Our Rome correspondent Gaither Stewart has filed this little gem of an interview with the controversial author. We trust it will be of interest to many of our readers.—Ed

Vidal lived large, unapologetically, and his villa in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast,  remains a must-see location for the knowledgeable visitor.

DATELINE (Gaither Stewart in Rome) When I interviewed Gore Vidal in October, 1983, in his penthouse apartment on Largo (Piazza) Argentina in the very center of Rome, he related the time a lady from the New York Times asked as her first question: “Mr. Vidal, you really hate the United States, don’t you.” He answered: “No, I hate the New York Times.”

Like the time, he recalled, he was introduced on an NBC television show as “the outrageous Gore Vidal”, he stopped the show when he asked why outrageous. “Ronald Reagan is outrageous,” he replied.

During the over two hours we spoke about politics and literature which I recorded on tape, Vidal never once minced his words or resorted to niceties toward anyone or anything. Forever irreverent as was his nature.

From the huge transcript, I fashioned articles subsequently published in various European leftwing newspapers and magazines, including L’Unità, the official daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, De Morgen, the major Belgian Socialist daily in Gent, The Haagse Post, an Amsterdam leftwing weekly, and others I no longer recall.

We tried sitting on his terrace overlooking Piazza Argentina and the ruins of four Roman temples but the noise from the late Sunday afternoon traffic was so deafening we soon retired to the huge salon. Yet this apartment that he had owned for 20 years, he called his retreat, reserved for work—reading and writing and thinking. The only reason he agreed to the interview here was because I lived in Rome.

American artists were all over a cheap Europe in the early post-war period. And they all passed through Rome: that catastrophic driver Tennessee Williams, writer and composer Paul Bowles, William Styron, Normal Mailer and Saul Bellow. Here on the loud Rome piazza he wrote his famous Myra Breckenbridge. Though the figure of Gore Vidal that Sunday loomed larger than expected against the reflections of the flashing lights from the heart of Rome below us, I had the thought that we could just as well have been in New York or his beloved California.

Rather than try to reconstruct the interview, I have recalled here some of his chief political points, familiar to older readers, but most likely new to the younger generation, which Vidal describes as a ‘non-reading generation.’ Surprisingly, most of his words of nearly 30 years ago ring quite contemporary today.

“American leaders never deal with real political and social problems. The Founding Fathers feared most of all democracy and monarchy and saw to it that we could never have either. We should scrap the Constitution and start over. It is only a document to protect property owners while America has the weakest union movement in the Western world, with only 20% of workers organized. I attack the system that has done this to the American people. Meanwhile we should get rid of both the New York Times and the Constitution.

“On the other hand the people are not concerned about real problems either. Americans don’t vote, while corporations select and pay for the politicians and get the Senators and Presidents they pay for. They function like Italy’s mafia that buys its votes.

“The Left-Right classifications are complex. I have said I am a man of the Left. But I think we need a new definition of the Left and its goals and how they can be achieved. It’s a good thing for people to govern themselves but it must be explained how it can be done. We need a new document, a new analysis, a new synthesis of those goals.”

Gore Vidal, 30 years ago, saw literature in a grim situation. “In my visits to some 125 university campuses I have seen that literature has become something that is taught, not actually read. Literature is chiefly a subject of university study. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the universities preserved the best of our literary past, Instead, it is often a case of Professor x writing a book and Professor y teaching it in his classes. The university campus is not real life, but 90% of our writers are connected with universities.”

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Phil Rockstroh

“Stupid is as stupid does, sir…”

In the contest between Stupid and Evil, Stupid reaps far more destruction. Why? Stupid prevails by the sheer force of numbers in its ranks. 

But the argument is moot: Because all too often Stupid is working for Evil…believing it is serving as a force for good…and, I might add, for degrading wages as well.

German born filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) insisted to her dying breath that her 1936 masterwork of visual bravura, “Olympia,” documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, Germany, and funded and promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state, was not a political film nor was intended as propaganda for the Third Reich…as writer/director Christopher Nolan is claiming his “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a political movie. 



Yet, for some reason, the villains of the movie just happen to resemble the febrile stuff of right-wing delusion regarding Occupy Wall Street activists, and the beleaguered victims of the movie’s vengeance-seeking, blood-drunk rabble’s reign of mindless terror happen to resemble the denizens of the One Percent.

