend Roman Polansky, guilty of forced sodomizing and rape of a 13 year-old girl, after feeding her drugs.]
[Further note. The derogatory term (pansy) is intended to be satirical. I have no animus against gays or gay rights, in fact, I fully support them.]
But, since the entire blogosphere is singing Vidal’s praises, without any reference whatsoever to his many negative traits, including venomous attacks on people ranging from Truman Capote to Charlton Heston, I decided to break my usual rule of not saying anything negative on someone’s death and point out how mean a man he was in some ways, personally.
There was, for instance, his trick of embarrassing heterosexual males by implying homosexuality, the most famous instance of which was his encounter with Charlton Heston, who was not amused.]
And more here about the venom behind the urbanity:
About Truman Capote:
“Vidal made no secret that he detested the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, saying once: “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”
When asked ‘What was Capote doing that you didn’t like?” Vidal shouted: “Lying! The one thing I hate most on this earth. Which is why I do not have a friendly time with journalists.” He called Capote’s death “a good career move” and added “Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.”
Stephen Moss in The Guardian has a good piece about a man who wrote brilliant essays and over-rated novels, and carried his perceptive and prescient anti-imperial criticism into pointless America-bashing that finally undercut his own criticism.
“Does age bring wisdom?” a questioner from the floor asked Gore Vidal? There was a short pause. “No, it brings senility.” Cue a wave of applause from the vast audience that had come to touch the hem of the man Adam Boulton, who had the tricky task of interviewing Vidal, called “the greatest essayist since Montaigne”.
That’s a big claim, but not necessarily wide of the mark: Vidal’s essays on politics and literature are magnificent and will live long after the weighty novels he is keener for us to read and remember are gathering dust.
The wind-lashed encounter with Boulton was a ramble – an old man (Vidal, not Boulton) peering into the nooks and crannies of a fascinating life – but, happily, it was punctuated by some memorable one-liners. Asked who his successor as the great contrarian would be, he said: “I’m not holding the door open.” Lifting his walking stick and brandishing it like a mitre, he intoned: “I’m still the bishop of Rome.”
His advice to young people – “Grow up.” Questioned about his famous line that “when a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies”, he insisted it had been a joke – the books of quotations may have to be rewritten. The Republicans he called “a mindset rather than a party – a group of like-minded people compelled by greed and with a capacity for character assassination.” Asked by Boulton if Bobby Kennedy (who Vidal heartily disliked) would have made a better president than George W Bush, he replied: “You would make a better president than Bush!” Could an intellectual ever be elected president? “Well,” said Vidal, “accidents happen.”
[LR: Being anti-Bush or anti-Republican, is, after all very popular in intellectual circles, so it is hardly evidence of great courage to attack either of them from the safety of Europe.]
The one-liners, if you could catch them above the howling wind, kept coming: Vidal’s mind, which has a deeply ironic and subversive bent, is sharp, even if at 82 the body is frail. But are one-liners enough? There is substance in Vidal’s worldview – the Jeffersonian belief in the autonomy of the states, the fear of centralised power, the opposition to US entanglements abroad (he even said US involvement in the second world war was undertaken for selfish reasons) – but these days it gets hopelessly lost. He has become a turn.
His ceaseless negativity is also wearing. Perhaps that is the prerogative of the old, but the attack on the US is so unremitting that he undermines his own assault. “America is a country where no one can be phoney enough” – it sounds good, but is it true? It seems phoney to me. This is the country, after all, he has chosen to return to after his long sojourn in Italy.
Vidal has things of value to tell us – that the US administration has used 9/11 to tear up supposedly inviolable personal freedoms, that America cannot be both republic and empire, that all US politics is based on money, property, business. It was a telling moment when Boulton mentioned the picture in Vanity Fair that linked Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, three octogenarians pitching against America’s misguided, self-interested interventions in the Middle East. That got a large and deserved burst of applause.
Where were the voices of the younger generation was the implication? Is the art of engagement dying? Ironically, Christopher Hitchens, seen by some as a possible heir to the waspish Vidal, has engaged – but on the side of so-called liberal interventionism. Hitchens was in the audience and asked a loaded question – was it true Vidal had said the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming? Vidal shot back that he’d never said such a thing, and that in any case Bush – his questioner’s hero – was too incompetent to have carried out so strategically devastating an attack.
[LR: Notice that Hitchens and Vidal reinforce the propaganda frame-work, by denying any validity whatsoever to the view that the government itself might have been complicit. How is this different from the Michael Moore brand of Democrat anti-establishmentarian critique?]
Vidal avoided that trap, but the uncommitted observer was still left wanting a more coherent picture of what should replace Bush. Even old guys – and it is poignant that Vidal is now the last of that Vanity Fair trio alive – have to do more than mock the vanities of the world. And beyond welcoming an Obama presidency as a sign that the US might be growing up,
[LR: Again, how deep really is criticism of this kind? ]
Vidal has little positive to say. Bush is an idiot, McCain a dimwit – not even a war hero, because “all he ever did was crash his plane; he didn’t even try to escape”; even Roosevelt wanted only to become “emperor of the west”. Sorry, but I don’t buy that latter point: there is a point where glib contrarianism becomes hollow and self-defeating; the enemy of thought.
Did he have any words of wisdom to offer at the dusk of a long life, asked a youthful member of the audience? Vidal had none, which seemed rather sad. It doesn’t suggest senility – the mind is strong, the wit undiminished – but it does suggest that irony can only take you so far.”
Gore Vidal on a bridge to somewhere bad :
“I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”
A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer….”