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06.24 Mr. Holder, You Must Hold Torturers Accountable Health & Environment
06.29 Thinking about Climate 06.26 False Health-Scare Ad on CNN 06.25 Louella Learns the Limits of Medicare 06.23 The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All 06.23 Tell ABC: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate 06.23 Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex 06.22 Thinking about Recoveries 06.20 Obama's Health Care Waterloo 06.15 Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform 06.11 Two Key Health-Care Numbers 06.10 Big Breakthroughs for Single Payer Health Care 06.10 Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations Media Watching
06.29 WP's Connolly Back, on Health Reform 06.17 Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage 06.15 Excusing Outrages of the Right 06.11 Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess US Politics, Policy & Culture
06.30 Obama's Torture Hypocrisy 06.30 Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity 06.29 Obama, They Want You to Fail 06.26 Who to Trust on a Truth Commission? 06.26 Tarnished Shields: The Morally Bankrupt 'Family Values' Republican Leadership 06.25 America's "Bases of Empire" 06.24 Twelve Angry White People: Jury Nullification in a Pennsylvania Coal Town 06.24 Touring Empire's Ruins 06.23 Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program 06.19 Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black 06.17 Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix 06.16 Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran? 06.13 Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program? 06.10 Waiving the Rules for Old Glory 06.10 Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed High Crimes?
07.03 Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement" 07.01 Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure 06.25 It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq 06.22 Obama Opposes Plame-gate Release 06.21 Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War 06.18 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future 06.15 New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record 06.14 Fear Rules Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
07.01 Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism:" The Economic Strategy of Imperial America 06.23 Obama's Financial Reform Proposal - A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control 06.10 Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney International
07.01 Pirates of the Mediterranean 06.29 Color Revolutions, Old and New 06.25 Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise' 06.23 Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil 06.20 Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?” 06.20 Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran 06.19 Iran's Election and US - Iranian Elections 06.16 The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters 06.12 Israeli War Crimes Against Children During Operation Cast Lead We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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CRITIQUING A LITERARY CRITIC:Critical Malfunction: Misreading Gore VidalTuesday, 24 June 2008Anyone who claims that the Lincoln of Lincoln and the Grant of Lincoln and 1876 are somehow self-portraits of Vidal could fairly be said to "not know how to read."
In a review of a new selection of Gore Vidal's essays, Lou Bayard unwittingly proves the truth of Vidal's recent observation about literary critics: "they don't know how to read." Before finally getting around to discussing the essays, Bayard -- who writes thrillers based on someone else's literary characters (Tiny Tim grows up and hunts killers in London!) or other writers (young Edgar Allen Poe finds murder afoot at West Point!) -- goes to great lengths to downgrade Vidal's fiction. He says that Vidal has never written a great novel (which is a matter of opinion, of course) because "he could never...convince us that we were reading about someone other than Gore Vidal." Referring to Vidal's historical novels, Bayard tells us that their main characters were all just ventriloquist dummies for Vidal, including -- astonishingly -- the fictional portraits of Lincoln and Grant. Anyone who claims that the Lincoln of Lincoln and the Grant of Lincoln and 1876 (neither of which gives more than passing, if revealing, glimpses of Grant, by the way) are somehow self-portraits of Vidal could fairly be said to "not know how to read." Lincoln in particular is an impressive display of "inhabiting other minds" -- Bayard's definition of great fiction -- from the sanctimonious greasy-pole climber Salmon Chase to the scruffy young assassination conspirator David Herold to the tormented Mary Lincoln, and many others as well. As for the president himself, Vidal has often pointed out to critics what should be obvious from reading the book: he never tries to "inhabit" Lincoln's mind at all, but instead shows him exclusively through the eyes -- and minds -- of others. Again, it's a unprovable matter of opinion whether you consider Lincoln a "great" novel or not. (I think it is; one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century, in fact. Bayard thinks it isn't. Is he "right"? Am I right? Who knows? Who cares?) But a critic should read and judge the work that is actually in front of him. If Bayard has come away from Vidal's historical fiction thinking that Burr, Lincoln, Grant (as well as Wilson, Harding and Franklin Roosevelt) are identical hand-puppets expressing Vidal's own personality, then he has patently failed at this essential task of criticism. As for the rest of the review, it is largely laudatory, although larded with the usual canards and distortions -- employed chiefly to distance Bayard from a too-close associaton with any position that might cause discomfort at, say, a convivial gathering of middle-brow literati. Such as Vidal's "defense" of Timothy McVeigh and his "cockamamie theorizing about 9/11." Vidal's "defense" of McVeigh, over the course of several articles, was actually an unambiguous condemnation of the bombing itself, coupled with questions about McVeigh's actual role, and an examination of the wider societal and political factors that lay behind that monstrous action. Now I doubt very seriously if Bayard, a staff writer for liberal Salon.com, aligns himself with those right-wing ranters who condemn all attempts to understand the roots of Islamic terrorism as a "defense" of its atrocities. He almost certainly believes that we should try to fathom these root causes -- the various injustices and inequities and suffering in foreign lands -- in order to allieviate them if possible. But the idea that there could be any serious, systemic injustices and inequities and suffering in the United States that might drive someone to violence and despair, systemic problems which need to be addressed and allieviated -- this apparently cannot even be considered. In fact, says Bayard, it is "insupportable." Vidal's "cockamamie theorizing about 9/11" involves examining the historical record of America's overt -- and covert -- dealings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the "arc of crisis;" outlining the many warnings of an impending attack from a variety of credible sources; and noting the many vast, gaping holes in the "official" account -- which itself underwent a number of shape-shifting convolutions until taking more-or-less final form at the hands of a toothless commission appointed by the Bush Administration and run by a crony of Condi Rice. Given all this, Vidal believes we should have a truly independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks. What a "cockamamie" notion, eh? Best not let a nut like that get too close to the canapes. To further denigrate any of Vidal's political observations that he doesn't like, Bayard drags out the old chestnut that Vidal can't possibly understand the nitty-gritty of American culture because he lived in Yurp for so many years. This ignores the fact that Vidal normally spent large parts of each of those years, er, living in America. But any appreciable amount of residency in foreign parts is evidently an insurmountable handicap for understanding the sacred Homeland. I'm looking forward to seeing Bayard rip the lid off that old poseur Mark Twain, who spent 17 whole years of his adult life abroad -- without jetting back for months at a time each year. Bayard does allow that when it comes to literature, Vidal himself is an astute and suprisingly generous critic, because he is "genuinely engaged with the matter at hand and willing to be changed by it." This is indeed an excellent quality in a literary critic. Bayard might want to give it a try sometime. Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2008 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on June 25, 2008. |
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