Analysis

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

When serious matters were taken seriously

By: The Economist

Posted: 08/4/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Gore Vidal's death represents part of the changing of public discourse. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES)

222But Buckley continued comparing the war's opponents, who included Vidal, to Nazi appeasers.

Vidal retaliated with "the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself."

Furious, Buckley called Vidal "queer" and threatened to "sock (him) in the goddamn face."

Seen in isolation, this exchange can seem depressingly familiar: two political adversaries shouting past each other (albeit with some unusually harsh language) as they play to their respective ideological bases. But step back a bit and it becomes clear just how alien their testy debate is.

It is hard to imagine men like Vidal and Buckley, two snobbish East Coast intellectuals with lockjaw patrician accents, being invited onto prime-time television now to opine on the hot-button issues of the day.

Vidal's death earlier this week, at age 86, marks not only the loss of a provocative novelist and political thinker, but also the demise of a brand of public discourse. It seems there is no longer a place for the erudite and witty public intellectual in America. Instead of learned allusions to classical literature, public figures, including the president of the United States, are now expected to drop their Gs and speak knowledgeably about the cast of The Jersey Shore.

In part, this is a product of progress. The club of elite American public intellectuals lost in the last decade -- Vidal, Buckley, Christopher Hitchens and Norman Mailer, to name a few -- was decidedly male, largely white and upper-class, drawing its members from a few old-line private colleges and prep schools.

As higher education extends beyond a narrow, moneyed elite, mass audiences want experts who look and sound as idealized versions of themselves.

So we get Joe the Plumber lecturing Barack Obama on socialism and Irish pop stars lecturing heads of state on humanitarian relief in Africa.

Even card-carrying members of the elite, such as former president George W. Bush, are keen to play down their Ivy League educations and play up their love of clearing brush on the ranch. Punditry reflects the diversity of every other sphere of public life, and few need fear being called "queer" on national television.

But although we hear from a far broader spectrum of voices, the end of the era of unabashedly elite public intellectuals coincides with a loss of a certain unironic seriousness in popular culture.

The 1968 confrontation between Vidal and Buckley is famous today because of the way the two men sniped at each other, but before they descended into personal insults, the two men were engaged in a nuanced debate of constitutional principles. Buckley argued that Chicago's police could be forgiven for trying to silence protesters whose complaints might comfort America's enemies in Vietnam; Vidal countered that political dissent, no matter how provocative, is protected under the First Amendment.

The angry confrontation between these two men is remembered today largely because such outbursts were so rare, so embarrassing. But now, when much political debate is designed to be entertainingly diverting, the name-calling would have been the whole point.

With Gore Vidal's death, the world of letters has lost a valuable voice. And we have all lost yet another member of a generation of public figures that was willing, without apology or ironic deflection, to take serious matters seriously.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 4, 2012 A14

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