Hi X,
Thanks for posting these series of writings. re: patriotism and who goes to war..
I am been reading Gore Vidal's "Hollywood".(for a long time, it is my current travel book for reading on "get- aways"). He is also difficult for me to read, He says so much with so many charactors. Too smart for me. . A review:
Hollywood (1990)
Caroline Sanford, the fictional protagonist of Empire, returns in the fifth tale of Vidal's seven American Chronicles. Still involved in Washington publishing, Caroline becomes Hollywood movie actress Emma Traxler, circa 1917, not so much out of a lust for stardom, but rather to make progaganda films that edified America about the dangerous European Huns. At the same time, Caroline shares in interest in an shares in interest in an influential Washington newspaper with her half brotler Blaise, and as such, she's a political player who spend time in the White House of her friend and confidante, Theodore Roosevelt - just as she will a generation later with his presidential fifth cousin, Franklin. She balances her time between East and West in an era when the cinema begins to play a vital role in American cultural life, thus allowing Vidal to write about a medium that recurs in his work, from the ribaldry of Myra Breckinridge to the serenity of Screening History, his brief nonfiction memoir about the movies of his childhood. Caroline also loses her virginity to a young married senator, James Burden Day, and has a child by him, Emma, although Emma never knows who her father is because Caroline quickly marries a dull, suitable cousin of the Sanford clan. None of this history for Sen. Day appears in Washington, D.C. because, of course, Vidal had not yet imagined the fullness of his life in 1967.
Unlike its predecessor, Empire, Hollywood is a livelier book, and the show business setting permits Vidal leeway to have some sinister fun with his characters and his narrative. Among the presidents in the book, Woodrow Wilson comes off looking much better than his successor, Warren Harding, who lets his dog pee on White House furniture. In the novel's Hollywood, luminaries like Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford and Fatty Arbuckle have cameos; in Washington, the minor players include Calvin Coolidge, Henry Cabot Lodge and even the author's grandfather, Sen. Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma.
pitt.edu
But a part early in the book, that constantly troubles me, is how he portrays the "inner circle" of power in Washington from the Wilsons to the Roosevelts, and other fictious, I assume, congressmen (all men at that time :), and their women friends lightly bantering with much glee, excitement and anticipation in their opulent "sitting rooms", the likely prospect of the US entering WW I.. Their young men, of course would be "officers and gentlemen" , (an oxymoron sometimes ? ) and the grunts would come from the "great unwashed"
Also thanks for posting Walt Whitman, a man that had to undergo his share of ridicule in his time for free expression..
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