GOOD GORE VIDAL INTERVIEW

From Wikipedia:

Gore Vidal

Contrary to his wishes, Vidal is — at least in the U.S. — more respected as an essayist than as a novelist. The critic John Keates praised him as "this [the twentieth] century's finest essayist." Even an occasionally hostile critic like Martin Amis admits, "Essays are what he is good at...[h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

Accordingly, for six decades, Gore Vidal has applied himself to a wide variety of socio-political, sexual, historical, and literary themes. In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled Armageddon?, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America. He ruthlessly pilloried the incumbent president Ronald Reagan as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays,United States (1952–1992), the citation noting: "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist." A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is The Last Empire. Since then, he has published such self-described "pamphlets" as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta,and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the current administration.

More bio here.

And to watch the interview, via Throw away your TV, click here.

Okay, so in the interview, Vidal doesn't really say much that he hasn't been saying for the last four or five years or so, you know, that Bush has destroyed the republic, that the war is totally illegal and imperial in nature, that public attitudes about all sorts of things are extraordinarily vapid, etc., but he says it so damned well. He is, after all, Gore Vidal. Go check it out; he's always a pleasure.

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