Posted on 11/06/2002 6:35:35 AM PST by areafiftyone
Gore Vidal once tried to get me to print an alleged secreta very big secretabout Richard Nixons penis. About what has come to be called, in post-Clintonian euphemistic legalese, its "distinguishing characteristic."
I thought about this episode when I was reading what might be called "The Protocols of an Elder Called Gore," Mr. Vidals attempt to provewell, insinuate in a Nixonian waythat a secret cabal (the Bush/oil "junta") instigated the 9/11 mass murders in order to increase their profit margins.
The Vidal screed, a 7,000-word mega-ultra-totalizing post-9/11 conspiracy theory, appeared in the Oct. 27 issue of the London Observer under the headline "THE ENEMY WITHIN." The Observer précis is telling:
"Gore Vidal is Americas most controversial writer and a ferocious, often isolated, critic of the Bush administration. Here, against a backdrop of spreading unease about Americas response to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, we publish Vidals remarkable personal polemic urging a shocking new interpretation of who was to blame."
One senses in the Observers précis an attempt to do a little sanitizing, a little distancing from this "remarkable personal polemic" with its "shocking" contents.
Well, in that theyre correct: It is shocking, disillusioning, particularly to someone like myself who has been a longtime admirer of Mr. Vidals essays, their intelligence, wit and precision, their erudition, elegance and fluidity. I cant take his novels as seriously as he does (which is very seriously), but even when I disagreed with the politics, his pieces in The New York Review of Books have been illuminating landmarks of the essay form.
Which is why Mr. Vidals Observer piece is so shocking. What you hope for from Mr. Vidal is a serious political critique. What you have here is a disjointed conspiracy theory.
Which is why it reminded me of Ophelias dismay at the derangement of Hamlet: "O what a noble mind is here oerthrown." Which recalls the fact that Hamlets madness ishe saysfeigned. That he is "but mad north-northwest." Has Mr. Vidals intellect gone south, so to speak, or is his 9/11 conspiracy theory some Vidalian north-by-northwest jest?
Which brings us back to the episode involving Richard Nixons penis.
This was back when I was a young reporter for The Village Voice and Mr. Vidal had something to promote, and a press agent arranged an interview, and Mr. Vidal seemed fixated on getting into print a story he claimed to have heard "from a nurse," I think, about Richard Nixons penis. This was around the time Watergate was developing, and I recall him saying, "The Voice will love this." And I felt a kind of a hint of condescension, as in: "The Voice will print anything as long as its about the Great Satan Nixon." I had the feeling Mr. Vidal was trying to put one over on me, the paper and its readersan elaborate jest I was supposed to play along with because he was the great Gore and the Left was inherently gullible.
But theres nothing very funny about the Vidal piece in the London Observer. And its more than merely sadabout Vidal, about the gullibility of the Left. Theres something genuinely ugly about it. Something that partakes of the slippery ugliness of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Youre familiar, I assume, with The Protocols, a czarist secret-police forgery that purports to be the minutes of the meeting of the secret Jewish cabal which is ruling the world and manipulating history from behind the scenes. Henry Ford promoted a version called The International Jew. Hitler was deeply influenced by it. And now an Egyptian TV station is making a 41-part series based on it. This is not at all to say that Mr. Vidals 9/11 thesis is anti-Semitic. He doesnt buy into the Mossad-did-it line; he believes we did it. What his thesis shares with The Protocols is the fantasy of an all-powerful secret cabal manipulating history: the Bush/oil "junta," which he calls "Hitlerian."
Mr. Vidals secret cabal is more sinister than the F.D.R.Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory (which he also buys into): the belief that F.D.R. knew about the coming Japanese attack but did nothing to stop it, because he wanted Americans killed to get us into the war.
In that theory, at least, F.D.R. was a passive-aggressive mastermind. He let something he knew was coming happen after, in effect, "asking for it" by provoking the Japanese.
But he didnt order it himself.
But that, in weasel words and passive-aggressive locutions, is what Mr. Vidal is implying George W. Bush and his "junta" did.
There are those (like Andrew Sullivan, for instance) who have taken note of the Vidal Observer piece and suggest that its best to ignore it, and him. And maybe Mr. Sullivans right. But I have a feeling that with something like this, if its ludicrous logical and evidentiary flaws are not exposed, there are those who will take it seriously. Worse things are flying around the Web, and this has the imprimatur of a famous American writer.
