In Defense of Gore Vidal
by James Versluys
I have an unusual tolerance for people with nutty theories. This tolerance comes from my notion that most people have theories that are not only poorly made and wrong, but also lunatic to boot. Since in my estimation this includes almost everyone on the planet, I would certainly be out of luck if I didn't.
It seems many people have weighed in recently about Vidal’s friendship with McVeigh, and especially about Vidal’s interestingly un-horrified attitude toward McVeigh and his political murders. I don’t think this consideration on Vidal’s part is the crime most reviewers think it is. I say right off that I agree with little in Vidal’s or McVeigh's opinions on matters of federal authority, but I do understand them. I seem to be alone in my understanding —as of this writing it appears that Vidal's subtler assessment of McVeigh has been lost on every reviewer who has seen fit to write on the subject.
Simply put, McVeigh and Vidal are both quite admirable fellows, even hugely courageous people in a rare form. This, of course, runs exactly counter the prevailing opinion which holds that McVeigh’s actions were cowardly and that Vidal is a malign and wicked fellow for daring not to scratch out his own eyes in terror. Yet any examination of the life and death of McVeigh by an acute student of human psychology would reveal the exact opposite conclusion, culminating in the excellent way he died. Many a soldier silently gave McVeigh the gift of veneration when they learned of the honorable and respectable way he died. There is a subtle but unmistakably unique quality to McVeigh’s exit which completely defies categorization and mere words. The world is divided up into those who understand that quality in a complete way and those who do not, and never the twain shall meet.
Vidal is of the same sort. A holdover from the time of Shaw, Gore Vidal is a wonderfully aristocratic and disdainful leftist who has an odd habit of saying exactly what he thinks, all the while being properly acidic towards those who are not excellent and wise, which of course constitutes the vast majority of mankind. He disdains the media as an institution, hates the federal government passionately, consistently frowns on the small vistas of the ever-foolish GOP and generally pours fire on all things political. One sympathizes.
Much is being made of Vidal's view of the government, many claiming that it amounts to a conspiracy theory. This is exactly true. And like most conspiracy theorists that lay grand schemes, he is dead wrong about not only motives, but also the goals of large organizations and the reasons for their actions. The general conclusions he lays are not only farcical, but sometimes contain the grains of immensely haphazard and unlearned leaps of logic. For instance, once when he was giving a lecture about British foreign intelligence, he made it clear he did not even know what the name of the organization he was expounding upon was, clearly spelling out for all his lack of authoritative knowledge on the subject.
I argue this matters not one whit. His failings as a thinker being no graver than every other intellectual claiming the name, so one can instead point to the wonderful things he gets right. And what he does get right are many of the interesting and subtler points about American history. Vidal has a genuinely interesting and penetrating insight on a large number of topics on everything from the real motives of FDR to his antinomian and refreshingly irreverent views on Abraham Lincoln, which were so good they have recently begun to be copied by establishment revisionist historians. Flipping through a collection of his essays, one finds a dozen gems and tidbits worthy of name and art alone. What other writer now alive can one say as much? Perhaps you can count them on your fingers, but not your fingers and toes.
Vidal's conspiritorialist tropism on the US government is not only overshadowed by his many fine observations and excellent witticisms, it's close to irrelevant. No one now cares that Kant believed in fantastical theories about Martians or had crackbrained ideas concerning diet. As quoted by Vidal himself, Mencken had noted that "the fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret. All of us, in our several ways, are illogical, irrational, almost insane."
Vidal's insanity regarding the government of the Unites States of America is not only harmless in its central incorrectness, it demonstrates how often bad ideas are the result of very good instincts. It is easy to remember that the man who does not hold suspicion towards and contempt of the government he lives under is invariably a fool or a peasant.
This is not to suggest that Vidal does not have his idiocies above and beyond his government theories. Far from it. The boorishness with which he attacked Buckley as a "racist" boggles the imagination. But again, to his credit Vidal seems to have grown more circumspect about throwing rank politically correct insults to and fro, and he seems to have finally grasped the essentially Orwellian character of modern race and sex "theories." As Vidal himself noted, "... A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?" One gets the distinct impression Vidal is no longer impressed with the direction race politics have taken, even if it can be noted that it is a state of affairs he and his political comrades helped to create.
