RIP GORE VIDAL

the serbia thing was pretty crucial in re-legitimizing the idea of 'humanitarian intervention,' and hence played a fairly important role in the leadup to the iraq war.

people not thinking that list constitutes "war" (it's an unnatural thought for 90s-kid me, too!) is the only piece of evidence future anthropologists will need to come to a working understanding of post-ww2 american life

otm. that older definition of war as event has changed its utility has diminished but it's still war and there's more of it than ever. xxp

as its utility

you guys are nuts

the military evacuating some diplomats from Albania /= firebombing of Dresden

let's keep some perspective here

it would be excessive to say that everything there counts as 'war' but come on, a 'four-day bombing campaign'?

barely got their hair mussed, those pissant little countries!

SMC finally comes out as a neolib/neocon whatever warpig-enabler label you wanna use

didn't Billy Blythe ejaculate some bombs immediately after his dress-stain indictment?

I don't deny that you can clearly see the US military "war machine" (as Morbz puts it) in action behind all of those actions when you take them all together, primarily because the scope and scale that they encompass (ie, globe-spanning) requires a functioning military industry. The only distinction I was trying to make was that the US has not been on the unbroken, unending mission of imperialist genocide that Morbz' rhetoric implies. There are gaps, there are peaks and valleys, and they weren't all encapsulated within Gore Vidal's halcyon days of youth.

xp

the least violent episode on that list is indeed /= one of the most violent from the largest war in human history

didn't Billy Blythe ejaculate some bombs immediately after his dress-stain indictment?

yeah and I thought this was disgusting in its transparent cynicism, I said so at the time, I am no fan of Clinton etc

ftr I think this was even less violent dlh:

1998 – Liberia: On September 27, 1998, America deployed a stand-by response and evacuation force of 30 U.S. military personnel to increase the security force at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia.

yeah, Dresden, I didn't realize every NBA star hadda be Michael Jordan.

Sotosyn, what will be your book mythologizing your past be like?

thx for playing tho yes lets all keep encouraging Morbsian hysteria

xp

Billy also took the Concorde down to Little Rock to pump electricity into a retarded man.

reads like a line from some 70s AM radio country hit

that was the night the lights went out in Arkansas

My memoir will be told from multiple points of view, one of which will be an unreliable female narrator.

do we have a chart of US military spending btwn GHW Bush and Clinton? I'm pretty sure it didn't go down by any standard.

has it ever?

hmm this is not what I was expecting tbh

http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2011/11/myth-of-isolationism-defense-spending_1200.jpg

clear downward trend during Clinton's terms there btw

partially because the economy/GNP was booming during Clinton's terms

I forgot that the death of the USSR prob played its legendary "peace dividend" role there.

Also the feds have only been paying a lot for education/ infrastructure/ healthcare etc for the last 80 years, right? So arms would've been a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

(before the New Deal, that is)

and the Great Society, moreso? bcz it appears to dip under 50% for the last time just as Vietnam is revving up.

not gonna be mean to shakey about that chart being from the heritage foundation since i'm sure the numbers are fine but it's still funny

http://nationalpriorities.org/media/uploads/publications/talking-about-military-spending/chart_1.jpg

defense spending has gone down plenty of times, and they're pretty much the times you'd expect (cf the sharp rise between 1965 and 1970, and then the drop) but this graph that takes it as a straight number and not as a percentage of the budget p much lines up w vidal's narrative, right? plummets (like you'd expect) between 1945 and 1950 and gradually rises (on average) from then on. anyway i am not calling anyone a neocon i am just saying that yes indeed there was a significant change in the u.s. govt's attitude towards military spending and global military action during the cold war and yes indeed we all grew up in the country that change made, and that's why the 90s seem like peacetime to us.

It's so large a percentage of the budget in the nineteenth century because the federal government had literally no other responsibilities except making war.

which is why heritage has chosen to graph it as they have, and then filenamed it myth-of-isolationism.jpg

okay much lolz at filename

and yeah I didn't really care about the 19th century half of the graph, but it was attached to the 20th century half

Good job:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INW6i6K1NmQ

All I've read by Vidal was his memoir, so I came to this only knowing him through his public persona. His blanket sourness about politics (I think someone in-house once internalized his every pronouncement) was persuasive, both softened and mitigated by things I don't especially feel like getting into. That aside, it's another good documentary about getting old.

sound mix in trailer is a wreck; doesn't bode well

I don't have the greatest hearing in the world, and there wasn't a word in the entire film I couldn't make out. Honestly, not a problem at all.

Meant to say that one of the funniest things in the film is Vidal's skill as an impressionist. He does JFK, Tennessee Williams, and W. He's like two notches below a good SNL impression.

Loved Best of Enemies, about the Vidal-Buckley convention spots (“debates”) in ‘68. For most of it, exactly what I wanted: all the segments in their entirety (the 10th is excerpted for an epilogue, but I think most everything from the other nine is included), with all the necessary context (effectively provided piecemeal and a little scrambled--e.g., you get a Ben-Hur clip well into the film, connected to Vidal’s thoughts on the war and American empire). Great line from Frank Rich that I think I knew but had forgotten: “The joke was that if you really wanted to end the Vietnam War, put it on ABC and in 13 weeks it would be cancelled.” Towards the end, I found it genuinely sad: how this one skirmish stayed with both men for the rest of their lives (Buckley seemed especially haunted by it). The epilogue makes the obvious but necessary point, and not sentimentally: it locates Vidal and Buckley not as one last great shining moment, but in fact--in the words of Vidal himself--as the beginning of the circus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSH20evwVIc

Howard K. Smith's equanimity in the face of these two guys got huge laughs more than once.

Meant to say that one of the funniest things in the film is Vidal's skill as an impressionist. He does JFK, Tennessee Williams, and W. He's like two notches below a good SNL impression.

― clemenza, Friday, December 6, 2013 9:45 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finally watched this last night, and YES! He does a good Reagan as well, but his best Reagan zinger remains this one (included in the film):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iuNpn17pfM

I'll be seeing this twice this week with different friends--I've been proselytizing.

You meant the Vidal documentary--I meant Best of Enemies.

I see no reason to pay to see BoE in a theater as all these debates [sic] are online and the reason the whole 'event' has been neglected to date is that it's extremely minor, no matter what these filmmakers think.

His blanket sourness about politics (I think someone in-house once internalized his every pronouncement)

rrrreally

It was a blow to learn from reading In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master, last year that he cried and had feelings.

scratch a cynic etc

Yeah, should have mentioned that I meant United States of Amnesia, which my library just got, not the new one, which I'll have to wait to hit DVD.

i prefer buckley/chomsky

I'm caught between considering it absurd that a feature film was made of the whole Vidal/Buckley shebang and yet quite wanting to see it at the same time.

Best of Enemies held up great for me. Love the left-field period details: Alan Sues, Streisand, Playboy After Dark, etc. I find the last 10 minutes--these two guys 35 years later--more moving than I ever would have thought possible.

“I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public,” writes Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books. “There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal.”

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/aug/11/william-buckley-myth/

Wm F. Buckley used his gaudy vocabulary and his patrician accent and mannerisms to create an aura of intellectualism, but he was just appealing to the class prejudice that believes the rich must be awfully smart or they wouldn't be rich. Nothing he said was particularly intelligent or insightful. George Will works the same side of the street, but a bit more understatedly.