STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 1 August 2012

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35. Gore Vidal and the Unfinished American Revolution

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169184/gore-vidal-and-unfinished-american-revolution


Gore Vidal loved America in the way that the best of the founders did.

Indeed, he seemed at times, to be the last of their number -- a fierce defender of the purest, most revolutionary of ideals at a time when the contemporary political class prattled on about Constitutional principles they neither understood nor valued. (At the bicentennial, in 1976, Time magazine featured a cover with Vidal in historic garb; an honor that delighted him sufficiently to earn a place for the cover on the wall of his Italian villa.)

Vidal, who has died at age 86, was a great man of letters: an author (Julian, Burr, Lincoln, The City and the Pillar), playwright (The Best Man) and National Book Award-winning essayist (United States Essays, 1952-1992) on the literature of his native land and the world. He was, as well, a bold and unrelenting challenger of the Puritanism that he regarded as the ugliest of American tendencies.

But I knew Gore as a political champion, who ran inspired campaigns for Congress, who demanded that presidents of both parties be held to account for high crimes and misdemeanors, who maintained a faith in democracy so deep and abiding that he called for a new constitutional convention to set right what was done wrong at Philadelphia and to realize the Jeffersonian requirement of revolutionary renewal. He was, as well, a scorching debater on topics political, as William F. Buckley learned to his chagrin in 1968.