Related to your point ciao, ever notice that the God that militant atheism rages against is the God of Christian scripture? I think you are right. In order to deny His existence, you first have to posit that he is. That makes men like Vidal cultured despisers. Some atheists are aware of the contradiction of course, but the militant ones have to posit their thesis in this way if their attempts to retool the broader culture into their own image will have any effect.

They first believe there is a god, then they have to convince themselves and others there is no god and that that god is all the bad things one can think of in order to justify and feel good about loving and living in sin.
Vidal seems to have both loved and hated himself at the same time, Since we can’t serve two masters at the same time, we must love one and hate the other as Jesus said. Satan rebelled against God, then blames God for being “unfair” to him.

I just don’t see the tragedy of Vidal’s life and death, unless it is the tragedy that he could have been a happy, great man if he had used his passion for God, instead of the uselessness and waste of a life rebelling against God.
” We have wearied ourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and have walked through hard ways, but the way of the Lord we have not known.” (Wis.5:6-7).

Vidal, Mailer, Capote, and I would add Updike are all gifted although I could never endure them because while they were good at describing the landscape of their own souls (Updike especially was a master wordsmith) I never found it interesting enough to finish any of their books. I’m not interested in, say, Capote’s Warhol-esque elevation of popular culture, Updike’s preoccupation with adultery, and so forth. But the New York Times did and so did other influential cultural gatekeepers. In fact, the New York Times article about Vidal you cited was largely laudatory. I read it.

Many artists become a “wreck of a human being” but that doesn’t lessen their influence. Look at Hemingway and the glorification of alcoholism. I never bought it even when I read all of his books in high school. These men came of age in the fifties when the conflict between the dominant cultural morality and the false promise of libertine freedom was still a matter of hidden fascination. The damage would not become apparent until the larger cultural adopted the precepts of the libertines after the 1960’s (Free Love! by which they meant sex without attachments).

Now we see it in the crassest forms — Madonna and so forth with the highest accolade being that they broke taboos. That’s a pretty low bar, but the danger is that most taboos exist for a reason and, once broken, it is hard to undo the damage that results.

The art critic Robert Hughes also died last week. He was one of the men who puzzled me because he had the right understanding of the slide into meaninglessness represented by much modern art even though he lived the life of the New York gadfly. I recommend his “Shock of the New” to anyone who wants to chronicle the decline in the art world. (Roger Shattuck’s “The Banquet Years” that studies the rise of the Avant Garde in France is another great read.) He’s like Alan Bloom, another good thinker but a libertine in his private life. Usually they were raised in a morally sound home (Orthodox Judaism often) and even though they left their faith the childhood lessons gave them the moral depth to make the sound analysis that they did. Unfortunately, once they go who will be left? Certainly not their children if they had any.

See all videos The Shock of the New.

For another example of how the ideas of elites filter into and ultimately distort the larger culture read Tom Wolfe’s “Bauhaus is Our House.”

I needed Gore Vidal to tell me characters like Silvio Berlusconi, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, or François Mitterrand, among many, “largely abandoned a biblical morality” when it came to their very public displays of sexual behaviour? Europe has been awash in such abandonment long before the “keen verbalization” of Vidal. Good lord, Abouna, weren’t you the one publicly debating the source of morality? I don’t recall you or your opponent citing the “truly perceptive” thoughts of Mr. Vidal in your exchange. That he shared similar views with many qualifies him as insightful, influential, prescient, or as a visionary? Less than 10 blocks from me, neighbors are battling in the City Council against a guy who put up a giant sign on his house: “These are the last days!” The NY Times said Vidal “presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization.” Quelle difference!

I say again, R. Albert Mohler, Jr. has picked a despicable, seemingly lifelong malcontent and fashioned a graven image of him, which he neither earned nor deserves. He was a wreck of a human being, consumed by his own obscenity. Why did our society tolerate such objectionable characters like Vidal, Mailer, and Capote? Because they were influential, gifted, and elite? They behaved like animals, literally. And like any “passion” and “temptation,” their sort of behaviour was seductive because it was unpredictable, base and debasing, and attracted uneasy laughter – indicating all involved understood it was wrong. Dr. Mohler has mistaken seduction for influence over “elites” everyone seems to know but me, and decided to hang his hat on an old dog that, for no other reason I can see, happens to be dead and available.

George’s point is why I published the piece. Vidal spoke what many of the cultural elites believe, even obliquely.

And this point, while obvious to some will appear prescient to others:

We should realize that Vidal’s rejection of monotheism, though blasphemous, was truly perceptive. He was certainly correct that a binding and objective morality requires a monotheistic God who both exists and reveals himself. He was also correct in pointing to the fact that a secularized Europe has largely abandoned a biblical morality when it comes, most specifically, to sexual behavior.

Mike, while I agree with you, Vidal was much more influential than we realize. Not only was he the litterateur of our immoral society, he bravely (albeit obscenely) vocalized what our elites believe.

I am concluding the teaching of a summer “crash” section of Psychology 101 (“crash” meaning 5-days a week, 3-hours a day, for 4-weeks), so, having a “captive audience,” I thought I would ask this “crew” today of their knowledge of Vidal, “his social class and literary circles,” his celebrated works, and his lifelong bitterness and scathing degradation sparing neither heaven and earth. Any takers? Not a one. Selection bias? Probable. But the point is, Vidal has passed to his Sky God, leaving nothing appreciable but another empty seat on the ice floe formerly occupied by Mailer and Capote. Leave it to a “hard-nosed” Baptist to ascribe to Vidal in death, what he never had in life: acknowledgement that he was simply nastier than others in his social class and literary circles. Shouldn’t someone tell Dr. Mohler that “shelf-life” and legacy are a different cut of cloth? A 1,000 sexual encounters before age 25? Can you imagine the wait for a table? Whatever… He’s got nothing but time now.