BEING VIGILANT OR BEING A VIGILANTE, THAT IS THE GORE VIDAL QUESTION?
'Having seen a biography of Gore Vidal (GV), I’d like to add my sincerest apologies to the American people for their half-witted worship of GV, either as hero or anti-hero; he just pisses me off!’ And that’s just it, he was a genius who manipulated his own brand of permissive, predictable, predatory intellectualisation beamed into American homes and loving his bête noire lavish lifestyle. Therefore he indulged his product of angry contempt for all to consume, and most bought into it – why didn’t Americans ignore him and laugh at his need for public affirmation? Cos it wasn’t that simple.
At times a brilliant wit but obsessive voyeur he nevertheless explored beneath the veil of lingering McCartheism by using the social media of his day – the TV. Suburbia had never had anti-conformism so televised. He was indeed born of the political womb of America’s greatest cultural export, that is middle-class consumerism , whilst being another American belligerent in the continent of American liberalism. If this is purely a polemic, I would say GV was a pompous overblown half-wit and a self-opinionated ideological ambulance chaser, who glamorised self-inflicted Italian exile whilst sunning himself with Hollywood ex-wannerbees pouring out their insecurities to the ego driven patriarch of Liberal America. Some maybe hoping at this stage that I’ve deliberately gone too far, and that I’m about to reveal the truth about what a guru he really was. Do you think criticism of his dependency on his ‘America fucks-up again’ compared to the ‘ever so umble’ GV who will put people straight, is in any way posturing? Or that this creation of a new form of intellectual indecency by GV’s love of American foreign policy going wrong, wasn’t actually a form of ideological porn? He waited in the wings to ‘enable’ America to have every opportunity to cock-it-up, just so he could ‘gallantly’ save America. Well ‘Mr America’, save it for a sandwich! Be a pot-stirrer elsewhere. Was he vigilant or a vigilante from the left? Yet the most telling factor is that few people have heard of GV outside America – Americans find that indefensible. How far do you think that this is justified? Or at all? You decide.