The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal Read Free

quantities of tanks, planes, warships, and bombs. Vidal argues for lifting the “imperial burden” and taking back the country,
our
country, as he calls it.
    Always the iconoclast, Vidal has a particular distaste for piety in its American manifestations. “From the beginning,” he writes in “Monotheism and Its Discontents,” “sky-godders have always exerted great pressure in our secular republic.” Sky-godders are Jews and Christians: nomadic people of the desert, who discerned the presence of an omnipotent God in the endless undivided blue overhead. The monotheists are different from more primitive polytheists, who live in jungles, where many gods flash their smiles and frowns. Vidal retains a lofty detachment through much of this essay, but he can barely control his rage when he writes about the Christian evangelicals who “feel it necessary to convert everyone on earth,” who have forced “their superstitions and hatreds upon all of us through the civil law and through general prohibitions.” Vidal himself declares “an all-out war on the monotheists.”
    A true son of the Enlightenment, Vidal prizes tolerance. He would normally say “live and let live,” allowing the monotheists to practice their faiths as they see fit. But they won’t let him be, he argues. “They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens.” And so they forbid abortion, gambling, homosexuality, and so forth: all things that Vidal would leave to the individual. Like his hero, Tom Paine, Vidal subscribes to the “religion of humanity,” he says, arguing that the time has come to “re-establish a representative government firmly based upon the Bill of Rights.”
    It should be noticed that Vidal is conservative in many respects, asking only for liberty in the eighteenth-century sense of that term. He stands behind individual choice, the limitation of executive power, and the preservation of the environment. Like his grandfather, he dislikes the drive for empire (which he has analyzed in his later novels, such as
Empire
,
Hollywood
, and
The Golden Age
). He would return us, if possible, to the pure republicanism of early America. When Ronald Reagan asked to get the government “off our backs,” Vidal countered that we should get them “off our fronts” as well. He supports the freedom to worship as one pleases, as long as one does not try to stop others from worshiping in a different way. He frequently points out the obvious truth that the American government has only one political party, the party of business, which has two wings, Republican and Democrat. In writing like this, he is very much in a tradition of American dissent that reaches back to Tom Paine and moves through such figures as Thoreau, Randolph Bourne, and others. But Vidal retains his Enlightenment perch, wry and ready to flash his wit, to unmask what is pretentious or foolish or self-serving. If his temper has grown short in recent times, one can hardly blame him, as in many ways his worst nightmares have come true under the regime of George W. Bush.
    With preternatural inventiveness, Vidal has recently revived the political pamphlet as a genre. First came
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
, in 2002—his visceral response to 9/11, which drew an enthusiastic response from a wide audience looking around in desperation for clarity and common sense in a time of sheer madness. The essay called “Black Tuesday” opens this pamphlet, and it begins with Vidalian gusto: “According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness.” The author catches our eye, and ear, from the outset, and he rivets our attention as he looks at the “perpetual war” that the United States has waged for the past half century in pursuit of “perpetual peace.” Seven or so trillion dollars have gone into what is euphemistically called