Michael Butler’s Blog

The Only Standard is Truth

The schools have been lousy most of my lifetime. Teachers need to teach the truth and tell the real story of our country’s founding. It was Murder Incorporated, with the European invaders killing everything in their path…then the English, French and Spanish killing each other. We had the railroad robber barons buying all of the state legislatures to get what they wanted. And Vietnam, a war of vanity.

So says Gore Vidal, historian and novelist, who, at age 80, has returned to live in his home country full time. With a laser directed toward the present government, he pulls no punches in his criticism calling Bush the “most ignorant president in American history…inept, uneducated, uncivilized.”

Recalling Benjamin Franklin’s warning at the Constitutional Convention, Vidal charges that the government is now failing due to the “corruption” of the American people. By this he means a collusion that’s taken place by having two presidential elections stolen and no one raising a voice to complain. “The three branches of government … totally out of balance…a really power mad and money hungry little group grabs control of Congress, the Executive and the Judiciary.”

In this, one of his few interviews directed specifically toward educators, he reflects on the American government and society and what it has become. Vidal sees America as a consumerist society caring only about money. He defines our government as totalitarian and bent on destroying our constitutional rights. He sees our schools as failing to teach the truth about the history of our country as well as the importance of our Constitution.

“We have a very interesting history, and luckily for me, I’ve lived by telling the history of the United States. But I ought not to be doing it. The schools ought to be doing it. I’m perfectly happy to hand over my megaphone any day of the week, but they can’t tell the truth.”

And so the interview goes. Opinionated and controversial, Gore Vidal hits all the main education issues squarely and leaves no doubt where he stands.

• Privatization of public education by charter schools–”It’s one of the last big rip-offs…They don’t know anything about education. They’re money collectors.”

• Mayoral control of schools–”What is a politician, by and large, unless he’s an educator of some kind himself….keep the politicians out of it.”

• No Child Left Behind–”Coming from this most ignorant president in American
history, it is great comedy…and whoever thought he was sincere…he wants to leave everybody behind and keep the money for himself, and Halliburton, and his friends.”

• Evolution — “If you deny that, you deny all modern science, all medicine, and all knowledge of the human race…only someone extremely stupid, full of the laughing gas of very, very primitive fundamental religion …told to stay in their humble place by Thomas Jefferson…”

• News media– “never been more corrupt or dishonest. It lies about everything…they start to sell the presidents the way they sell the detergents, and…don’t find much difference between them.”

Most poignant was his recollection of all the brightest boys in his school being sent off to World War II to be used as cannon fodder…”just thrown away, thrown away, thrown away.” The consequence of this tremendous loss is the “absolute degradation of American society today politically, in the arts, in everything….due to too many of us …killed…there was no repeat generation.”

The InterviewThe InterviewThe InterviewMore on Gore….

For more than 60 years, Gore Vidal has written about America and put its history under his critical scrutiny. In novels, scripts, screenplays and essays, he is one of the most prolific authors in the 20th, and now 21st centuries. At 80, he continues in what seems to be a final quest to warn Americans about what has happened to their government.

His most recent books, that he calls “pamphlets” include:
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came to Be So Hated, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia —- all highly critical of American foreign policy. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, which he calls his “little book for John F. Kennedy,” takes readers back to the founding fathers to answer JFK’s question of how a little backwoods country could produce the three geniuses of that century. In this, he recounts Benjamin Franklin’s belief that the Constitution was flawed and would eventually fail, as he explained continuously during this interview.

Born in 1925 in a family with deep roots in politics for many generations, Gore’s youth was often spent with his grandfather, Senator Thomas Prior Gore of Oklahoma who took him along into the Senate where he watched Huey Long and other senators of the day. Senator Gore was blind and often relied on his young grandson to read to him. Later, he took the last name of his grandfather to be his first name. His father was the Director of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt administration, and he was related through his mother’s second marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy.

After graduating from Exeter at 17, Gore Vidal enlisted in the army during World War II and was sent to the Aleutian Islands. It was while on board ship that he began his first novel, Williwaw, which he finished while recuperating from frostbite and arthritis in Birmingham Hospital in the San Fernando Valley. This hospital later became Birmingham High School, mentioned earlier in this interview.

This first novel was acclaimed as an extraordinary achievement for one so young. Several less successful followed until The City and the Pillar, the story of a young homosexual, in 1948. Too much of a shock for post-war America, the New York Times critic refused to read or review his next books, so he wrote using pseudonyms to survive economically. During this time, he also wrote scripts and screenplays.

After two major best sellers, Washington DC and Julian, he returned to sexual themes with Myra Breckenridge, a gender satire about a female transsexual. With this and, later, Myron, Gore put the literary world on notice that he would deal with sexual topics on his own terms whenever he chose.

His greatest success has been as a master political historian. Novels, yes, officially, because he inserts his own characters among the historical figures to comment and move the story along. But as Gore describes them, “When I write history, I write history.”

And so he has. The American Chronicles. First Washington D.C., telling about the WWII era that he directly experienced, knowing the Roosevelts and many of the major players personally. Then Burr. With these framing the time period, he proceeded to write about the intervening years with Lincoln, 1876, Empire, and Hollywood. The Golden Age, ending at the millennium, is the final book of this series. Most became best sellers, as did his books on ancient times, Creation and Julian.

A complete list of all of his works is available on line. His most recent book is Point to Point Navigation, the second half of his memoirs.

Gore Vidal now lives in his 1920’s era home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Having spent a great deal of time in Italy, he recently sold his villa in Ravello after knee surgery left him unable to walk well enough to go down the long steps to the piazza that he so loved. We are fortunate to have him here now as he speaks at many local events bringing his sharp tongue to bear on the current administration and the destruction it has caused to our constitution and civil liberties.

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The Interview