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Hat-tip to TheGodlessHeathan.com, Gore Vidal on why he's an atheist not an agnostic--a portion of a c. 1999 debate hosted by Melvyn Bragg (now Lord Bragg) on LWT (London Weekend Television), possibly an episode of the long-running The South Bank Show.
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Gore Vidal died in July at the age of 86 and these four previously unavailable interviews, spanning 20 years, show him talking in his usual provocative, stimulating, humorous and sometimes petty fashion.
Witty quips are scattered throughout I Told You So. Quizzed on whether it was true that actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon asked him to be godfather of their new baby, Vidal says: "Always a godfather, never a god."
The interviews, printed in reverse chronological order with 2008 first, have common themes - such as his influential grandfather, his play The Best Man or the presidency of J.F. Kennedy. Kennedy was an "operator", says Vidal, and JFK's family "had all the charm of two tons of condemned veal".
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Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in official Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
To Phyllis Schlafly and the New Right, this consensus amounted to liberalism, and in the nineteen-seventies they began to use guerrilla tactics--direct mail, single-issue pressure groups, right-wing think tanks, insurgent campaigns. By the nineties, conservatives had begun to take over the institutions of government. Liberals copied their success: the Heritage Foundation led to the Center for American Progress, the Moral Majority to People for the American Way, Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olbermann. The people Washington attracts now tend to be committed activists, who think of themselves as locked in an existential struggle over the fate of the country, and are unwilling to yield an inch of ground.
Meanwhile, another army has invaded Washington: high-priced influence peddlers working on behalf of corporations and the wealthy, seducing officials of both parties and daily routing the public interest. The War of Organized Money goes on almost unnoticed outside the capital, but the War Between the Colors reflects a real divide in the country, the sorting of Americans into ideologically separate districts and lives. From time to time, a looming disaster--such as the upcoming budget crisis--leads to negotiations and a brief truce. But the fighting never really stops.
-- George Packer, "Adversaries," The New Yorker, Oct. 29 & Nov. 5, 2012, p. 88.
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The Economist wants President Obama to hug a Republican, but they're clearly frustrated by the modern American GOP:
But what about the Republicans? Their script is depressingly easy to write. The party’s leaders will once again conclude that they lost because their candidate was not a genuine conservative, and vow to find the real thing next time.
If the Republicans do that they will be abandoning all electoral sense. They managed to lose an election again in a country where conservatives still handily outnumber liberals by lumbering Mr Romney with extremist positions, such as rejecting any budget deal involving tax rises even if spending cuts were ten times greater. Their obsession with abortion and gay marriage seems ever more out of touch with women and young people. And their harshness towards illegal immigrants cost them the growing Latino vote, 71% of which went to Mr Obama. Plenty of independent voters, and this newspaper, yearn for a more pragmatic Republican Party. Doing a deal on the deficit with Mr Obama would signal its rebirth.
In another article in the same issue, The Economist looks at the ''remaking of the president''
Mr Romney won the white vote by 59% to 39%—an improvement over John McCain’s showing in 2008. But in Midwestern swing states, that margin was narrower: just four points in Wisconsin, for example, and 15 in Ohio.
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Over the course of his presidency, [Obama] has pointedly unveiled policies designed to appeal to each element of this coalition.
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Perhaps the best illustration of Mr Obama’s campaign-by-niches is his wooing of gay voters.
The 5% of voters who identified themselves as gay in exit polls opted for Mr Obama by 76% to 22%—enough to account for his entire margin of victory.
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''The late Gore Vidal used to argue that the American idea rests on the proposition that the end doesn't justify the means, and I think he was right." - Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale
Carter:
Democracy cannot flourish when electoral politics is exalted above all things. The entire point of the concern for civil society is that a successful nation needs its people to be focused on matters more important than transitory partisan advantage. A nation where friends can no longer hold political discussions, for no other reason than that they disagree, is a nation not only in decline but, in the Weberian sense of nationhood-as-common-interest, on the verge of collapse.
And our decline matters. I am naive enough, in the innocence of late middle age, to believe that America should still be a beacon to the world, a nation worth imitating. Plenty of countries around the globe have learned to imitate our self-seeking, our obsessions with wealth and celebrity, and our growing incivility. Before selecting our public behaviors, we should perhaps think a bit harder about what it is that we want to export.
- Yale Divinity School's Reflections: Who Are We? American Values Revisited, Fall - 2012
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Here is more on the Journal of American Studies of Turkey's call for Gore Vidal papers. The journal published its first edition in 1995.
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