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  Gore Vidal - The Last Aristocrat-Democrat
It comes as something of an embarrassment to one, who prides himself on a certain independence of spirit, that I can so completely agree with anyone as much as I agree with Gore Vidal. Whenever I read his essays or hear him in interviews, I find myself in accord with nearly everything he says—even those things I do not always have the courage to express myself. His outrageous opinions cannot be matched by anyone on the scene today. He has seen America at its best and at its worst with a cold analytical eye spanning nearly a century of experience. He has come to despair of our land ever again achieving the good while seeong only a future of despotism, misery and decline for us. We will be so much poorer for his passing when that sad day comes. He is the last aristocrat-democrat.
His latest interview appears in an interview by Brit, Tim Teeman.
Since I know many will not actually take the time to read this long, highly entertaining interview, I will enclose here a few selected quotes. See if you agree:
How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”
Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”
“His (Obama’s) problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is.”
Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.”
The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’”
"I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.”
The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.”
“Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr. Bush.”
“Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.”
America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.”
“I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”
 Robert Boldt an editor of MWC News, is a freelance film/video producer living in Jefferson City, Missouri. He is active in local politics, worked on the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns and is a cofounder of The White Rose Collective. Articles by Bob Boldt at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/bob-boldt |
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