The title says it all. Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead.
I laughed. And I laughed. Which was a nice balance for the cry I had the other day, from which I don’t feel much recovered.
I laughed from the very first line
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2 responses to “I laughed from the very first line”
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Do you think he’s been waiting to have his say for a long time? I did actually read the article in Newsweek to which he refers and the thing I thought was funny about that was that reference was made to the way Buckley was in some ways like a child, and appealed to children. I’m not saying it well. The following week there was a letter to the editor from a baby boomer sort saying that the person had felt drawn to Buckley when the letter writer was about 12 years old, so even though later the letter writer’s political views diverged significantly from Buckley, he still remembered being drawn to him as a child. But anyway, that is some serious anger Mr. Vidal seems to have been nursing for awhile. I guess he wanted to have his say some day. And boy, did he.
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So Buckley seems to have been a mysterious (for which reason, magnetic) individual to a number of baby boomer children. Maybe he was built to be the evil pied piper of the boomers, leading us down the PBS road into conservative land.
I love this below, from the artice Vidal wrote for which Buckley sued.
“Twenty-four years later, on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o’clock, in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.”
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