This amounts to the best point about Vidal's writing —that his value is not confined to a single notion. He is not, as the brilliant phrase has it, "a prisoner of one idea". Casually glancing at his essays, one finds some of the better witticisms created in our times: "It has been noted that half the adults of our Republic no longer read newspapers, clearly the smart half". Or another: "I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television." A third: "A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." Vidal's better quotes are some of the best aphorisms produced in the latter half of the twentieth century, At his best he is one of the first-rate writers of our time.
The best part about Vidal as a man is his tendency to adopt a skeptical and aloof air. One can be forgiven for wondering why he is on the Left at all until one ponders the atrophied insides of the ear sockets of our more religious comrades on the Right. In a fashion far more suited to the Right than the Left, Vidal never seems to take anyone seriously without first casting a cold eye upon them, a trait which should have gotten him ejected from the side of angels long ago. Questioning authority is a leftist trait, but coldly disrespecting authority is the rightist’s purview, and Vidal is refreshingly relentless in his disdain for the meaner and more pusillanimous people in life. From the Great Emancipator to Hearst and FDR on down, there is no person he approves of completely, another no-no in our land where radical hagiographers still attempt to rehabilitate the Hisses and Stalins of the world. To paraphrase Vidal on another subject, maybe he has said something good about his fellow comrades once, but I have yet to run across it.
Gore Vidal is essentially one of those men who is too well accomplished and writes too excellently for his comrades on the Left to disown him for deviating from the accepted orthodoxy, which is why his impolitic ruminations on McVeigh have not and will not get him ostracized. Since political tolerance is utterly unknown in leftist circles, this creates an odd situation for the poor leftists who read him. A reaction like this particular sentence from a scolding review of Vidal’s dalliances with McVeigh, written by some nonentity from Salon.com, is representative: "But there are some subjects on which it simply doesn't pay to be a contrarian, and mass murder is one of them." It is safe to say this represents the standard bearer idea about Vidal’s McVeigh problem, at least as far as the wide-eyed radical masses are concerned. Not a harsh rebuke by the standards the Left sets for unorthodoxy, but a definite berating for daring to stray from the fold, even if for a moment.
These apostasies would certainly get a lesser writer ejected from the pack, but Vidal will come through precisely as before. Skepticism, wit, and style can get you ejected quickly from the Left, but at some level of output it can inure the better writer from being ejected from the polity, just so long as the issue is not central to current political aspirations. Truth can be tolerated among progressives so long as they don’t get in the way. The quixotic seriousness of the lumpen-radical is precisely like every inferior man's self-righteousness. The radical naturally understands who his superiors are in a vague and inexact way, and he strives to show respect to his master even when venturing forth to attack them from spite or envy.
Making light of mass murder is most certainly not what Vidal is doing, but rather he is eschewing the reflexes of habit that pass for ideas in the mass media today; namely, simplistic moralizing. A press catering to the masses needs to establish an obvious culprit, preferably one of complete evil with no complexities or irritating notions about justice. McVeigh is resisted as a human being in direct proportion to the press' need to keep him simple, stupid, and thoroughly wicked. The real McVeigh —an honorable, compassionate man driven to complete despair and murder by his ideological views— is something far too terrible to contemplate, even as an aside. So the press must have a bogeyman, and a crew cut is the perfect cover, making McVeigh impervious to any subtlety or human motives that don't spring from a mean daddy. All we children of Hollywood know that crew cuts and discipline equal stupidity. And as a patriotic American I know that if the movies say it, I believe it, and that settles it, all glory and honor to Diversity.
This particular right-winger owes Vidal a stiff drink for his insights and literary virtues.
Any man of the Right wishing to "expand their horizons", as the gratingly post-modern expression goes, should tackle his collected essays. Between Bruce Anderson, Chris Hitchens and Gore Vidal, the Left in this country can escape being called a complete sham. Count your blessings, boys.
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