And the Left is always ready to swallow Richard Nixon penis stories, you might say.
It was a mistake not to take the malign potential of the original Protocols seriously. And if a famous American writer is entering a late-onset Ezra Pound period, so to speak, that too is worth notingand lamenting.
So lets look more closely at his argument. Lets perform what the Web-bloggers have taken to calling a "fisking" or a "misting." Are you familiar with those terms? Im particularly fond of "fisking" and "misting," because I believe they represent a revival on the Web of the kind of attentive close reading (albeit with plenty of attitude) that has disappeared from the jargon-clogged analysis of literature in the academy.
"Fisking" is derived from the devastating online critiques by "warbloggers" of the dispatches of Robert Fisk, the British foreign correspondent, who achieved a kind of perverse fame when he was beaten up by angry Afghans, blamed it on America (how were they to know he was one of the Good White Guys) and exclaimed that, in effect, if he were they, hed beat himself up too.*
"Misting" is a term I favor because it has less of a built-in ideological agenda, and because it derives from that genius product of self-subverting American pop culture, Mystery Science Theater 3000, whose fans are known as "Misties." MST3K, as its known, made brilliant literate comedy out of the informal American practice of talking back to bad movies, to bad pop culture in general, showing and simultaneously ridiculing some of the schlockiest examples of world cinema. And insinuating into the Tapestry of Badness its own subtextual weave of pop referentialityhypertexting hilariously on the run.
So lets try a combination of fisking and misting on Mr. Vidals Protocols.
Lets begin with the key disingenuous yet self-subverting rhetorical trick Mr. Vidal employs: the attempt to ride two horses at once.
Horse No. 1, as he puts it in paragraph two of his screed: "One year after 9/11 we still dont know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday . " (Italics mine.)
Horse No. 2: Oh, but we really do knowit was Osama bin Laden. But if you have the historical/political penetration of Mr. Vidal, you can see that Osama was acting at the instigation of the George Bush "junta."
Horse No. 1 breaks early from the starting gate (Osama may have nothing to do with it; "we still dont know"), but by paragraphs four and five, Horse No. 2 is catching up.
Because, in these paragraphs, we learn that despite the fact that "we still dont know" who did it, Mr. Bush knew ahead of time that Osama was going to do it: "From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: We believe that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks . "
So although we really dont know who did it, Mr. Bush is culpable for knowing who did it ahead of time. His failure to heed the warning about the man who did it is evidence that Mr. Bush was either hoping for it to happen, or behind it himself.
Now the fun begins, as Mr. Vidal again seeks to ride two different horses: prove both the former (Bush let it happen) and the latter (Bush, or the Bush "junta," ordered it to happen).
Having established that Mr. Bush knew, or he should have known, or he ordered it so he had to know, with flawless logical precision, our essayist then proceeds to develop his fearless prediction that Mr. Bush may eventually be impeached for knowing about or ordering the 9/11 attacks, an assertion he makes largely on the basis of a thesis by one Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. Mr. Vidal tries to preclude any idea that Mr. Ahmed is anything less than an objective historian by making a smarmy forestalling remark, "Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them." A weak rhetorical ploy to brand any inquiry into Mr. Ahmeds objectivity as prejudiced in advance.
And certainly no one could accuse Mr. Ahmed of being anything less than objective, because he is on record as believing that "the U.S. and Western media most often systematically toe the Zionist line motivated by economic interests linked directly to the U.S. desire to consolidate its global hegemonic power . " And that the Israeli government is guilty of "genocide against the Palestinian people."
And we know Mr. Vidals source is incapable of conspiracy theory from the way he tells us that the Hamas suicide attacks have been "intentionally provoked by Israel to justify war plans." At least we know hes consistent, because in Mr. Vidals Protocols, he is used to support the theory that the U.S. government also "intentionally" had its own citizens murdered for its "war plans."
The reason Mr. Bush will probably be impeached, our seer Mr. Vidal tells us, is that he "allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as preemption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban." (Italics mine.) So the 9/11 attacks were justified self-defense. (I think David Corn has already disposed of the factual basis of this pre-emption theory in the March 1, 2002, issue of The Nation.)
But for Mr. Vidal, even though "we still dont know" who did it, our seer can read their minds (whoever they are) and tell us that the 9/11 attacks were their "preemption" of our planned attack on them, whoever they were. Are you with me? I know its hard to follow; illogic always is.
