In Gore Vidal: History of the National Security
State & Vidal on America, TRNN Senior Editor
Paul Jay and the acclaimed essayist, screenwriter
and novelist Gore Vidal discuss the historical
events that led to the establishment of the
massive military-industrial-security complex
and the political culture that gave us the
“Imperial Presidency.”
……………………
The book Julian Assange clutched to display as a message when he was arrested and dragged out of the Embassy of Ecuador in London, UK.
……………….
I remember a while back one Left group criticized another Left newspaper for calling Gore Vidal “a great writer.” The newspaper editors responded, “We wrote he was a good writer, isn’t that good enough?”
I recently read and listened to audiobooks of Gore Vidal’s novels of the Ancient Middle East and Roman Empire. I knew Vidal had been in a political family and around Washington DC. When I read Vidal’s description of the back-stabbing in the Roman Emperor’s court I know that Vidal has seen or heard about similar political dealings in Washington in the Twentieth Century. Gore Vidal wrote novels and then worked in Hollywood on movie scripts and also for television. The man had a sense of timing and the writers craft that I think makes his stories move along.
I was listening to Herodotus on audiobook. A long work that shows that apparently people in the Ancient World had the understanding that of six-year-olds and the story sounds like Jack and the Beanstalk. Someone steals a princess, so the countries go to war and thousands of men are willing to die or risk becoming slaves because a noble prince was insulted. Okay. Is that how the world works. In Gore Vidal’s “Creation” a grandson of the religious leader Zoroaster of Persia travels the world and sees many things from Greece to China. Gore Vidal gives a realistic treatment of some of the scenes in Herodotus.
In “Julian” Gore Vidal depicts the attempts of the last Pagan Emperor to resist the totalitarian Christians and restore Hellenistic Philosophy and Gods as state protected and promoted as opposed to recently dominant Christians after Constantine.
So… When I listened to Gore Vidal’s last interview I am thinking of his scripts for the Ancient World. Vidal spoke of FDR as the American Agustus, a fair minded far sighted benign ruler in an American Republic. But, he died. His successor was unluckily a little emperor who set the US on a bad path of Imperialism and Militarism. Harry Truman changed American history. Vidal’s last message.
So random individuals who stumble into power are the motive force of history.
If Mussolini was killed in World War One there never would have been a fascist movement in Italy, and then in Germany?
The book that Julian Assange was holding when he was arrested with Gore Vidal’s picture on the cover was based on recorded interviews with Vidal when George Bush was president in 2005. Vidal says that both the 2000 and the 2004 elections were fraudulent and had cheating to win unfairly by the Republicans. Gore Vidal says he has to get back to America from his longtime home on the Mediterranean to help the leftist Democrats resist the fascistic Republicans. For Gore Vidal the lesson of a lifetime in politics where he said “I am not a conspiracy theorist, I am a conspiracy observer,” was to “Vote Democrat the lesser of two evils.” That’s it. What is to be done. Vote Biden 2024?
Thanks for the stories Mr. Vidal.
xenagoguevicene 