Editorials/The Lost Gentleman/Pietistic Gore
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS The Lost Gentleman by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. George Bush is, according to those who know him, one of the finest gentlemen to inhabit Washington in many years. Certainly he is one of...
...They intend to create a network stitching together the most effective organizations of the Reagan era into what will amount to a Conservative counterculture in opposition to the Kultursmog...
...In the last year of the Reagan Administration, Vidal became a Christian...
...His second book, Live From Golgotha, is not so straightforward...
...to all sides, and today he is being pummeled from all sides—occasionally with astounding venom...
...For years his club sandwiches have sold well in the suburbs and in recently gentrified neighborhoods...
...Apparently Muggeridge was right...
...It has thus been of no use to him in either his administration or his presidential campaign...
...Another failed sinner and lapsed roué whose long literary life as a satirist and farceur led him to despair and Christian bliss was the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge...
...He began his presidency proffering a "kinder gentler" politics Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...He was too much the Yale gentleman...
...He who should have consolidated the Reagan Revolution allowed it to be discredited...
...Live From Golgotha reveals Vidal to be consumed with obscure details from the New Testament and questions of Christian theology...
...But age has encroached with unexpected swiftness...
...Millions of conservatives dislike the Presi-dent—though Liberals snort that he advanced conservatives in the judiciary, advanced their social policy, resorted to their favorite poisoned shibboleths, and, as William S afire lays down in the New York Times Magazine, sought "solid support from the far fight...
...How did George Bush get into such a mess...
...Gore Vidal—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and vicarious pol—is making a desperate attempt to save his market share...
...Whoever wins in November, these will be the voices of the future, for in George Bush and Bill Clinton there are only the fatuities of the past...
...As with another famed nonbeliever, the pre-war writer H. L. Mencken, Vidal has long exhibited an interest in all religions, and both men have had acquaintances among the clergy...
...In the last grisly days of this election some of George Bush's friends are wondering how to explain what seems to be a public apodiabolosis...
...n a word he is haunted, by the Scriptures, the hereafter, and what he sees as the coming millennium...
...Nearly half the Democratic candidates were retired politicians...
...One and a half years ago, despite a slowing economy, George Bush's approval rating was 88 percent, well above that of any other President since the victorious culmination of World War II...
...Muggeridge became a zealous proselytizer and an eloquent opponent of abortion and birth control...
...N ow George Bush is facing defeat against a mediocrity whom roughly half the electorate adjudge destitute of character or integrity-72 percent of the electorate approve Bush's character, but only some 30 percent would vote for him over the vastly less admired Boy Clinton...
...Lest the large audience of wisenheimers who bought his earlier works catch on, this fall Vidal is marketing not one but two products...
...Vidal's quiet support of charities suggests that he may be content with a less conspicuous role as in his last years he contemplates The End...
...He is one of the most unloved nice men in American history...
...Vidal has always been far gone on visions of nuclear holocaust, planetary catastrophe, political conspiracies, and flights into the irrational...
...I now move," he writes, "graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit...
...It is a rather ham- fisted attempt to maintain Vidal's old image as godless cynic, hedonist, and sophisticate...
...Today, with very little ammunition, he struggles against one of the most unlikely candidates in American history, Boy Clinton...
...For a man who is only 66, Vidal's tone is charnel and curiously fated...
...But, as has been said of Vidal before, particularly in reference to his taste in fiction, he is occasionally very old-fashioned...
...The first reveals his moribundity...
...but the truth is that his legendary confidence is gone...
...Now it has plummeted below the ratings Jimmy Carter suffered in his death throes, though Jimmy's presidency was a foreign policy disaster, and Jimmy's economy—with double digit interest rates, double digit inflation, almost nonexistent productivity gains, high unemployment and a Misery Index (combining unemployment and inflationrates) of 19.6 percent—was, well, Third World...
...Augustine would be Gore Vidal...
...In the first book, Screening History, Vidal repeatedly wanders from his ostensible theme, the movies, into reveries of his youth...
...Thus, despite working for eight years alongside the most successful President since FDR and despite the evidence of economic boom and Communist implosion all around him, George Bush was sozzled by the Kultursmog's ignorant insistence that the Reagan Administration was a failure...
...Retiring congressman Vin Weber, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, and the Vice President's chief of staff William Kristol are laying plans to consolidate the best ideas and policies of the 1970s' conservative revival...
...He spoke of being the Environmental President and the Education President and found himself overwhelmed by the regulatory and spending imperatives of the Kultursmog...
...Millions of Liberals are even more indignant against him—though the conservatives swear that he is a "moderate Republican," surreptitiously tacking towards the Liberal hot air...
...Was he too nice...
...Supposedly a satire of the Crucifixion, the book lends evidence to what Vidal's European acquaintances have been saying about him...
...Christianity's celebrities appear, such as Jesus and St...
...Acquaintances from the European scene, where he plays the role of Yank expatriate, report a development that Vidal dares not reveal to the clients back home...
...His closest associates were other gentlemen, such as the failed secretary of the treasury, Nicholas Brady and the far less admirable director of the Office of Management and Budget, Richard Darman...
...The President's deeper problem is that he cannot conceive how polluted the airs of 12 The American Spectator December 1992 Washington are by his enemies' politics, prejudices, and ludicrous ideas...
...Thus it is a paradox that this very kindly and amiable man is steadily going down to defeat because of the determined antipathy of nearly 60 percent of the electorate...
...Paul, along with the not-so-celebrated, for instance, St...
...Between the damp slices of white bread he would dearly love to sell a bit more ham, mayo, and sci-fi grotesque...
...It is rumored that Vidal has been generous to Catholic charities...
...So popular was George Bush not long ago that the Democrats' leading messiahs decided to sit out Campaign '92, thus producing this century's most mediocre presidential field...
...He broke his Reaganite pledge against higher taxes, allowing spending to go through the ceiling, the deficit to grow, and economic stagnation to set in...
...But Vidal's friendships have been more intense...
...Yet from the ruins of this campaign a renewed conservatism is taking shape...
...0 Pietistic Gore 14 The American Spectator December 1992...
...The second—though quite unintentionally, I am sure—reveals his absorption with the Christian religion and his longing for the supernatural...
...His tales of debauchery and the meaninglessness of life blubberedout in fantasies such as Myra Breckinridge always bring to mind C. S. Lewis's lines to the effect that those who believe in nothing will believe in anything and those who long for sin yearn for salvation...
...The pollution is so pervasive that it constitutes what might be called Kultursmog, and George Bush was too gentlemanly to notice or to object...
...The precursors to all this were there in his fiction years ago...
...How far Vidal's conversion will take him is anyone's guess...
...I knew Malcolm in his last years, when he often repeated his judgment that the next rueful dissipater to join him in scudding along the path once taken so famously by St...
...An American priest who has spent much time with Vidal in Rome has told me that their conversations throughout the 1980s became more concerned with heaven and h ell and with prayer...
...and once, at a fashionable house party outside London, Vidal approached an internationally known playboy about to enter the hoosegow on a drug charge and quietly counseled "pray the rosary...
...In a way he was...
...Certainly he is one of the finest gentlemen I have known...
...For that matter, most of American media and most of the public discourse are polluted with these toxins...
...Though the Jewish religion and people are held in high esteem by fundamentalist Christians today, in Vidal's Christianity there are traces of the old rap against the Jews for the Crucifixion...
...But George Bush's predicament has come about not simply because he is polite and high-minded (the Machiavel Darman certainly suffers neither of these disabilities...
...Timothy...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