Or is it illogic north by northwest? Could this be Mr. Vidals parody of dumb Left conspiracy theory? Certainly the topic is ripe for parody, now that (according to Page Six) Barbra Streisand has joined those who believe that Paul Wellstones plane crash was "no accident" in what The Times Nicholas Kristof has called the Lefts "cesspool of outraged incoherence."
In any case, much subsequent Vidal verbiage follows designed to prove the Sherlockian discovery that this is all "The Case of the Afghan Pipeline," that the "Bush junta" countenanced or caused the murder of thousands of Americans in the hopes of provoking a war to expedite an oil pipeline that might increase the profit margins of their oil companies. Standard boilerplate Left conspiracy theory.
But then our essayist assumes a disingenuous passive voice and takes one passive-aggressive step beyond all that, into Protocols territory. That step can be found in this sentence: "Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan . "
Its really the first three words that give the game away: "Osama was chosen . " Poor Osama isnt even given any credit for "agency," as the postmodernists say. Couldnt think it up by himself. He "was chosen"implicitly by his white masters in the West, the "Bush junta"to commit the mass murder of Americans (although remember: "we still dont know" who did it).
Osama was chosen. Not a word about fundamentalist Islams hatred of America, of Jews, of the West. No, it was the Westwe did it to ourselves. Well, the Bush cabal did it in our name. Is comparing Mr. Vidals screed to The Protocols extreme? Not as extreme as Vidal comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.
Dont you also like the echt Vidal touch: "Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds . " The wily conspirators cant escape from the even wilier Gore, who knows how their minds work. Osama had no ideological or theological motives of his own; he just had, you know, that Bad Guy Look (the "aesthetic grounds"). He was a hired actor, and whoever he was beneath the skin was irrelevant to that division of the American Cabal which was assigned to run the Bad Guy Star Search for a front man for their scheme to murder thousands of Americans.
At this point, the Vidal Protocols shift into a discussion of the mechanics of the plan. In the section labeled "Bush and the dog that did not bark," we begin to learn the magnitude of the plot to kill our own citizens by "the junta"how many were directly involved, how many Americans knew but kept silent.
Here, speaking of business types, Mr. Vidal brings in rhetoric that could have come directly from The Protocols: "One fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of [our] culture . " Maggots are a favorite metaphor in this sort of literature. Guess whom the "maggots" usually turn out to be?
Again, Mr. Vidal is weaselly about what he seeks to assert and prove. "Complicity" is the one-word sentence that opens the second paragraph of this section, as if he will follow it with proof of George W. Bushs complicity in the plot to murder his fellow citizens to increase the profit margins of some oil companies. But then he hedges it by saying, "The behaviour of President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions."
So now weve edged back from promising proof of "complicity" to "all sorts of suspicions." Nice rhetorical trick by the master. For proof of complicity, or the suspicion of complicity, he dips into an article called "The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce." The passages in which Mr. Vidal quotes the author, Stan Goff, who identifies himself as a former Special Forces operative in Latin America, include locutions like this:
"By around 8:15 AM [on the day of the attacks], it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong." (Italics mine.) "Should" plays an important role in conspiracy-theory thinking. There follows more "should have" this, "would have" that, the implication being that higher-ups in the U.S. military knew the planes were heading for D.C. and the W.T.C. but issued "stand down orders" to interceptor jets to allow the attacks to succeed. Mr. Vidal gives us a terrific insight into the mind-set involved here, in this line from Mr. Goff: "Now, the real kicker: A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building . " (Italics mine.)
Here, what were really seeing is Gore Vidalonce so clear-sighted a skepticexecuting a "well-controlled downward spiral" into Internet conspiracy theorys grassy knoll. Its the old J.F.K. conspiracy argument that Oswald wasnt a good enough marksman to hit J.F.K. (Except he did.) The hijacker wasnt a good enough pilot to hit the W.T.C. (Except he did.) Or is it meant to imply that the person identified as the pilot really wasnt the pilot, or that he was trained by the Bush cabal? Dont laugh: If you go on the Net, you can find pages and pages of "proof" that the plane was "remote controlled," that the plane was piloted by the Bush cabal but didnt crash into the W.T.C. at all, it just launched a missile into it (like another plane supposedly did at the Pentagon), or launched a missile at the W.T.C., which triggered explosives already planted by the cabal at the base of the W.T.C., or alternately that the W.T.C. was deliberately "re-engineered" by the cabal in the mid-90s so that it would collapse on command (the way the cabal "re-engineered" J.F.K.s head wounds to pin the crime on the "patsy," Oswald, in some conspiracy theories).
