Thursday 2 August 2012

Vidal Loco

Letter to the Beebs:
In your World Service and online paeans of praise for Vidal, could you not have included a bit of balance?
Perhaps the best being Hitchens' piece in Vanity Fair, (Feb 2010), showing Vidal to be an anti-semite; a believer in conspiracy theories about 9/11; labelling Timothy McVeigh a "noble boy" no more murderous than Generals Patton or Eisenhower; believing that WW2 was the fault of America and in any case not worth fighting, etc....
The man was a brilliant writer, no doubt, but also, per Hitchens, a "crackpot, surpassing even the wilder-eyed efforts of Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, providing a miserable coda to his brilliant run."
Surely this deserves some note.