Re: Dubya does Delhi: will the chimps make rude noises?
John Lacny wrote:
That said, I find it disconcerting that she is singled out for contempt when there are plenty of other talented writers with shallow left politics (Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer come to mind) who aren’t held to such a high standard. In fact, their crankiness is often taken as a charming curmudgeonly virtue.
Not by me. I don’t know enough about Mailer to comment, but Vidal seems to me to be an upper-class nativist and xenophobe of the sort that leftists are too soft on. I interviewed him hours after Pim Fortuyn was shot - he hadn’t heard about it until I told him - and his first reaction was that the killer was probably a homophobe. He added that Europeans are right to be concerned about protecting the integrity of their culture. He also flirts with anti-Semitism and conspiracism. He’s a witty writer, but a rather foul person (his memoirs gave me the creeps - he said he’d never loved anyone since a prep school crush who died young, and that seeing a lover’s erection made him lose his own). I’d keep my distance from him.
Doug