In a recent interview on Dateline, SBS TV Australia, Gore Vidal admits that he’s become a pamphleteer, an essayist — and for good reason. That’s sort of what some weblogs have become as well — and for good reason.
The transcript of Gore’s interview is worth a read. He says, [heh]:
We’ve never had a kind of reckless one who may believe –and there’s a whole theory now that he’s inspired by love of Our Lord –that he is an apocalyptic Christian who’ll be going to Heaven while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn’t the case. I hope that’s exaggeration.
And he reminds us of our long history as aggressors, including:
So we have been at war steadily since 1950. I did a…one of my little pamphlets was ‘A Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’ –how that worked. I mean, we’ve gone everywhere –we have the Enemy of the Month Club. One month, it’s Noriega –king of drugs. Another one, it’s Gaddafi. We hated his eyeliner or something and killed his daughter. We moved from one enemy to another and the press, the media, has never been more disgusting. I don’t know why, but there are very few voices that are speaking out publicly. The censorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly in network television. So nobody’s getting the facts………I spoke to 100,000 people two weeks ago in Hollywood Boulevard, down the hill from where I’m speaking to you now. There were 100,000, lots of police, many helicopters overhead which, as the speaker got up, would lower themselves to try and drown your voice out. The press did not record that there were 100,000 people. They said, “Oh, 30,000 perhaps. That might be an exaggeration,” they said.
And then about pamphleteering [and, I believe, weblogging]:
There are ways of getting around official media and there are ways of getting around a government which is given to lying about everything, and the people eventually pick up on it, but things are moving so swiftly now.
And he ends with this [which are my sentiments exactly]:
We’ve never had a period like this and it was –to somebody like me, who is really hooked into constitutional America –this is incredible. We cannot trust the Supreme Court after their mysterious decisions on the election of 2000. We have no political parties. We’ve never had much of them –I mean the Democrats, the Republicans. We have one party –we have the party of essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic, one called Republican. So in the absence of politics, with a media that is easy to manipulate and, in the hands of very few people with interests in wars and oil and so on, I don’t see how you get the word out, but one tries because there is nothing else to be done.
There’s lots more good stuff in the interview. Go read it.
The new “pamphleteers”
Reply