Welcome to Mr. Vidals world, where, lets see, dozens if not scores of personnel in the military would be cognizantcomplicitin the cabals plot, because they allowed the attacks they knew were coming to proceed untroubled to their targets. "Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark," Mr. Vidal, in his Sherlockian mode, tells us. "I dont think Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedures until the damage was done." (Italics mine.)
Im perfectly prepared to believe that the Air Force screwed up (although a number of the timeline details on which Mr. Vidal and his source base their conspiracy allegations are contradicted by The New York Times September 2002 book on the attacks, Out of the Blue). And I believe that the Bush administration and the Clinton intelligence agencies who preceded them failed miserably, inexcusably, and that many more should be fired for their failure and incompetence. But to Mr. Vidal, "incompetence" is the cabals red herring. What Mr. Vidal is implying, insinuating in a particularly repellent Nixonian way, is that someone "kept" the Air Force from preventing mass murder. Were there "stand down orders?" he asks, quoting from a "Canadian media analyst" who believes there were. On the other hand, maybe the Pakistanis were behind it all, Mr. Vidal says, throwing a last-minute late entry into the multi-horse race.
But all of this previous silliness doesnt rise to the stupendous heights Mr. Vidal reserves for his final few thousand words. A finale that begins when he invokes Hitler: "Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another."
Our sage finds some merit in this wisdom: "It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injuredor threatenedparty before he struck." He seems to be saying that somehow the W.T.C. mass murder was an example of the U.S. "pretending" to be injured. This will be somewhat hard to sell to the survivors of the W.T.C. attacks, who, I guess, are "pretending" to have lost their children, fathers and mothers.
Clearly our sage has lost track, in his frenzy, of one slight difference between the U.S. and Hitlers Reich: Hitler did pretend injury; he dressed up prisoners in Polish uniforms to stage an attack on a German radio station in order to provide a fig leaf for his 1939 attack on Poland, for instance. But we didnt pretend to be attacked by others on 9/11, although implicitly, metaphorically, sleazily, that is what our sage implies with his Hitler analogy.
But it turns out were actually a little worse than Hitler: "
something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, they are threatening us, we must attack first." The new addition that makes us worse than Hitler: We are more open about it than Hitlerat least to the penetrating gaze of our seerthus a little worse, in our shamelessness,
than Hitler.
Whats fascinating is this patrician faux-populists contempt for the American people. Those stupid Americans, not realizing they actually attacked themselves on 9/11, are now getting all cowardly and acting threatened. How foolish and fearful we must seem from the perspective of the sage, secure in his villa in Ravello.
Remind us again, oh sage, of the hard evidence that our "Hitlerian" junta was behind 9/11. But wait, more kitchen-sink allegations posing as having been proved: "The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared before 9/11." Note that "plainly" tucked in there. In other words, he has no evidence; its supposed to be self-evidentall the people who drafted the act were in on the plot, too.
For his final flourish, our sage demonstrates that he still has an eye for detail. He notices that "[w]hen Mohamed Attas plane struck the World Trade Centres North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat."
No, despite the childish reasoning that has led up to this finale, Mr. Vidal does not attempt to implicate the goat in the Hitlerian plot, nor the child. He gives us a little lesson in classics for those not as erudite as our sage:
"By coincidence, our word for tragedy comes from the Greek: for goat tragos plus oide for song. Goat-song. It is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us."
Whoa, Gore, dudelighten up on the kitsch: " we were struck by fire from heaven " And remember, we werent really "struck": Youve "proven" we struck ourselves. The real tragedy, the real goat-song here is, as Ophelia said, the spectacle of "a noble mind oerthrown."
But theres an upside to it all: the Egyptian TV station thats making that 41-part version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Forty-one parts! A (lying) historical epic! Theyre going to keep plenty of screenwriters busy. Im sure theyll need the script-doctoring services of an Old Pro, Gore. I think youve just passed your audition.
My response time has been fantastic as a result, too. Thanks!
Didn't want to go there.
Like "Burr"?
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