But we are told to relax…ruminate on a jumbo bucket of popcorn and suck down the high-fructose soda of our choice…We should allow our limbic system to ascend to the throne room of consciousness…to simply let the spectacle pull us along, as in a trip through a high-tech funhouse.

Historically, a component of fascism has been the visceral appeal of mass spectacle — the drowning of the burdens of Industrial Age selfhood into an intoxicating immersion in the anonymity of the mob. Another aspect is the promotion of shadow projection i.e., the attempt to lessen inner conflict and shame involving dark-tinged, hidden emotions and yearnings by projecting those traits on outside groups e.g., the political use of racism to displace class-based resentment; the caricatures created to demonize the enemy, appropriated by governments and promulgated in popular culture to mobilize support for war.

In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Nolan (perhaps unconsciously…he doesn’t seem all that bright and self-aware) deploys the psychological trope of shadow projection by portraying members of an Occupy Wall Street-type popular insurgency as boilerplate, comic book villains who rise from the city’s underbelly, compelled by murderous grievances, to inflict a reign of chaos, reminiscent of Terror-gripped, late 18th Century/ early 19th Century France, on the city’s economic elite.

What is the writer/director getting at here? 

Whether Nolan is aware of it or not, he has made a fascist epic. Batman, from its inception was always a hyper-authoritarian myth. Comic Books, at their inception and rise during the Great Depression of the 1930s, reflected a middle/upper class unease regarding those popular heroes of the disaffected laboring class such as Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. 

Woody Guthrie’s take on song writing is germane to the subject of movies as well. Woody averred: All songs are political.

Hollywood movies are suffused with capitalist false consciousness? And how could they not be? The “successful” members of the entertainment “business” have done quite well by the system, thus have been bestowed with all the privileges of the One Percent.

Moreover, certain self-appointed arbiters of good taste and social propriety have posited the canard that the recent madman-inflicted, firearm-wrought tragedy at an Aurora, Colorado cinema exhibiting Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises should not be politicized. Nonsense. The assertion, in itself, is political, for it is a (tacit) admonition to refrain from challenging the status quo — and the status quo of U.S. gun culture comes down to this: blood-drenched shooting spree followed by blood-drenched shooting spree.

Withal, the 2nd Amendment is not the word of God writ large across the eternal heavens. It is an archaic notion of a past, rural/agrarian era, and crafted by an assembly of land-holding, powdered wig-clad aristocrats.

Does the uncertainty of these times and the fading of cherished concepts evoke feelings of unease within you? Then how about trying this? Quit stroking your guns and hyperventilating over the depleted embers of dying delusion: Get over the hagiography of this sham democratic republic, and begin to re-imagine and remake the world anew.

Regarding all the bombast and braggadocio of rightist 2nd Amendment true believers, who claim that guns are the last, best hope to stand against government tyranny: Where were these sentinels of freedom when the operatives and enforcers of the U.S. national security/police state brought its brutality down on peaceful Occupy Wall Street dissidents?

Neither they nor the vast majority of people in the U.S. possess any concept of — nor do they give a rodent’s rectum about freedom.

Because the fledgling nation’s solution to what they termed the “Indian problem” was addressed by the use of firearms, the habit of viewing and deploying guns as a solution to societal ills has bequeathed a violent, blood-sodden legacy upon the culture.

To all you compulsive gun-strokers — heirs of the hateful legacy of your genocidal ancestors — I ask you this — how do you like existing under dismal, degraded conditions such as these?

Seemingly, from their graves, my Native American ancestors (My late father was born of half native descent.) have cursed you. But the grim truth is, on a collective basis, through our acceptance of a toxic cultural mythos, the people of this nation have conjured this curse, and have, by their clinging to death-besotted attitudes and attendant actions, seeded the winds of fate.

Regarding gun violence in the U.S., the situation is very simple. The 2nd Amendment is not only antiquated, but is an outright menace to public good. 

Nations that do not fetishize guns, and have said fetish codified into law and imprinted into the public’s imagination are not afflicted by any degree of violent gun deaths.

Although its origins and workings seem to us mysterious and evanescent, evil remains proliferate because our traumatized psyches see it as a force of good. Evil is a deranged angel of self-preservation, convinced his wicked machinations and destructive fury are bulwarks against outside forces aligned to bear his doom.

