ON HIS first visit to Ireland in 20 years, Gore Vidal spoke at Trinity College on Monday April 12th as a guest of the DU Politics Society. Vidal, the 74-year-old self-crowned gentleman bitch of American letters, delivered a lecture entitled Chaos to some 400 guests in the Edmund Burke Theatre.
As well as being one of the most celebrated writers of his time, having produced 24 novels (including best-sellers such as Myra Breckinridge, Burr and Lincoln), plus numerous essays and plays over the last 50 years, Gore Vidal is, of course, a famously political animal. His family tree includes Jackie Kennedy (with whom he shared a stepfather), his grandfather Senator TP Gore, and distant cousins Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and Countess Markievicz. Gore himself has made two failed bids for public office. Indeed, the writer is responsible for possibly one of the most succinct definitions of the forum since Plato: Politics is derived from the Greek word polloi , meaning many , and tics , meaning bloodsuckers .
Whatever the political or social event, Vidal has been there, Zelig-like, on the sidelines, observing leaders such as Roosevelt, Kennedy and Nixon at work. His circle of acquaintances has at various times included Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, The Kennedy family, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Paul Newman, Princess Margaret, Greta Garbo and Eleanor Roosevelt, and more recently Vidal has made the occasional foray into acting, with accomplished cameos in Bob Roberts and Gattacca.
Vidal took the podium to a standing ovation, and, pausing only to apologise for his resemblance to Ian Paisley, launched into a 25-minute exposition, beginning with an invocation of literary critic Harold Bloom s theory that human history is divided into phases that cyclically repeat themselves.
First there is a theocratic age, Vidal proposed, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos and out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a brand new theocratic age and the cycle begins again.
Vidal maintained that the centrifugal forces at work all around the planet, including the collapse of worn-out centralised political structures and the dramatic migration of peoples, are emblematic of this present age of chaos.
Later in the lecture, commenting on post-PC American society, Vidal quoted from manuscripts discovered in the archives of John Jay Chapman ( America s greatest essayist after Emerson ), who died in 1933: Our democracy terrifies the individual and our industrialism seals his lips. Every man is afraid to make a joke, unless it is a stock joke. We are all as careful as diplomats not to show our claws.
Moving on to the theme of the tyranny of the centralised state, the novelist described America as being on the cutting edge when it comes to technologies of control.
Recently a government spokesman noted that by the year 2008 there will be a central computer that will contain everyone s financial dealings, including bank balances, use of credit cards, and so on, he pointed out. At the touch of a button, the Treasury will know who has what money and the Treasury will then be able to deduct what it thinks it may need in the way of tax. In earlier time, this was only a tyrant s dream. Now it is technically possible.
Vidal then went on to outline the most sinister manifestations of such technology. For those interested in how to control an entire population, he said, we have invented a magnetic bracelet, which is worn, tastefully, on wrist or ankle, thus making it possible for a central guardian to keep track of the bracelet s movements. At first, the European Union will use this jewellery to keep track of aliens, then possible criminals; then . . . We have surpassed Orwell s innocent imaginings.
There are young men and women in prison for life for having been caught a third time with marijuana, he declared in his Trinity lecture. Thanks to the criminalising of so many areas of human activity from drugs to sex, we have more than one million people in prison and over two million on parole or probation. Far more men are raped each year in the American prison system than are women on the outside. But no-one cares. A state with too many laws becomes, in effect, lawless, mind-less, and heart-less.
From here, pushing the disinformation ticket, Vidal also addressed America s tradition of inventing global bogey-men in order to keep the war machine ticking over, characterising Cold War fear of the Soviet Union as one of the biggest hoaxes ever pulled. The Russians are coming? The Russians weren t going anywhere!
Vidal, after needling The Sunday Independent s Mary Ellen Synon as a right winger who believes there are two parties in America, summed up the American power structure as one corporation-funded government with two right wings, Democrat and Republican. Painting a picture of Protestant militants wrestling for control by way of the impeachment process, he asserted that, Clinton was a target because he s a communist : a defender of blacks and an advocate of the NHS.
After questions from the floor, guests adjourned to a wine reception in The Atrium. The star speaker arrived early, and after some initial trepidation, minglers such as Jonathan Philbin Bowman, Djinn Gallagher, David Norris and Sam Smyth queued up to banter with him. Vidal (on close inspection surprisingly well preserved, white-haired, tall and burly, wearing a dark single-breasted suit) was in strict No Press mode, although he did respond to Hot Press query if he d been back to visit his ancestors in Donegal with a blunt, but good-humoured declaration of, I ve never set foot in the place! An hour later he was gone, whisked away to enjoy his last night in Dublin before a morning flight home to his villa in Ravello on the Amalfi coast of Italy. n