When I consider my chutzpa in quibbling, as I intend to here, with anything Gore Vidal has to say I smile wanly at the absurdity of it. I harbor an unreserved admiration for his writing. He has delighted and even thrilled me over the years with the angle from which he comes at ideas and his elegant vision.

Vidal (inset) recently engaged in this exchange with Kera Bolonik of BOOKFORUM:

BF: A few critics have declared the American novel dead. GV: I don’t think the novel is dead. I think the readers are dead. The novel doesn’t interest anybody, and that’s largely because there are no famous novelists. Fame means that you are touching everybody or potentially touching everybody with what you’ve done—that they like to think about it and exchange views on it.

It’s possible, just barely, I’ve written some novels that could, with hooplah and luck, become best-sellers. We’ll see about that when they see light of day. But my view—not as much humble as painfully arrived at after a lifetime of study and prayer—is that if I’ve written anything that illuminates the mind of another soul, then I’m a writer, a novelist. Maybe not a famous one, but a blessed one, and worthy of the name.

I don’t conceive of success as a numbers game or a horse race. I see it as having given a damn and having shed a small light on a very dark path.

My view, unlike Vidal’s, is alchemical. And yet he’s no stranger to alchemy himself, having spent handsomely of his resources and spirit to transmute our base politics to gold with his elixirs of clarity and idealism.

His is a grand view, saddened by the squalid commercialism that has swamped us. Mine is that the work of the alchemist has never been to serve the masters of the universe, but rather to transform us one by one.

I don’t think Vidal would like to think of his splendid canon as having edified  but a few of us. Why should he? He has reached an immense audience and earned every member of it.

My ambition could be handily seen as the self-justifying of a remarkably neglected author. Some might even say deservedly neglected. But that too remains to be seen. I’m content to believe that a flash of light emanating from something I’ve written will someday reorder the synapses of someone’s brain for the better. That’s all the true alchemists ever wanted. The rest is market economics and grandiosity.

I’m sure this precarious state of grace, wherein my ambition frequently soils my gratitude, comes of conceiving my work as a writer as a continuous act of prayer and, yet again, a co-operative venture with the almighty to whom I pray and owe whatever craftmanship I have.

I think any politician or lobbyist convicted of corruption should be sentenced to listen to Henry Kissinger and John Kerry for years on end. And if they’ve really been bad, they should have to watch them pontificate before morning coffee.

The difference is I have confidence that eventually, by the most tortuous route, Henry Kissinger will say something I understand. I’ll disagree with him, I’m sure, but I’ll get it. I have no such faith when it comes to John Kerry. He doesn’t talk circles around ideas, he ties ideas into loops. I don’t know if the Kerry people have noticed it, but when you Google the word waffles the first thing that comes up is the official John Kerry web site. I wouldn’t call the senator a waffler. It’s more like he reconnoiters an idea until it goes out of style.

The other day I heard Mr. Kissinger in the next room say we can’t win the war in Iraq. Ah, so that’s what we were trying to do? His thoughts eventually emerge from the ponderosities, but I rarely think it was worth waiting for, and I always fear I’m going to get sick and die before they arrive.

I know CNN and Fox know why we’re in Iraq. But I think they’re withholding the information for security reasons. They’ve been using scarlet visuals and war-drum sound tracks for years. I think it’s called telegraphing the story line, as if they already knew the ending. But I found it passing strange nobody bothered to ask Mr. Kissinger, who had given the war his seal of approval, just what victory was supposed to look like. But now that it has slipped away, I guess it doesn’t matter any more than it mattered to the hawks in the first place.

As for Mr. Kerry, well I sometimes think I know what he thinks because the pundits tell me what he thinks. It’s as if they’ve been listening to the real Senator Kerry, whoever he is. But without the pundits I’m not sure any of us would know. He had a much better education than I did, but somehow Yale failed to convince him that simple, declarative sentences mere humans can parse are Ivy League hallmarks.

That’s why I admire John Murtha these days. I know he stands on the wrong side of many things I hold dear, but the man can get a thought out of his mouth without mutilating it.

On general principle I think we should vote against anybody who hews to a party line, anyone who is clear only about which fence he’s sitting on, anybody who can’t say I don’t know, and anybody who panders to the right, left and middle. That would leave us with a fairly level playing field.

Arizona thinks everybody should be required to speak English. Good for you, Arizona—start with the politicians.

I also think we should start electing comedians to high office. True, a lot of bad comedy acts are already playing in government, but they’re not comedians, they’re wannabes. Real comedians know how to talk straight. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t laugh.