“A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.” — Carl Jung: “The Philosophical Tree” (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

To those firearm apologists who proffer the assertion that one should not blame guns for the acts of madmen…let me ask you this? There are unstable individuals residing all over the world, and have throughout every era, what is it about the U.S. that engenders a social milieu wherein so many unhinged individuals go on murderous rampages, and why is the death toll so high therein? The startlingly obvious answer: The easy availability of firearms and a toxic mythos surrounding these weapons that promotes their ownership and drowns out reasoned discourse on the subject.

Restricting the manufacture, thus profit motive, of firearms is a must…to keep them out of the hands of criminals, psychopaths, and idiots, and that includes the cops.

The problem of evil would be more easily remedied if evil people saw themselves as evil. But evil does not arrive in the form of a new computer application (Irredeemable Wickedness, version 13. 13) that foul-minded types can download into their psyches.

Evil creeps up on you when you’re going about the mundane business of the day.

Will we, as a people — inculcated by cultural mythos and saturated by shallow, sensationalist mass media narratives — learn anything about the hideous, tragic nature of non-virtual reality violence from this latest in a long series of gun-wrought mass murder?

In grim contrast to comic book-based, movie-style, violence porn, these repeated incidents of gun violence displayed for us the effects of actual violence. These events should serve as object lessons in the consequences of having large segments of a population, stressed to the point of collective madness and dwelling in a nation that, culturally, evinces demonstrably psychotic attitudes regarding firearms.

Gun-clutching pathology — and sorry, people, that is exactly what it is — is engendered by emotionally displaced feelings of powerlessness. The ridiculous number of guns, combined with racism and wealth inequity, in this deeply troubled nation, contributes to the endless number of firearm-related tragedies that nations that have sane gun laws — meaning tight restrictions — don’t suffer.

You boys and girls can swoon in all the hyper-macho, retrograde, Sarah Palin-level, 2nd Amendment-conflating fantasies that your besieged minds can conjure — but it will not change the reality that it is the people of this country’s sacred illusions and attendant fetishizing of guns that makes worse the very situation of which they live in fear. What a waste of human life and mental real estate.

Accordingly, the work of Hollywood artificers, such as Christopher Nolan, reflects collective pathologies at large in the culture.

All too many big budget, Hollywood action movies, epic in scale and one dimensional in content, are saturated with the empty grandiosity of fascist thought. Carl Jung noted that evil generally comes with an aura of emotional detached coldness.  Apropos: The shop-worn device of the super-villain is fascist conceit — a projection of the coldness and overkill of the U.S. police state/militarist empire on imaginary villains.

Evidently, Nolan has internalized the fascist inclinations inherent to late stage capitalism. His cinematic images are over-wrought, yet cold — a fascist paradox that are catnip to troubled personalities, such as James Holmes, whose inner torments and concomitant actions mirror the collective nature of this violence-worshipping culture.

Only a society as violently (and, I fear, irredeemably) bughouse crazy as the one extant in the U.S. would arrive at the assertion that an individual who carried out a deadly shooting rampage in a packed movie theatre could be feigning madness, or, in the words of a corporate press headline, “James Holmes’ behavior sign of psychosis or faking it, expert says.” http://gma.yahoo.com/james-holmes-goofy-behavior-sign-psychosis-faking-expert-142209134–abc-news-topstories.html

In a nation that, for example, accepts as normal the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, supports state-applied torture, and the slaughter of children by predator drone attack, yet gibbers on about the latest outrage committed by some sub-cretinous, Reality Television celebrity — the standard for psychosis and the standard of so-called normal will dovetail. To paraphrase one wit: Fish should be the last creatures queried regarding the existence of water.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com and at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh

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Posted on The New Yorker by Andy Borowitz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Customers across the nation who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day were in for a surprise, as the chicken restaurant chose today to launch a new product, Hate Sauce.

Delighted customers mobbed the restaurants to try the zesty new sauce, with many chicken fanciers ordering their sandwiches with extra hate. “It’s so spicy it makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire—like a gay couple in hell,” said Harland Dorrinson, who sampled the sauce at a Chick-fil-A in Orlando.

But even as Chick-fil-A prepared to call its new hate sauce an instant hit, it faced a challenge from an upstart rival, Wing-n-nuts.

