Gore Vidal Quote
Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. We are good, G.W. proclaims, They are evil, which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them—as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway—his profound knowledge of Islam’s wiles and ways: They hate what they see right here in this Chamber. I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. At this plangent moment what American’s gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?
Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. We are good, G.W. proclaims, They are evil, which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them—as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway—his profound knowledge of Islam’s wiles and ways: They hate what they see right here in this Chamber. I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. At this plangent moment what American’s gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?
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About Gore Vidal
A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.
As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories, and delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, the plot being about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship.
In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–363) in Julian (1964). Julian was the Roman emperor who attempted to re-establish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores.: 94–100 In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the United States.: 439 : 75–85