Gore Vidal - R.I.P.

Gore Vidal died the other day. He was 86 years old when he passed away. He was, along with I. F. Stone, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Chris Hedges, one of our most Socratic figures. During the fabulous 1960s, Izzy Stone and Gore Vidal were my television personalities. Noam Chomsky's 1968 essay, The Responsibility of Intellectuals affected me greatly when I read it in the Wayne State University library. It was also around this time that I read, and was affected in other ways by Chomsky's ground-breaking work in generative grammar, his Syntactic Structures.

  I came to know of Gore Vidal through his appearances on Dick Cavet's reality television show and through his essays in the New York Review of Books. I admired his style and his politics. Vidal's interviews were always instructive, and thereby interesting.
  In the February 2010 issue of Vanity [Un]Fair, the journalist Christopher Hitchens spit out a trashy bit of non-reportage and non-sense on Gore Vidal. I took offense at Hitchens' trashy bits. And I sent Hitchens a few thoughts of my own - quoting myself (a delightful feeling) we have:

It appears to this reader that your Vanity Fair article establishes that Mr. Vidal and his views have become strange (outrageous). But "strange" in what sense? I direct your attention to Gregory Vlastos' Socrates, page 1 where, regarding Socrates' "strangeness", Vlastos cites Alcibiates' speech about Socrates in the Symposium:

"Such is his strangeness that you will search and search among those living now and among men of the past, and never come close to what he is himself and to the things he says." (221D)

Mr. Hitchens, you have not come close to revealing . . . Mr. Vidal's 'strangeness'. When you attempt to see Mr. Vidal and to understand his strangeness and his irony, you see someone else. Who could it be? [Obviously, Hitchens only saw himself.]

There are too few Socratic ironists among us these days - Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges remain. When we think about the Summer Olympics and the presidential race between President Obama and Governor Romney, some of us will be listening to Gore Vidal's running commentary. He's still with us, but just barely.