“My only friend is Gore Vidal–and even he’s kissed more boys than I have.".
Interviewer: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?posted by Fizz at 4:10 AM on August 1, 2012 [4 favorites]
Gore Vidal: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?
He was a racist and an elitist, forever mourning the decline of his era of aristocratic privilege.
This might explain the ferocity of the new class on the subject. They know that should the bad times return, the Jews would be singled out yet again.Do you think that his "new class" was largely composed of gentiles determined to protect Jews? He goes on to further characterise them by saying that
like so many Max Naumanns (Naumann was a German Jew who embraced Nazism), the new class passionately supports our ruling class [...]So the new class are determined to protect Jews; they are like this Jewish guy who supported the Nazis; but they're not actually Jewish. Really? And what do you make of his assertion that
these neo-Naumannites are going to be in the same gas chambers as the blacks and the faggots [...]Why are the Nazis going to round up these non-Jewish new-classers? And what of the Jews themselves, if they are not to be identified with the "new class"? Are the Nazis coming for "the blacks and the faggots" and "the new class" but not the Jews themselves?
"____ know that should the bad times return, the Jews would be singled out yet again .... the ____ are going to be in the same gas chambers as the blacks and the faggots".Isn't it clear that the missing word is "Jews"?
classic ____ professions as doctoring and lawyeringCould the missing word be anything but "Jewish"?
It was probably because I’d assumed he was straight. I knew him only as a political writer of large, crusty tomes about political figures or vaguely named epics: Burr, Lincoln, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. With this information in mind, I jumped to conclusions. Surely only a straight person could want to write thick, lofty studies on such a fully unqueer topic as the American empire. The thought that an interest in these things could coincide with a dedication to true, campy queerness in its purest form had never occurred to me. What I discovered later, on closer inspection, was that Vidal seemed to understand that within the world of scholarship and letters was embedded an excuse for the kind of heightened bitchiness that in any other kind of public forum doesn’t quite fly. The world of politics, likewise (nowhere more in evidence than 1962’s Advise and Consent, which amps up this bitchiness to an exhilarating pitch).posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:38 PM on August 6, 2012 [1 favorite]
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posted by PinkMoose at 11:43 PM on July 31, 2012 [3 favorites]