Gore Vidal has passed on, but the profilic author and essayist leaves behind a treasure trove of witticisms and button-pushing commentary. His unflinching assessment of culture and politics was brutal, honest, and typically provocative. British author Martin Amis once said, ?Even his blind spots are illuminating.?
It might ring a bit reductive to pay homage to Vidal?s life?s work with a smattering of provocative quotes, but it certainly beats the sacrilege of paraphrasing his perfectly constructed sentences. So, here are eight of Vidal?s most controversial stances, in his own words.?
On the Presidency
Despite being friends with JFK, having shared a stepfather with Jackie Onassis and being a distant cousin of Al Gore, Vidal was skeptical of America?s highest elected office.
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?Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it.?
From The Decline and Fall of the American Empire?(1992)
On Homosexuality
Vidal?s third book, The City and the Pillar, published in 1948, was a coming-out story that shocked and appalled the establishement with its casual treatment of homosexual urges. Later, he took that matter-of-fact approach when explaining his views on same-sex coupling.
?Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no-one would perform them.?
From Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (2001)
American Imperialism
His vocal opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq were only surface manifestations of Vidal?s deep antipathy toward U.S. foreign intervention and imperialism.
?The average ?educated? American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past.?
From At Home (1988)
On Timothy McVeigh
After Vidal wrote a 1998 article in Vanity Fair about the ?shredding? of the Bill of Rights, he began a correspondence with Oklahoma City bomber?Timothy McVeigh, exchanging numerous letters over a three-year correspondence.
?He?s very intelligent,? said Vidal in a 2001 interview about McVeigh. ?He?s not insane.?
On 9/11
Not quite a truther, Vidal believed that the World Trade Center attacks were comparable to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, arguing that both FDR and President Bush had advance warning and chose to do nothing for their own political benefit.
?I?m not a conspiracy theorist?I?m a conspiracy analyst,? explained Vidal in 2007. ?Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up. They could never have pulled off 9/11, even if they wanted to. Even if they longed to. They could step aside, though, or just go out to lunch while all these terrible things were happening to the nation. Yeah. I believe that of them.?
On Religion
Long before Christopher Hitchens (whom Vidal briefly anointed as his philosophical successor), Vidal was a vocal critic of organized religion, in particular those that worship a single god.
?The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved?Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal?God is the Omnipotent Father?hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god?s purpose.?
- From Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, April 1992
Corporations and Media
Long before the tangled business pedigrees of Fox News and MSNBC, Vidal railed against the clouding effect corporate interests had on objectivity and truth.
?The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity?much less dissent.?
From The Decline and Fall of the American Empire?(1992)
On Marijuana
Staunchly against government regulation of drugs?he once claimed that Prohibition led to the greatest breakdown of law and order in American history? Vidal wrote a 1970 op-ed in the New York Times defending legalization?with full disclosure.
?It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect?good and bad?the drug will have on whoever takes it. This will require heroic honesty. Don?t say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know?unlike speed, which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which is addictive and difficult to kick.?
How do your beliefs line up with Vidal?s views? Let us know in the COMMENTS.
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Oliver Lee has been covering social justice and other issues for TakePart since 2009. Originally from Baltimore, he lives and writes on a quiet, tree-lined street in Brooklyn.?Email Oliver?|?@oliverung
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gore-vidal-8-most-shocking-opinions-181033539.html
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