http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0623-01.htm<snip>
As everyone knows, Vidal for many years spent much of the time in Italy - then two years ago he moved out after losing both his long-time companion, Howard Austen, and the ability to walk. He moved back to southern California on a permanent basis. I asked him if he saw things in his homeland differently now that he no longer lived abroad.
"I was never an expatriate," he replies. "I was never considered to be that by anyone except for the far right. I had a house in southern Italy and another house in southern California - but in right-wing circles, that's enough to be considered an expat. America was what I always wrote about."
How is it, then, to live full-time in the United States?
"If you care about America it's dreadful," he said. "If you are making money you don't care.
<snip>
Why is it so dreadful to live in America, I asked.
"We have been deprived of our franchise," he says. "The election was stolen in both 2000 and 2004, because of electronic voting machinery which can be easily fixed. We've had two illegitimate elections in a row ...
"Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarised, everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of the government are in the hands of this junta.
"Whatever you are," he goes on, "they say you are the reverse. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam - but they spent millions of dollars proving that John Kerry, who was a genuine war hero whatever you think of his politics, was a coward.
"This is what happens when you have control of the media, and I have never known the media more vicious, stupid and corrupt than they are now."
<snip>
"Gore is always working, but with the door to the big study wide open," says Barbara Epstein, editor of the New York Review of Books, remembering her visits. "At night, after you have this wonderful pasta-infested dinner in the small but beautiful dining room - Howard was a wonderful cook - you listen to music in the salone and have a little of the very good local wine. It's very relaxed, even cosy...
"He's such a fabulous host because he loves company. It's really a house where he works - and he works hard - through the winter, and imagine he longs for company, as though he were saving up for you to come and be entertained..."
<snip>
"I'm not sentimental about places," Gore Vidal says - yet what seems more likely is that, behind his granite face and those dry, beautifully enunciated judgements, sentiment too painful to expose is festering. "I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my work room in Ravello," he tells the audience in Rome, and quotes a passage from Palimpsest, his earlier memoir: "A white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic grey sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever-more hostile sun.
"As I quote these lines, I will myself back to then, when Howard was still alive and our world had not yet cracked open."
....more
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