Tag Archives: pundits

Gore Vidal Dead: Clever Satirist, Deluded Moralist

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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.”

Ames Versus Wile

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Winter comes, says Anthony Wile:

“This is a very important movement … this movement that is perhaps the prelude to REAL world government. And yet …

Nothing shall grow in the gardens of world government. Fairness will reign. The guilty shall be punished and those who have been oppressed will mount the Throne of Theosophy, certain of their righteousness and rejoicing in their power. See here:

“He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.”

“If someone is very hungry, the Angkar will take him where he will be stuffed with food.”

“If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.”

(Sayings of the Khmer Rouge: “to be “stuffed with food” is to become a corpse, fertilizing the rice fields; and the ‘small piece of land’ refers to a burial pit.)

Ever read Chronicles of Narnia? Or the descriptions of the White Queen’s winter. It is a land where all things that are good are frozen and quiescent, where rivers have ceased to run, where people have ceased to speak and even the animals have ceased to sound. No history is available but that which is approved.”

“Pus-humpers Should Writhe In Hell,” says Mark Ames, Exile journalist and former colleague of Matt Taibbi:

“In 1985, Niskanen left Reagan’s side for the comfort of a lifelong sinecure in the Koch welfare program, safely protected from the ravages of the free-market, just like Hayek, just like all the pus-humpers in the libertarian nomenklatura.

And within a year, chief pus-humper himself, William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, was attacking Catholic bishops for daring to allege that Christianity is not all about free-markets and enriching the 1-percent:

A former economic adviser to President Reagan says the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are ignoring the Bible as well as sound economics in their call for more government help for the poor.

…In a lengthy teaching letter approved last month, the bishops declared that significant poverty in such a rich nation is “a moral and social scandal that must not be ignored.” They said government as well as individuals and businesses should do much more to help the poor and powerless take part in economic life.

Niskanen, identifying himself as “an economist and a Protestant,” said, “one has reason to question the moral authority of a letter that has little apparent basis in the Scriptures of our shared religious heritage. The letter seeks to provide an agenda for the state. The New Testament is a message of individual salvation through Christ,” he said. “The bishops encourage us to seek justice through political action. Jesus counsels us that the Kingdom of God is not of this world.’ The central theme of the letter is economic justice. The New Testament provides no concept of secular justice, economic or otherwise,” he said.

Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.

May the bastard writhe in pain.”

Comment

Ames, like Taibbi, and, disappointingly, like even Bill Black, who as a former government official has an even higher standard to meet, refuses to argue honestly. Whatever you might think of an opponent,  ad hominem is the least persuasive way to make your case.

In the first place, Ames sweepingly puts all libertarians in one category.

(Of course, some libertarians do the same too).

Then he confuses the position of the minarchists Friedman, Mises and Hayek with the current Mises libertarians, who are mostly pure anarcho-capitalists.

Next, he confuses minarchists with the oligarchs who espouse  libertarianism, the Koch brothers, although the Kochs (as the libertarians have been the first and more vociferous to point out), are state capitalists or mercantilists.

Then, Koch is conflated with Alan Greenspan, who abandoned libertarianism for the state, and Greenspan is associated with Ayn Rand, who was a minarchist who expressly considered crony capitalism and criminal capitalism “looting”.

What an ignorant rant.  And in the middle of it all, Ames invokes Jesus, about whom his crowd has nothing good to say otherwise, unless it’s to get the long-suffering Galilean to brand their wretched marketing campaign to reelect whichever lame is on the ticket this time.

Jesus wouldn’t have approved of very much in modern life, left or right.   [Nov. 23: On second thoughts, I don’t think this is necessarily true, but it would take too long a digression for me to address it here]

Jesus would likely not have approved of this kind of violent debate, not Wall Street, nor DC. Who knows what he would have demanded. He could have been a mystic revolutionary, for anything we know.

But a Democrat re-election campaign funded by Soros and the ruling elites, astro-turfed by a bunch of liberal- to-left outfits and led by professional activists, that threatens global violence as a way to get the kulaks to pay for its agenda isn’t exactly a change from the status quo.

That’s exactly what the terrorist attack of 9-11 was.

It’s exactly what the financial terrorism of 2008 was.

So, this is the third time we’re hearing the mantra,  Give us what we want or else.

That’s not the population demanding. That’s Soros and assorted other elites, speaking through their intelligence and media assets, provoking and co-opting popular rage.

But guess what.

Strike three …right?

This time, it’s Mr. Soros who might be out.

Update 1: I should add that I am not on either side of this debate theoretically.

