Gore Redux

When we head out to the main square of Ravello, Vidal’s knee requires him to use a wheelchair for part of the trip. Settling in at his favourite bar, we watch sultry women and men circling each other in front of the cathedral of San Pantaleo. I’m reminded of a “Vidalism”: “A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.”

Streams of well-wishers, a few with a raised fist in the classic salute of defiance, pay their respects. Vidal is a hero to the European left.

We settle into more scotch. “The great scandal of America right now,” says Vidal, is “the ceos, who are simply bandits. They go into a company that has a rich base, grab everything they can for themselves — stock options, huge salaries — and fire as many people as possible. If we ever have an old-fashioned revolution in the U.S., it will be made by well-educated, blue-collar workers who have lost their jobs.”

I mention that much of the working class votes for Bush. “Because the bandits own the media,” Vidal fires back, “and the media tells them America is the greatest country in the world.” He leans forward. “The infantilizing of the Republic is one of the triumphs of American television.”

Vidal’s transition from media darling to “extremist” has mirrored the process of his own radicalization. While he’s still much sought after around the world, there’s little room for Vidal in print or on television in his own country.

When he broke through as a novelist, it was at the beginning of Cold War propaganda and McCarthyism. “The American people were being systematically terrified by the country’s ownership. I believed the whole nonsense,” he writes in his memoirs, Palimpsest.

“My real political education began when I made money only to have it confiscated by a military machine. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who joined the right wing and blamed it all on a vague nemesis called ‘big government,’ I started to turn left. If the government was going to tax so much of our money, then let the government give us health care, education, and all those things other first - world countries provide their taxpayers.”

He supported Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic convention and became a frequent visitor at the White House. “We were both unadventurous conservatives, interested in personal glory. The only division between us would have been my growing hatred of the empire and his unquestioning love for it. In due course, he wanted us to win the cold war with a hot war. I think, even then, I suspected that the cold war was a fraud.” Still, Vidal bought into the Kennedy myth. “What an actor he was! What a gullible audience I was!”

Vidal joined the anti-war movement protesting the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. His 1968 debate with William F. Buckley Jr., during abc’s live televised coverage of the Democratic convention —Vidal defending the demonstrators and attacking the police; Buckley defending the war — became legendary when they almost came to blows. By the mid-1970s he was a major cultural figure. The publishing of his novel 1876 saw Vidal make the cover of Time in 1976.

By the 1990s, after exploring U.S. history in a series of novels, Vidal had come to believe that a turning point occurred after World War II when Truman, instead of demobilizing the army, expanded the war machine and ushered in the “National Security State.” Kennedy further raised military spending $17 billion ( U.S.) above that of the Eisenhower years.