A time to think

Gore Vidal is an American institution, but even such a man cannot ignore the noise from his television. Answering the phone last Wednesday afternoon, two days before he would turn 83, Vidal tells me from his home in Hollywood: “I’m distracted by Lou Dobbs on my set. The Mexicans are coming, he tells us every minute. I remember years ago, when he was a sunny-faced little fat boy, and he did business news and that was all. … You can always go pretty far in America if you play the bigot card.”

It’s immediately apparent that Vidal’s advanced age has not dulled his tongue. Though his sentences now come out a little slower sometimes — meandering a bit, or ebbing out to be replaced by a new thought — this is the same Vidal who, on live television during the 1968 Democratic convention, accused conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. of being a crypto-Nazi (to which Buckley, without irony, replied: “Now listen, you queer. … I’ll sock you in the goddamn face”).

On Sunday afternoon, Vidal will be having what should be a much friendlier public conversation with Pasadena senior and civil rights activist Marvin Schachter at Pasadena City College, part of the ACLU–Pasadena Foothills’ annual garden party.

Beginning with his work to register black voters in the South years before Brown vs. Board of Education kick-started America’s civil rights movement, Schachter has devoted much of his life to progressive political causes. In Pasadena, he has been the driving force behind shaping affordable housing policies and is the leading defender of the rights of senior citizens.

Vidal’s political consciousness developed as a young boy in his grandfather’s extensive library. Born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, he is the grandson of Oklahoma Sen. Thomas P. Gore, making Vidal a cousin of former Vice President Al Gore. His father, Eugene Luther Vidal, was a West Point lieutenant who served as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his mother later remarried the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Vidal was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in a heavily Republican district of upstate New York in 1960, and in 1982 finished second to Gov. Jerry Brown in a Democratic primary race for the Senate.

His grandfather’s library also spawned a love of writing and literature. While still in his 20s and after serving in the Navy during World War II, Vidal published the first of dozens of novels, including 1948’s “The City and the Pillar,” which was attacked by mainstream critics and others for its sympathetic depiction of gay men, and many historical tomes, from “Burr” and “1876” to “The Golden Age.” He also worked in the 1950s as a contract screenwriter for MGM, where he contributed to the script for “Ben-Hur.”

Vidal is most famous, however, as an essayist of unique insight into American socio-political life. On the day of our half-hour discussion, Vidal’s focus was to warn of a decline in our very way of life: a cancer as much a result of The People lacking intellectual curiosity — fearing it, even, as our national political discussions show — and forgetting our own history as it is the fault of those in power who fuel and exploit ignorance to strengthen their control.

And because his TV remained on throughout the conversation, popping up in the middle of all of this came Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin — who, along with running mate and “military hack” John McCain, Vidal said, appears deranged by excessive self-love. Classic Gore Vidal, indeed. 

PW: Two years ago you said that running out of money would be the only thing to stop the Bush administration from waging war on the world. Today we have a welfare proposal for Wall Street that would cost roughly the same amount as the Iraq War has, not counting future costs. Is it time to say, “I told you so”?

Gore Vidal: I noticed that statistic [he laughs]. Thomas Jefferson, who from time to time was very wise, said — this is when they were Constitution-making in 1789 in Philadelphia, and they’re talking about if we should have a standing army and navy — he said “I have always pitied any nation that felt it should have a standing army and navy.”

There is no American alive today who doesn’t know that we are threatened on every side [he raises his voice and adopts the tone of an evangelist preacher] by people who hate Jesus. We got to fight ‘em, got to fight ‘em. If we don’t fight ‘em over there, we’re going to fight ‘em over here, ba ba ba ba ba. I think there’s something wrong with the water here. We’re getting more and more dumb-dumbs.
    
But it seems that the cost of imperialism is becoming more than the US can afford. So where do we go from here?

Nobody’s going deliberately anywhere. They’re drifting. I’ve been following this [economic free fall] ever since it started to break, before Her Alaskan Majesty arrived on the scene to bring us joy, and it’s lunatic. I don’t mind making fun of anything, particularly the pomposities of our rulers, but I’m enough of a patriot that I don’t want this place to end up as a joke.

And there She is up there, amid Her considered thoughts on various subjects, and magazines and newspapers She read — and there they all are, just right in front of me. [He pauses as if to show there are no thoughts there, replaying moments during the recent Katie Couric interview of Palin, and then laughs] She couldn’t think of the name of anything [what newspapers she reads, what reforms she’s accomplished].   

