[lbo-talk] FW: Gore Vidal: Tim McVeigh was "a true patriot, a Constitution man"

Bhaskar Sunkara bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com
Sat Oct 17 04:53:44 PDT 2009


Never heard that one before. Sans a few essays I always found Gore Vidal to be awful. I prefer any essay by Perry Anderson over Vidal. His stance on McVeigh and the right-wing milita movement of the 90s has always been awful too.

Here's some logic from the man in 1999:

"Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species."

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 5:18 AM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:


> Vidal says it was the other way 'round. He said Kerouac gave him a "pro
> forma" blow job. Then Vidal turned Kerouac over and, as he reported to Allen
> Ginsberg, "I fucked him."
>
>
> Kerouac didn't like Vidal's writing. This is from a letter he wrote to
> Ginsberg:
>
> ".... am now resting and getting hi and going to the movies etc. and trying
> to read Gore Vidal's "Judgment of Paris" which is so uglily transparent in
> its method, the protagonist-hero who is unqueer but all camp (with his
> bloody tattoo on a thigh) and craptalk, the only thing good, as Bill says,
> are the satirical queer scenes, especially Lord Ayres or whatever his name .
> . . and they expect us to like Vidal, great god.
>



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