Paleo-con Vidal?

michael pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Tue May 15 10:04:17 PDT 2001


Chapter on, and forward by Gore Vidal, in paleo-con polemifest, "America First!, " by Bill Kauffman. Published by those soulless "secular humanists" at Prometheus Books, who publish a bit of neo-connery more usually. (Reprints of Sidney Hook, except for his first book from '32 on Marx that cited Lukacs, Korsch and Dewey. Justin tells me he never, and I assume in his will never allowed it to be republished. Did he even talk to Christopher Phelps, btw? He dissed Alan Wald...)

Anyway, back to Gore and the Kauffman. The chapter on Gore mostly relates the contro over his essay in the Nation from '86, "The Empire Lovers Strike Back, " and the charges about anti-semitism with some asides about Edmund Wilson.

William A. Williams, who had similiar hankerings for small "r" republicanism is also cited in this Kauffman book. Course, Williams was a Christian Socialist, as well, and used the older vocabulary of the "cooperative commonwealth" in his more visionary type musings. (have not gotten around to Paul Buhle's short book on Williams from a few yrs. ago.)

Coincidentally, another Old Right author, Eugene Davidson, who writes for the highbrow journal Modern Age, in a new collection of essays on the 60's (Reflections on a Disastrous Decade, I think is the title) has an essay on Jack Kerouac, as does, Bill Kaufmann. A documentary on Jack I saw yrs. ago, has a drunken Jack on Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Jr. in the late 60's ranting about the "Communists" "Hippies" and "Beatniks". Michael Pugliese



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