So what would a McCain administration bring us?

… [He uses a mocking dramatic voice] One of the greatest heroes who ever lived. Such a brave man!

Who said he was? He says he is. The self-love of that man, as he waddles along like a penguin and talks about what a wonderful human being [he is], how he’s won wars — he said “I know how to win a war,” but he hasn’t done a goddamned thing. He’s never had a command position, anyway.

He’s just another military hack. And he got his first job [as Navy liaison in 1977] when he was used as a go-between to the Senate, where there are many, many people who are interested in military affairs for very good reasons. Then somebody died and somebody else died, and he ran for office and got elected. I have never seen an intelligent remark attributed to him. Now I may have missed 10,000 glorious phrases, but there’s nothing there.

This is a country where any liar can get away with it, because everybody else is lying too, and the first law of the United States is “I will not blow your scam if you don’t blow mine.”

Does Obama give you any real hope in terms of bringing peace, limiting corporate power and reversing erosion of civil liberties?

Yes, I’m all for him. He’s a bit hard to defend to a people who’ve been trained that the less education you have, the more of a good person you are, because otherwise you might be an elitist or you might even be a snob —  who reads books! The hatred of education, which has become one of the hallmarks of the American citizenry, is very alarming. When they were going on about how this guy was born in Kenya in the jungle, they had to work him into a snob because he can read books, formulate thoughts. And this is evil. Real guys don’t do that. They get divorced and remarried in
Las Vegas.

Listening to [Obama] talk at a time he dared talk to a grown-up like the senator from Arizona, when he was even allowed to defend himself, I thought: Now what’s wrong with [people]? This is a brilliant man. So he sounds like a professor — well, he is a professor, and it’s all the good for us if he wants to waste his time on the totally uneducated electorate. But he’s working; he’s doing his job as a citizen and they’re scared of him. I thought: Boy, these people are not going to survive much longer, and I mean our country. If they’ve been taught to hate someone who can formulate an idea, then we’re out of business.

The problem is when [Obama] starts to talk to somebody like the senator from Arizona he tries to make sense. He tries to elegantly educate him. He can’t do it, because the senator from Arizona is not used to talking to intelligent people. Obama is intelligent, and he’s doing him the courtesy of treating him as his intellectual equal. And he isn’t one. That’s what scares me.

People have been comparing Obama to John Kennedy. You spent time with Kennedy (serving on his Advisory Committee on the Arts), so what do you think of that?

I’ve never met Obama, but I listen to him in a way in the old days you couldn’t. With a tight shot on television you get a pretty good idea of what he’s like. Jack was no intellectual. He’d be the first one to tell you he wasn’t, but he honored intellectuals. Kennedy surrounded himself with the most brilliant people he could find, which were not altogether too many. He thought the people who were already in office, particularly the military, knew what they were talking about. He found out with the Bay of Pigs they didn’t.

Comparing [Obama] to Kennedy, I think each has goodwill toward the republic. Whereas I think there’s a lot of evil will coming from the senator from Arizona and a lot of people. … They’re all playing games to get as much money as they can for themselves, and the people are without any education or curiosity. [Once, while speaking to an audience of high school educators] I said, “What’s being done to the children here? I have never in my life met a boring 6-year-old, and I’ve never met an interesting 16-year-old. What are you people doing to them?”

What was happening to those kids?
First they’re trained to not reveal any curiosity about anything. Every important question has been answered for you. You better put the right check in the right square little box, which is no way to educate anybody. This is for — I don’t know — this is for savages on desert islands: Do you think there’s a turtle under that rock? Instead of saying let me go over and see if there’s a turtle, no — there’s bound to be a turtle, so check “turtle” and you’ll pass the course. If you give people …

— Oh my god, She’s on! Breaking news: Bailout vote … but there She is, The Queen of Alaska. She’s deigned to come down from her icy lair.

She’s drowning us out, you know.

You can’t fight it …

It’s a role, and She’s being a good sport about it, you know. Also, She’s so pleased with herself. It’s almost a match for her partner — remind me of his name? John McCain. They’re both in the final throes of self-love, out of their minds with admiration, he for himself, she for herself. For her to start lecturing the senator from Delaware [Joe Biden] shows that she cannot know the voice of an intelligent person. Otherwise, she’d be in some awe of him — but these people aren’t important; I’m important; they want to take My picture. It’s the politics of celebrity, non-celebrities who have tricked themselves into thinking they are.

