And over at his piece of shit blog, you know who is making the case that we should be more outraged over dead pedophile Gore Vidal -- who was a great artist -- than we are about the living Duggars, including the one who was diddling his sisters for Jeebus and the ones who enabled him, who have no talent whatsoever, and who are currently in our face all the time on TV..
Vidal, of course, was an atheist, so obviously you know who is right about this.
OK, I give up. If people are going to insist of telling me about things like this being said, I'm certainly going to use them. "Don't fight forces, use them" and the clueless ignorance and amorality of such folk is certainly a force that has a negative effect in the world.
Considering what I've been told in the last several days is not important, the massive British child pedophilia scandal, the wider European pedophila scandal, Thailand's massive child rape industry with its world-wide network of sex tourism servicing the worlds wealthier pedophiles, several famous and semi-famous men who either were known to be active pedophile rapists for decades or who advocated making child rape legal, I think the internet has officially gone entirely off its rocker. But that massive hypocrisy, drawing a double standard based on who is doing the raping, has always been with us. Various sides have always been willing to overlook what their pedophile rapists do, especially when you can call them "artists" or when what they do involves "art" and, especially especial, when the children being raped are poor or not white.
Update: Well, it's impossible to know what people will continue reading in the future but I suspect that, other than some of his essays he won't keep. Gore Vidal's novels will end up being as dated as the work of other authors who knew how to write, like Laura Z. Hobson or Howard Fast. As the internet proves all the time, we are in a post literate culture which doesn't remember such writers for very long, unless one of their books gets made into a movie, generally botched by a script writer and further damaged by the director and others. The movie of Gentleman's Agreement, even with Gregory Peck, is abysmally bad as compared to Hobson's book, and even that's dated. I don't think Vidal's writing is as good as hers, but that's a matter of opinion.
There's a funny irony here. I was re-reading "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." I'd forgotten Jim Prideaux, the injured agent who eventually gets revenge on his best friend who betrayed Prideaux and the MI-6, defended his friend for most of their friendship as an "artist" and "artists" have to be given special allowance because they are "artists."
ReplyDeletePrideaux is described at one point as someone "hungry" for intellectual fare (when he comes to Oxford from a background of growing up in many non-European, esp. non-British, countries), and he's more of a doer than a thinker. So his adoration for the "artist" borders on worship of false idols.
Just funny to see that defense of the "artist" being raised yet again. One would have thought it dead and buried with Romanticism in the early 19th century; or at least eliminated among even the undereducated, by now.
Guess not.