The rival chain, based in Falls Church, Virginia, chose today to introduce a new product targeting Chick-fil-A patrons, the Chicken Bacon Bigotwich.

“We think we’re going to take a big bite out of Chick-fil-A’s customer base,” said Wing-n-nuts corporate spokesperson Carol Foyler. “Their founder is anti-gay. But ours is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-woman. When word gets out about that, there’ll be lines around the block.”

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Photograph: Chick-fil-A.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/chick-fil-a-introduces-new-hate-sauce.html#ixzz22VmTMBAZ

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By Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The presidential election cycle is underway, which means that Michael Erick Dyson is pledging his undying love for Barack Obama. Apparently, the president’s handlers have favored Dyson with “access” – a quality that is worth far more to some folks than truth and self-respect. “What it all comes down to in Dyson’s world, is rubbing elbows with the president and bragging about it.”

“Why does the only response to Obama have to be slavish devotion and a political stand down?”

Not only is there no longer a black press [4] which represents the interests of black people, but the presence of black people in corporate media is also of dubious value. Take the case of “public intellectual” Michael Erick Dyson. Dyson has recently been a substitute host on MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Show, and he has displayed his unique gifts for spouting nonsense and/or boldly displaying opportunism when speaking on the subject of Barack Obama.

Dyson can’t seem to make up his mind about Obama. In January 2008 Dyson debated Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford on the subject of black support for Obama on Democracy Now [5]. Dyson made it clear that he was a wholehearted Obama supporter who advocated suspending any and all criticism or questioning of the candidate in order to reach the holy grail of seeing him elected president.

That debate took place shortly after the Iowa caucus victory proved that Obama could get votes from white people. At that time Dyson proudly proclaimed his unwavering support of Obama, gave him a pass on speaking up for black people, and directly stated the phony mantra of the Obama sycophant in 2008, that they would “hold his feet to the fire” after he won.
The Dyson/Obama love fest didn’t last for very long, however. Just a few months after Obama’s 2009 inauguration, Dyson was interviewed by Davey D [6] and had rather scathing words of criticism for the man whom just a year earlier he said should be treated as if infallible.

“He is willing to sacrifice the interests of African Americans in deference to a conception of universalism because it won’t offend white people.”

“We are so grateful for having a black person in the office we don’t demand anything of him.”

“I expect the president of the United States to address issues of race.”

“He’s fallen short and we must hold him accountable.”

These words, while truthful, didn’t last long either. Now Dyson is not only an Obama lover again, but appears to be in part because he now has up close and personal access to POTUS. Dyson can now preface his statements with words like this, “A couple of years ago when he and I were in the Oval Office talking…”

On the July 25th broadcast [7] of the Ed Show, one of Dyson’s guests rather obliquely mentioned that there is some criticism of Obama because he delivers on issues of importance to the gay and latino communities while doing nothing of the sort for black Americans.

“What is wrong with questioning or criticizing Obama?”

According to Dyson, this mild observation unleashed the wrath of Obama worshippers in social media, and on the July 26th show [8] Dyson let everyone know that he is still an Obama guy and the president is a Dyson guy too. “I ain`t one of them [haters]. How do I know? He [Obama] told me so at the Olympic warm up game the other day in D.C. when he hugged me and thanked me for my love and support. When you get at that level, holler back at me.” Yes, that is what it all comes down to in Dyson’s world, rubbing elbows with the president and bragging about it.

He went further. “Make no mistake, I`m riding hard on the Obama bandwagon. I`ve been on that journey a lot longer than the Black Willy come latelies who voted overwhelmingly against Obama when he ran for Congress and who initially spurned him when he asked for their votes for the presidency because they were beholden to Hillary and Bill Clinton.”
Dyson is an academic, a writer and a minister, but as guest host on The Ed Show, he should act as a journalist. The response to his critics should have been that as such, he has a duty to present a wide variety of viewpoints, even as they relate to dear leader Obama.

Dyson had a unique opportunity to ask questions which are still fraught in the black community. What is wrong with questioning or criticizing Obama? Why does the only response to Obama have to be slavish devotion and a political stand down?

Of course, it may be unfair to expect professional ethics from Dyson when the rest of the journalistic profession is no better. There are huge incentives to being a court scribe instead of a journalist. Scribes get plum assignments, access to movers and shakers, prestigious prizes, and big paychecks because they represent the interests of the people they cover when they should be asking them hard questions.

