The Pakistani Spectator

Gore Vidal, 83, described as America’s greatest essayist and one of its best-selling novelists, says he has in his life “crashed many barriers.” Vidal’s brutal manner of criticism hasn’t waned. The United States of America, he says, is a “madhouse” and its President is “overwhelmed” and “incompetent”.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart, says The Independent.

In Vidal’s words: “I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated. But he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed.

“And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense. The President wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.

“Obama is doing dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.

“America should leave Afghanistan. We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it. The ‘War on Terror’ was ‘made up’, Vidal says. ‘The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

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In the 1970s, when I worked as journalist in Saudi Arabia an average person on the street would describe the USA as “Shaitan” (or devil). When asked to explain why so, the Saudis were not quite articulate. But in general terms they described the collapse of family life, basic value system and ruthless materialism as signs when devils take over.

Saudis would have found their thoughts articulated better by Vidal. “Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America’s greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party.

“He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and – finally, bizarrely – befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

“Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been ‘a failure’. It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked ’somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.’ The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken ‘by the madhouse’ and the Chinese call in the country’s debts.

“A ruined United States will then be ‘the Yellow Man’s Burden’, and ‘they’ll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport’.”