We should have listened to Vidal

Noted author forecast EXACTLY where we are today - 33 years ago!

   It was William Shakespeare who said, many years ago in “Henry VI”: “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers.” Not that anyone would argue with that. But instead, what if the first thing we did was listen to the writers, particularly those who have paid such scrupulous attention to our politics for decades. Maybe even written extensively about them.

   If, for example, someone other than the attendees at the National Press Club a couple weeks before Christmas in 1991 had not only listened carefully to a speech given by author Gore Vidal, where he forecast – with stunning accuracy – exactly where we would be as a country 33 years later, but actually took pen (or keyboard) in hand and warned us. You know, did something about it.

 

Author Gore Vidal predicted precisely where we would be - 33 years ago 

“Finally, there is a great danger facing us all,” Vidal cautioned that afternoon. “And that is the mounting fury of those who have been deprived for too long of decent lives. And I promise you, they will not be apathetic forever. “If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’”

   If you don’t recognize that quote, it’s from Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, just before the prince has agreed to a fixed sword fight where Laertes’ poisoned sword will kill him. He recognizes what he is about to face.

    We were five years away from Fox News, just a few years into Rush Limbaugh’s hyper-partisan nonsense and there would have been time to perhaps spare us the onslaught of rampant, ugly political division, the Insurrection, The Big Lie, the fake electors scheme, the sleaze of the hush money trial, two Impeachments and the precipitous lowering of our standards of political speech – which few thought was possible.

    Here we are, a little over four months from a Presidential election that could change the course of our history as a Democratic republic and polls say it’s a veritable toss-up. How could we let this happen? How did we let our sacred democracy with a small “d” be polluted this way?

     “I promise you, they will not be apathetic forever,” Vidal cautioned. It’s as if he could see the Trump flags, the guns, the nooses and the sturm and drang on the steps where his blind grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, once walked.

      There was more. “Thomas Jefferson wanted to hold a constitutional convention every thirty years,” Vidal said, “once a generation because as he said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket. As it turned out, the jacket has been so reshaped over the last two centuries, it is now something of a straitjacket for the people at large and satisfying to no one except those who gain election and profits from our most peculiar system.”

     Anticipating the furor of the border and immigration, he spoke to that, too.

   “It is true we are a less homogenous and a less educated people than were the three million inhabitants of the original thirteen colonies and I cannot believe we are so lacking in scholars and in those devoted to the spirit of the original constitution and perhaps more important the Declaration of Independence that we will do away with our liberties while giving even greater power to the executive.”

Like immunity, say?

    Vidal wonders how we might fix it.

    “As you know in recent years there have been several moments to convene a constitutional convention. These have been the work of single interest groups usually from the far right. One wants to forbid abortion to every woman.”

    This was 33 years ago, remember. And he still had more to say. If somehow, we agreed to a new constitutional convention, Vidal imagines the reaction.

     “The first thing they will get rid of is the Bill Of Rights, the liberals moan. To which my answer is first, I don’t think the people are suicidal and second, what is the difference between losing those rights at an open convention rather than by gradually losing them behind the closed doors of the current Supreme Court.”

    Again, 33 years ago. Gore Vidal was calling for us, as a people, to wake up, to save what the founders left us.

     “The people at large have been kept ignorant by bad schools and by the dispensers of false opinion,” he said, again, five years before Fox News. “That is true, that is a problem. But ignorance is not stupidity. And self-interest, as both Hamilton and Madison agreed, is a great motor to the state, checked properly and balanced.

    “Of course, the manipulators will be busy at such a convention. The creative minds that gave us the Willie Horton ad will opt for some apple pie fascism (Donald Trump, anyone?) but there are other voices in the land.”

     Yes, there were other voices in the land, singing out eloquently about where our country seemed to be heading. Gore Vidal was right, prophetic, even.

     If only we had listened and acted upon it, then. As Shakespeare noted: “The readiness is all.”