Edit: Thanks for the link, BenG. That documentary was an able refutation of Greenberg's piece.
Second edit: Replaced afa's link to Slate with one to the same article published in the Huffington Post, where the responses are more plentiful and argue against Greenberg's accusations more persuasively.
Quote:
Originally Posted by afa
|
That was a shrill but fairly disturbing piece -- especially for those of us who weren't aware of certain of Mr. Vidal's shortcomings (
if the Rutgers professor who wrote the piece has in fact represented Vidal's views accurately).
However, the idea Vidal shouldn't be eulogized as a writer because of certain of his last decades' political views is absurd, just as it is ludicrous to criticize a self-proclaimed polemicist for being a polemicist. And it is amazing to read Greenberg defending Podhoretz's charge of anti-Semitism made in the same article in which P. repeats the breathtakingly homophobic idea that set Vidal off in the first place: that there is "something fundamentally suicidal in the promiscuity of homosexuals . . . and the AIDs epidemic bears this out."
T.S. Eliot was not only anti-Semitic in private but, unlike Vidal, incorporated anti-Semitic sentiments and even nasty portraits of Jews male and female in his most important work. And even though I myself am Jewish on my mother's side (i.e., completely Jewish by law), I can't imagine refusing to eulogize Eliot or honor his work for that reason alone. It would be like refusing to teach Shakespeare because he wrote Merchant of Venice.
And that is assuming Messrs Podhoretz and Greenberg are actually right about Vidal, which seems a stretch given what they're complaining about is the pun "Israeli fifth columnists."
Additionally, Mr. Greenberg makes the unsubstantiated charge that Vidal was a "lifelong racist." Again, it seems strange that a professor of history would be adverse to backing up charges which require historical proof.
My understanding of Vidal's "racism" was that it belonged to his early days at West Point and had been immortalized in a diary entry by Anais Nin -- something to the effect that she met the young Vidal for the first time and deduced that he "doesn't like negroes." Vidal was mortified by that entry and, twenty years later, admitted in his review of her diaries that Nin's observation had been correct: that he had been racist at that time but had not been ever since.
If Vidal were lying or covering up his views, then why would he validate Nin's remarks and admit the truth of such a general and unsubstantiated observation, and then go on to say he was horrified by his own prejudice and had since corrected it? Nin was not even alive at that point -- he could easily have said she was wrong, but he chose to be honest.
Additionally, Vidal has made frequent and scornful reference to the racism of those who set up the system of government in America (pointing out what he saw as the racist reasons for casting America as a republic as opposed to what he called "a true democracy"), so the charge that he laments the days of privilege and exclusion makes it sound as if Professor Greenburg hasn't actually read Vidal.
From the contrast in venom and actual links cited at the end of Greenburg's piece to that of the casual charge of "lifelong racism," I wondered if perhaps Greenberg were reacting to Vidal's anti-Israel position (a position which is very common to the
actual left and not the centrists whom Orwellian newspeak figureheads have been calling "the left" -- see the controversial work of Norman Finkelstein). It is a position with which I disagree (as I do with Finkelstein), but it hinges not on Jewish people but on the corporate corruption upon which Vidal claims our "pseudo-democracy" is based -- a position which hardly demonstrates Mr. Greenberg's complaint of Vidal's supposed loyalty to the privileged.
The Slate article contains a link to the offending article by Vidal, and I can see how the Podhoretz exchange could be construed as anti-Semitic. Still, I would argue that Vidal at his most lucid -- himself practically an Italian expatriate for decades -- would not have argued for something as artificial as "authentic" Americanism.