Last Citizen of The Old Republic

Though in declining health and wheelchair-bound for some years, he outlived Buckley.

The Best Man is a Broadway hit again; theaters will dim their marquee lights tonight.

I find myself returning to his essays so often that I assumed I might be reading Gore Vidal when the news of his death came, as it did on July 31.

As it happens, I'd been re-reading Robert Stanton's book (with Vidal), a compilation of excerpts from nearly twenty years of interviews. Published in 1980, Vidal's thoughts on history and a range of topics are timely as ever.

Serious comments around the Web are on the lines of "I miss him already," and I feel the same way about the loss of Vidal's voice. Some thoughts from Digby and Roy Edroso.

With Vidal being remembered for his TV appearances, it's painful to remember that there once was some time allowed for articulate thought. If the medium has always been one of huckstering, Vidal understood how to turn that to his own purposes. From a 1977 interview, cited in Views From a Window (p 142)—

...it's interesting talking on television. I pick a general direction I want to go in. Now you can't get on the tube unless you're hustling something, so I have to pretend to be selling a book a book or play. I get that over as quickly as possible. I've even stopped Johnny Carson in the middle of a conversation about the book to get on to the attorney general's crimes. In a funny way, television is the only way you can get to people... on television your voice is actually heard without an intermediary.

The chance of "getting to people... without an intermediary" on network TV seems incredible now, though when asked by the interviewer if "network powers" ever tried to keep him off shows, Vidal replied—

They don't like me, and Dick Cavett told me that the blacklist still goes on... that periodically, [at ABC] he would be given a list of people not to have on, and sometimes I would be on that list. Then, for no reason at all, I'd be off it. Nobody ever figured out the rationale for it. But there is indeed a blacklist, and it does continue.

Despite political and sexual antipathy to him, Vidal was considered entertaining enough to be on TV regularly in the '60s and '70s: an era that now seems about as distant as the various centuries in which his historic novels are set.

The better part of this in August 1 NYT was the first couple of comments, including—

Anarchteacher, Tulsa, OK:

"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore, II, c. 80 B. C.

Gore Vidal was our American Cicero. He valiantly stood as our golden shield of republican virtue against the brassy sword of empire yielded by plutocratic militarists and their vulgar plebeians. He was the national conscience, unrelenting in reminding the citizenry of its lost historical memory in this "United States of Amnesia." Something great has gone out of the world with his passing.

"Since I recall pre-imperial Washington, I am a bit of an old republican in the Ciceronian mode, given to decrying the corruption of the simpler, saner city of my youth." — The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982); included in At Home: Essays 1982-1988 (p 5); this may also be in Vidal's later collection of essays, United States.

Vidal's 2008 remarks on Buckley's death expressed his contempt for the deceased. Typical of his late writing, the column rambled, yet ended with the blend of erudition and truth-telling we could expect from Vidal—

The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says "We gotta fight 'em over there or we're gonna have to fight 'em over here." This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with "news" magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be "good" Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.

I speak ex cathedra now, ad urbe et orbe, with a warning that no society so marinated in falsity can long survive in a real world.