Why Gore Vidal shorts the future.
__ It was Karl Marx, not Gore Vidal, who said that history repeats itself - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But since Vidal has said practically everything else of interest and wit on the subject, he might as well have said that too. He has spent a half-century chronicling US history, in the six linked novels Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., while also knocking out thunderous essays, not to mention such hairpin turns as Myra Breckinridge; his most recent novel is The Smithsonian Institution. One of our literature's most caustic and seductive voices, a rich kid who early on nurtured an acerbic relationship with the spoils of capitalism, a libertarian's hero but also JFK's intimate - and Jackie's brother by marriage - Vidal has lived an erratically patriotic life that finally landed him on the Amalfi coast, looking back at us savages. What does the digital future look like from there? Al Gore is his cousin, which may or may not account for Vidal's defense of the Internet as an endangered emblem of Democracy. Yes, he has a computer - and a computer vassal to operate it.
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Wired: The scientist/nerd has become a new mythological hero. What's the next station in his journey?
Vidal:
"Mythological" is the wrong word. He's not a myth but a dim fact, like the Forbes list of the Truly Rich and Infamous. The physical sciences - not the arts and certainly not philosophy - are the central fact of the last three centuries. Interesting that three writers as different as Martin Amis (Time's Arrow), Tom Stoppard (Arcadia), and Gore Vidal should all be writing about physics as fiction, or vice versa.
Can we learn from history?
The United States of Amnesia has a very good reason not to cultivate a sense of the past, as our crimes against so many people might make us - not, God forbid, guilty, but jittery living in a world where we are, contrary to our unrelenting propaganda, detested.
Is "progress" a fiction?
Was the invention of cellophane progress? My father brought some home for me to look at in the '30s. DuPont had introduced it and no one knew what to do with the stuff. Now human progress, and some of my new novel, involves slow alterations of a Darwinian nature, like the withering away of the little toe or the addition of a third sphere to the brain. Incalculable.
You do take the long view, centuries-long at least.
I try to imagine it all from the big whimper on, and that puts our self-important race in a class with the viruses. I do look - hope - for change, but our short known history of 4,000 years or so tends to be more of the same, with variable interest rates.
So how does the "Digital Revolution" rate in revolutions the world has known?
Revolution, or evolution, or simply the latest gimmick? A subject I don't ponder. I still want to know what Iago meant when he said to Othello, "What you know, you know."
Lots of people have claimed that a Kennedy White House would never survive in this age of Internet/media frenzy. You're one of the few people actually in a position to know.
We always thought Jack would be shot - by an angry husband. But he was a cooler character than Clinton and I suspect would have stared down the enemy. Also, if he had to, he'd take everyone else with him. He would - and could - reveal everyone's sex life, and the government would fold. He was the greatest gossip I've ever known.
What's the biggest thing you've changed your mind about?
I was brought up, like all Americans, to believe that we were a peace-loving country whose bad luck it was to keep getting roped into other people's wars. Then, while writing Empire, I realized to what extent the Spanish-American War was cold-bloodedly planned, specifically by the assistant secretary of the Navy, mad little Theodore Roosevelt, and by Admiral Mahan, Cabot Lodge, and Brooks Adams - New England grandees with imperial longings. These four, exactly one century ago, maneuvered us into a war with Spain so that we could steal the Spanish colonial empire. Looking again at Burr, Lincoln, and 1876, I saw there was something big at the core of these narratives, something that as an American author I had missed in my own work: that plainly we are driven to conquest, whether by love of God or by some peculiar DNA code.
T., 13-year-old protagonist of your latest novel, The Smithsonian Institution, is your bid to rewrite that history, showing us what might have been an alternative future.
Woodrow Wilson provided us with World War I - after another invasion of Mexico, just for practice. It should be noted that, all through this, the American people, ignorant of geography and history, wanted no part of foreign wars. T. time-travels so that he can stop World War II, by stopping World War I, by keeping Wilson from becoming president.
Where would you time-travel?
Nowhere without anesthetics.
Do you find the future more interesting than it used to be?
Less interesting. The only hopeful sign I see is that our number two export, after weapons, is entertainment. Can Disney save us? Tune in to the next millennium. I haven't even made reservations, since, actually, I'm not going to spend much - if any - time there.
A good argument for cloning, perhaps?
What's the point of a physical duplicate when it is the mind-experience that is a person? Yet if memory could be saved at regular intervals, one might have a true immortality - very tempting in the sense that the more one knows, the more wonderful consciousness is.
A neural DAT backup. In the meantime, what tools do you use?
A fountain pen, yellow legal pads, the OED.
Do you have any concerns about the electronic supertome, whose screen will display the contents of innumerable books? (See "Ex Libris," page 98.)
Yes! How do we - the creators - get paid?
What will you write about next?
The loss of our Bill of Rights.
What advice would you give to a creative 23-year-old looking to make a difference in the world?
Read.
Did you ever get any good advice at that age, or any other?
My father warned me never to date a girl who called her mother Mummy. So I dated her brother and lived happily ever after.