In November we’re voting on whether to amend the state constitution to stop gay marriage (Proposition 8). What do you think about that?

I don’t think about those things at all. People’s private lives are people’s private lives. If people of the same sex want to feel that they’re married and make the mistake of standing in front of the monotheistic religion, go ahead. It’s no business of mine.

But why do people always want to make it their business?

Control! Control, my boy! That’s what they want. And sex has been wonderful for that. There was a great piece written back in the 1920s, by H.L. Mencken. He was asked: “There are those who think various forces are destroying the United States and our liberties; who would you blame the most for that?” He said, “Henry Ford, for inventing that goddamned automobile. The police can go out and arrest any nice lady who is driving along very, very slowly in her Model T and treat her as a prisoner.”

And that is what is happening. Anyone who has driven in Los Angeles or its environs, as I have off and on for 50, 60 years, you know the police — I can remember when they were out for people who didn’t like the Vietnam War. “Could you pull over, you just went through that light?” “Well, I didn’t go through that light.” You would see the machine guns ready to go off. [Speaking in a low, dark voice] You disobeyed an order of someone really important: the police. We’re taught to be terrified of the police, but in civilized countries they’re there to protect us from those who wish us ill. But should the police wish us ill, “go to it” is pretty much the attitude of our rulers.

But it’s all control, why we’re being asked to think about [gay marriage], talk about it, debate about it. It’s a means of control, making something deeply illegal. What a way to go after people — their private lives. You can always prove that in his private life someone is doing something evil, that you don’t like, and Little Lord Jesus is backing you up because [he takes a rough, rural voice] he don’t [sic] like it either.

Putting religion and the law together is one of the greatest mischiefs of the, initially, 20th century.

Law enforcement is also on the ballot in California. In general, what will be the consequences of continued growth of the prison apparatus?

It takes us to where we are now, which is not the happiest place in the universe. I was just going through a bunch of ’60s pictures [of an event to register black voters]; these were nice middle-class folks from LA, and they hadn’t realized … they were trying to get as many cases against the average citizen to keep him from damn well voting.

It’s a violent society. A very stupid society. We’re regarded as the idiot of the world. I find the people who read me most seriously are in Europe. For one thing, they’re morbidly interested in how we got to be the way we are.

— She’s back; She’s back. She’s on my set. The big headline is “Veep Debate.” Oh my goodness me, She’s wearing white; such an Adorable Girl.  

What are your thoughts on the state of literature in the United States?

I wish it well. It’s not been a golden age. This is the age of movies. I’m not one of those writers who [denounce all film; although he has been critical of film’s ability to express complex ideas]. I’d rather see a good movie than read a bad novel.

What are you currently reading?
Aristotle. Like everybody else I’ve pretended to read him for 50 years, so I thought I’d sit down and read through “Politics.” He’s writing about every known republic he could find out about, which was practically everything extant in those days, and he comes to the conclusion that republics by their very nature are doomed. Everything that is happening to us now you can see presaged in Aristotle’s “Politics.” But I don’t want to bore people — they’d much rather hear about some princess from Alaska.

Remember I told you I would tell schoolteachers how boring their students were? The schoolteachers had collaborated on the boredom. They told them to question nothing: What are you? Some kind of little commie?

I’m talking about [students then who are] the grownups now, who are more or less in charge and are going to be very much in charge of the education of the next generation: They need to know that they don’t know anything, and they shouldn’t be proud of it. Every generation is there to teach the next one. I’ve done my best in trying to teach American history, writing “Burr” and “Lincoln” and so on.

Each year Purdue does an analysis of high school students, what they find interesting and what they hate. They hated American history most of all. It takes genius for a country with a history as interesting as the United States’ is to have turned off a whole generation to their past and make them bored with their history. Even watching the career of the Bush family should catch their interest, if only to go and do likewise: getting as many drops of oil as they can out of the ground. What we should be training the new generation to do is to restore the Constitution. So you’re going to have to get the generation who is of age to read it, to find out about it.

Gore Vidal speaks from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Pasadena City College’s Haberson Hall. Parking is available in lots no. 4 and no. 5, along Del Mar Boulevard between Hill and Bonnie avenues. The ACLU Pasadena-Foothills is requesting a donation of $30 to attend, or $10 for students and low-income people. Call (626) 792-1284 or visit aclu-sc.org/chapters/view/101247.