[Peace-discuss] Truffles in the muck

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I have my hesitations about The Nation, George Scialabba and a good bit of what 
Gore Vidal writes, but these paragraphs from a current review highlight 
important things that Vidal is saying and few others are.  --CGE]

	Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal's Selected Essays
	by GEORGE SCIALABBA

This article appeared in the October 27, 2008 edition of The Nation.

...My favorites among Vidal's essays, both included in this volume, are "Homage 
to Daniel Shays" and "The Second American Revolution." Soon after the 
Revolutionary War, the eternal tension between lenders and borrowers, the rich 
and everyone else, came to a crisis in New England. Shays led thousands of small 
farmers, many of them former soldiers in the revolutionary army who stood to 
lose their land to creditors, in search of debt relief and tax relief. The rich 
fought back, first militarily and then by writing a Constitution that imposed a 
strong central government disproportionately weighted in favor of the propertied.

That Constitution has become the American Scripture, our political Holy Writ and 
a chronic obstacle to popular initiative. Dissolving the mystique of the 
Constitution and those who framed it, as well as that of the revered Federalist 
Papers -- whose "general tone," Vidal accurately observes, "is that of a meeting 
of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell" -- is essential to our civic 
health. These two essays, along with Vidal's historical fiction, are powerful 
dissolving agents.

Disabusing Americans about their government's international behavior is equally 
essential. After a PEN benefit one night in the mid-1980s, Arthur Schlesinger 
Jr. confided to his diary, "Gore gave a (relatively) polished talk about the 
American empire, banal in content, cheap in tone, and delivered to the 
accompaniment of smiles of vast self-satisfaction." Presumably it was the tone 
Schlesinger objected to; his own self-satisfied banalities about the American 
empire were always pronounced with reverence and gravitas.

Vidal's bête noire (and not surprisingly, Schlesinger's hero) was Harry Truman. 
The National Security Act of 1947; the creation of the CIA, with its 
unconstitutional exemption from Congressional scrutiny; the containment 
doctrine, supposedly for defense against Soviet expansionism but promptly 
invoked to justify the rearming of Germany and interventions in Greece, 
Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere; the paranoid secret blueprint for the cold war, 
NSC-68 -- all these Truman-era setbacks for democracy are described in "The 
National Security State," along with a modest and sensible five-point program 
that, decades later, still sounds like a very good way to begin reclaiming the 
country.

It's not clear, though, to me and I suspect to Vidal, that American democracy 
can be reclaimed, at least in the form of vigorous, Jeffersonian 
self-government. (As Vidal points out with his customary sardonic relish, 
Jefferson began selling out Jeffersonianism during his second term.) The reasons 
are structural -- mass production and mass consumption may not leave enough room 
for individual autonomy -- and clinical -- like muscles, intellectual and civic 
virtues may atrophy beyond repair. No matter who is elected president this fall, 
the country may become an ever more dispiriting place for a conservative-radical 
aristocratic republican of Vidal's stamp...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081027/scialabba