Practically, however, I believe less government is better, just because government is far too large and centralized now. But I don’t believe that a small republican government in a city is automatically the same as an empire. It is simply not true, from the evidence of history, and from my own personal experience, having lived in small villages in small countries, and in the heart of the empire in the US, in the DC area.

If force and fraud are the reasons why government coercion is wrong, then it stands to reason that force and fraud by themselves are a kind of “government,” one without legitimacy. Corporations, often, are mini-governments that depend on state-created law to protect them from the results of their actions. There is no hallowed ground anymore. It’s all rotten and so ideological arguments start from a false premise.

Both sides, like those who see terrorists everywhere and those who see them nowhere, are thus bound together in opposition. They become locked into their respective positions, which is where the elite wants them to remain, because it allows the “shadow government” to steam ahead with no opposition.

Update 2 (Nov. 23) :

In keeping with my position on ideology, I also think Jesus was not an ideologue. He was a poet, that is, someone whose “thinking” is an image of existential reality not a logical superstructure arising out of inherently flawed assumptions.

A recent piece at CNN’s Belief blog makes this point well, and suggests how something like “microfinance’ can be remedied by adapting to this reality:

“The discussion at the AEI event revolved around the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan and the problem of providing immediate relief for compounding and overwhelming needs but still being able to make the transition to sustainable development.

The concept of microfinance and microcredit, for which the founder of the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, has been applied under HOPE International to 14 countries serving more than 250,000 clients. I asked Greer whether he thought microfinance could become a broken system, and about the phenomenon of loan sharks emerging in India’s microfinancing world:

“What’s happening right now in the microfinance base shows why it’s necessary to have something else than just access to capital or some new way of providing loans to the poor; that in and of itself is insufficient to see real transformation that happens in communities.

So the situation in India – we also operate in India – but have a different operating model; we make sure that the profits that we’re generating are reinvested back into those areas. We emphasize training, we emphasize savings, and we don’t have the belief that if you just give individuals 50 dollar loans that that’s gonna result in huge transformation.

That’s an important piece. It takes money to make money. But it’s only a piece of a bigger picture of what it takes to transform a community.”

I’m not certain that AEI, a neoconservative outfit, best known to the general public for its hawkish positions, is the best place to be having this discussion, and I don’t know what assumptions are at work in this discussion, but at least the authors are correct in warning against appropriating Jesus for any partisan political model.

Obama: Dining On Whatever The Pentagon Feeds Him

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Andrew Bacevich reports that in his latest opus, Bob Woodward, the McDonald’s of court-historians, is better at recording the trivia of Washington in-fighting that make it to the Sunday headlines than understanding the constitutional significance of a shift in decision-making at the highest level:

“Obama’s Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president’s announcement at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war.  Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.

Pick your surge: 20,000 troops? Or 30,000 troops?  Or 40,000 troops?  Only the most powerful man in the world — or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge — could handle a decision like that.  Even as Obama opted for the middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by others: the war in Afghanistan would expand and continue.

And then there’s this from the estimable General David Petraeus: ”I don’t think you win this war,” Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. “I think you keep fighting… This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious.  Why fight a war that even the general in charge says can’t be won?  What will the perpetuation of this conflict cost?  Who will it benefit?  Does the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to wage permanent war?  Are there no alternatives?  Can Obama shut down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year?  Or is he — along with the rest of us — a prisoner of war?”

State Terrorism: The Ukrainian Genocide, 1933

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The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why.  Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.

“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale — between seven and 11 million people.

But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told  their stories  about concentration  camps and massacres.  The experience  was also  captured  unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………

British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.

“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”

Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………

“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”

Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.

The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.

Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.

The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”

Obama Wins Nobel for Bankster Bail-Outs and Af-Pak Bombing

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In the news:

“President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama’s name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.”

My Comment:

Considering that Henry Kissinger has a Nobel prize, this is quite in tradition for the misnamed Nobel prize – a highly political award. Maybe some of the Swedish banks that got into trouble in Latvia are greatful for the Obama team’s globalization of QE (Quantitative Easing), after their lending spree in Latvia.

And nuclear disarmament? After two weeks in office?

Even the report displays skepticism:

“Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.”

In short, it’s an astute, if blatant, piece of public relations.

Some questions for the Nobel Laureate:

Question: Is the US Govt. going to lay down most of its nuclear weapons? Or is it going to make nominal reductions, while using that to prevent any other country gaining even a single weapon?

Question: Is the US Govt. going to reduce surveillance, quit bombing in South Asia, and threatening Iran?

Question: Is the US Govt. going to modulate its own life-style of excessive consumption (subsidized by US tax-payers and artificially cheap interest rates that effectively rob savers all over the globe) or is it going to be lecturing other countries on how to live frugally after a half century of reckless living?

(more later)