Dyson’s routine makes it easy to make fun of him. His gift of gab borders on buffoonery, but it has made him a hot commodity. He could put his glibness to good use and spark a conversation about Obama, but that is not to be. Now we get “black Willy come latelies” and man crush hugs.

The hard truth is that Black Agenda Report and its allies are unique in their determination to continue advocating for self-determination and movement based leftist politics, and not just idol worship of the black face in the high place. Dyson is not alone in changing his mind about Obama depending upon whether or not he has access to the Oval Office. There are not many principled people in the world of political commentary, but anyone reading these words doesn’t have to be concerned about that. No one at Black Agenda Report is in danger of mincing words about Obama, or the rest of American political leadership. We also aren’t in danger of getting any hugs.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [9] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.
[10]
Michael Eric Dyson Obamarama
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-michael-eric-dyson-and-barack-obama

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By Peter Hart, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)
Paul Krugman writes today (New York Times, 7/16/12) on media’s failure to factcheck campaign claims:

Perhaps in a better world we could count on the news media to sort through the conflicting claims. In this world, however, most voters get their news from short snippets on TV, which almost never contain substantive policy analysis. The print media do offer analysis pieces–but these pieces, out of a desire to seem “balanced,” all too often simply repeat the he-said-she-said of political speeches.

Paul Krugman

Trust me: you will see very few news analyses saying that Mr. Romney proposes huge tax cuts for the rich, with no plausible offset other than big benefit cuts for everyone else–even though this is the simple truth. Instead, you will see pieces reporting that “Democrats say” that this is what Mr. Romney proposes, matched with dueling quotes from Republican sources.

Indeed, the best example of this was an issue we flagged here last week: Whether Barack Obama’s call for extending the Bush tax cuts only on income up to $250,000 represented a big tax hike for small businesses. According to reality, it does not. But Republicans say that it does, and they say it often. So it becomes one “side” in the debate.

Interestingly, after a few days of this, the Times ran a piece on Saturday (7/14/12) that seemed like it was supposed to factcheck these claims. But, like many other attempts, it failed to clarify the issue for readers, more or less concluding that everyone had a point.

Times reporter Trip Gabriel writes:

Mr. Obama is correct that only a tiny sliver of business owners make enough to land in the top tax brackets. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan Congressional office, estimated last month that 3.5 percent of taxpayers with business income in 2013 would fall in the tax brackets that would rise under the president’s proposal.

So this is settled, right? A tax increase that doesn’t even affect 97 percent of “small businesses” can’t really be criticized as an attack on small business owners, can it? Hold on a second:

But the tax committee also supported Mr. Romney’s assertion that this sliver represents a significant share of the economy: those top earners generate 53 percent of all small-business income.

It’s hard to see what that “supports” exactly–other than the idea that people in the top tax bracket are wealthy. Indeed, the next several paragraphs go on to explain how the definition of “small business” gets a little fuzzy; some counts (like Romney’s) apparently county “flow-through” businesses, which can include hedge funds and the like. (Goldman Sachs, until 1999, was in this category of “small businesses,” Gabriel points out.)

What about the idea that this small increase in the top marginal tax rate will destroy jobs? Here, too, the Times finds a way to suggest everyone maybe has a point.
So what about job killing? That, too, is a matter of one-hand-other-hand debate:

But the question of whether small-business owners are encouraged or deterred by marginal tax rates is robustly debated by economists.

The evidence? Former Bush economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin says a business owner that  has $80 instead of $100 is less likely to hire. It’s hard to know how that relates to the current tax debate. The other side is William Gale of the Tax Policy Center, who notes that business can “deduct wages from their revenues… with the potential to lower their effective tax rate.”

And, the Times says, “recent studies have challenged the notion that small businesses are a key engine of job creation.”

If the point of such a story is to settle a key election season dispute, it fails. If the point is to muddy up the water enough to allow both sides to keep saying the same things, no matter what the facts say–it does the job perfectly.

SELECT COMMENT:
John Kirch says:
07/16/2012 at 11:40 pm
This is the classic way that reporters hide behind the notion of objectivity to avoid upsetting key sources in both major parties. Objectivity has come to mean he said-she said reporting and the facts be damned.

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