Vidal, Keillor: 2 infantile liberals

Essays are what he is good at … [h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating.

~ Martin Amis, literary critic, on Gore Vidal

Prologue

Two doyens of liberalism were recently in the news. One was the octogenarian icon of the secular left who first appeared in the late 1940s with “The City and the Pillar” (1948), a sexual tome that infuriated mainstream critics in that this was one of the first major American novels to feature conspicuous homosexuality. My second critique is of Garrison Keillor, the outspoken liberal radio host and popular author whose essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com.

Gore Vidal: a petite Leni Riefenstahl

Gore Vidal, in an article published in the London Times online last week, was lamenting that America had just elected a “dictatorship,” referring to the administration of Barack Obama.

Vidal must have been in a coma for the past 9 months since King Obama’s coronation. When asked how Obama is doing, Vidal snapped back:

“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.” … The “War on Terror” was “made up,” Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction.'”

Vidal could not see that 2008 was in reality 1938, when all the liberals, socialists and anti-war peaceniks of that day groveled beneath the feet of Hitler at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and tried in vain to placate this megalomaniac’s insatiable lust for power and adulation by selling out our religious allies, the Jews, and our military allies, Czechoslovakia and Poland – a shameless cowardice that came to a crescendo when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as the king of the appeasers, proudly waved in the air the Munich Treaty he and Hitler just signed, saying, “We have peace in our time.”

Peace in our time? Did we then, Neville Chamberlain? Do we now, Gore Vidal?

For 83 long years, Vidal has been in a time warp of liberalism and perversity and has gleefully helped take American culture to the brink of the abyss. In a sane, rational society, Vidal’s writings and ideas would be ignored, and Vidal the old man made comfortable at a nice asylum with padded walls – not published on the front pages of the New York Times whose “imagination” is lauded as “so powerful as to compel awe!”

Indeed, these are not very sane and rational times we are living in during the Age of Obama.

Garrison Keillor: a petite Walter Duranty

My second critique is of the affable Garrison Keillor, a fixture of contemporary liberalism whose folksy mannerisms belie the absolutely hideous liberal ideas he has given America during his long, unremarkable career as the host of “The Prairie Home Companion” and “Lake Wobegon” on National Public Radio.

In a provocative article in the Chicago Tribune, Keillor is lamenting over the endless culture wars that are going on between the left and the right and in exasperation says: “The sheer waste of time – years, decades, spent on thrilling public issues in which the unconservative right fights tooth-and-nail against the regressive left and nothing is gained. It’s like a tug-of-war between two trees.”

While the advent of the progressive movement of 1890s witnessed the decline of classical liberalism, humanism and the Age of Enlightenment, it ushered in the age of anti-intellectualism, anti-industrialism, statism, fascism and the culture of death, climaxed by Roe v. Wade (1973), a case that sanctioned the murder of 50 million innocent babies under the color of law. If the intellectual cache of international recognition so lavished upon Vidal can be measured by the body count of one’s ideas, then we must not only venerate the progressivism of Gore Vidal and Keillor, but at least give Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot an honorable mention, right?

About the only useful idea in that quote by Keillor is the word “regressive.” Liberals for the past 120 years have called themselves “progressives.” This is a lie, for there is not one progressive idea in liberalism. It’s all regressive and fixated on the idea of perverting the Constitution so that the negative rights extolled in the Bill of Rights are not rightly directed at Congress and the courts, but against We the People.

Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a “Fair Deal,” a “New Deal,” the “Great Society,” No Child Left Behind, Change We Can Believe In, Cash for Clunkers, health-care reform … is just the same putrid corpse lying in a different colored coffin.

Epilogue to ‘the embalmer’s art’

Vidal, Keillor and the legions of useful idiots of the socialist left will never understand that above all human nature yearns to be free; that 222 years ago the American republic was the first successful experiment in government to unleash that spirit so that our citizenry would one day be free to fulfill Jefferson’s eternal promise – Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Government cannot provide happiness. Government can only defend its citizens or enslave its citizens with yet another addictive welfare program, class-warfare scheme, tax and in the end … a coffin.

While Vidal ridiculed the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan as the “triumph of the embalmer’s art,” Keillor prophetically said, “Old men shouldn’t be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived.”

Indeed, Mr. Gore Vidal, Mr. Garrison Keillor and President Barack Obama, your replacements have arrived and they are – God, America’s Founding Fathers and We the People. Society will only get better when we stop listening to fascist, perverted ideas of liberalism that have taken America to the brink of ruination. We must look to God, the Founding Fathers and within to remake America’s republic based on Veritas (truth), law, morality and the Judeo-Christian traditions of intellectual thought.