That’s why I loved Frank Gorshin, the late impressionist. He always made me understand just how I felt about public figures, for better or worse. Can you imagine him doing John Kerry? I can. But I’m not sure how he’d do Henry Kissinger. I know he could, though.

And oh how he’d do the President! He’d have us remembering every pugnacious, condescending schoolyard bully we ever met. But would we laugh? I don’t know. It’s too close to home. John Kerry is funny, if you’re not desperate for a Democrat in the White House. Henry Kissinger is funny in his own way, mellifluating inexorably like molasses towards a conclusion everyone but you calls brilliant. But George Bush? Ah, well, we’ll never know, because Frank is gone. But there’s Steve Bridges. He makes us realize that presidents, if they do nothing else for us, are good for a laugh or two.

There’s actually something Frank couldn’t do. In fact, it’s pretty hard for any comedian to do. How do you make us laugh at all those fathead ponderozos who solemnly assured us going into Iraq was a great idea and now appear nightly on television just as if they’d never said it? How can they look at themselves in the mirror? We believed them. How can we look at ourselves in the mirror? And how are we going to eke out a laugh at our folly? They owe us some big-time apologies, but we won’t get them. What’s so bad about saying: Yes, I said it, and I was wrong, I apologize? Do they think maybe CNN and Fox would kick the soapbox out from under them? Not a chance. Without them, there would have to be more reporting, and that would cost a whole lot more than these nightly bafflegabbers.

We need a whole bunch of Frank Gorshins and Steve Bridges. We need a Comedy Party. The Greens are a long way off from taking over, but I think a Comedy Party would sweep into office on a tidal wave of guffaws. Americans have always enjoyed a good joke, even on themselves, but we seem to have reached a point where we need to remember to laugh.

And may I suggest one humble plank in the platform of our new majority party? Ban from the airwaves all the pundits and retired generals and self-serving think-tank flounders.

Connecting the dots between the horrors we’ve committed is like connecting the stars, and yet I think I know what the horrors have in common: fear of women, fear of children.

Pomp, blather and ideology serve the oppression of women’s eternal potentiality and the psychic gifts with which children arrive in our dangerous care.

Just as corporate greed smirks behind self-righteous apocalypticism, so fear of women lurks behind extremists and their self-serving phallocentrism. The Taliban’s treatment of women is a raw and religiose version of the lengths to which church, state and enterprise go in the West to deprive women of equality.

I once asked an Episcopal parish priest to explain why women should not be priests. He regarded the benighted boob before him with pity and pronounced, Our Lord didn’t call any women to be apostles. When I had regained some measure of composure I said, For the love of God, He didn’t call any Ukrainians either. I’ve always been pleased that I used that cliché, for the love of God, precisely because there wasn’t any love of God in the priest’s answer. This almost comic incident epitomized, to me at least, the crime of institutionally harming half of humanity in the name of bogus dogma, to say nothing of the fact that our knowledge of the life of Mary Magdalene haunt’s the church’s misogyny.

Our success in convincing children that they don’t see what they clearly do see and don’t know what they clearly do know is equaled only by our success in coercing them to help us cover up the abuses visited on them.

We’re addicted to the hyperbolic world created by the pervasive abuse of children. Its operatics hold us in their demeaning thrall. We’re as vigilant as grand inquisitors for the few children who have survived their upbringing with their birthright senses intact. We do all we can to ostracize and marginalize such freaks. If we must, we’ll institutionalize and drug them. If we accidentally marry them, we’ll destroy them and blame it all on them.

The hypocrisy required to sustain this tragic crime manifests in all manner of diseases which we dutifully treat as if they were separable from their psychic causes.

We cook up all sorts of phony concerns—stem cell research, same-sex marriage, flag burning, the ordination of women—to distract us from our criminal pursuits. Our excesses—obscene consumerism, war-making, blindness to the human misery in our midst, fanaticism, greed—inure us to the consequences of our behavior. We’re doing this for your own good, we tell our victims. There’s no antidote to the poison of believing this.

I think the advertised omnipresence of women in the West has frightened a significant number of dimwits in Christendom, Islam, Israel and India. They see a world in which half the human race might have its say, and they don’t want any part of it. Such a world is a house of horrors to them. They pile a lot of words around their misogyny, but it can’t hide the fact that in the society they want women will be shadows.

To say American society was attacked on September 11, 2001, is diversionary. It reeks of convenience. We are the society from which a vision of the liberated woman is beamed to the rest of the world. For this we were attacked. Regressive elements in our society disdain this vision, but we remain its origin. The phallo-goons of the world perceive us as determined to let women run amok in the world, as men have from the beginning.

When the Republicans in the United States saw the politics of sub rosa, coded racism and polarization circling the drain they began to whip up fear of Nancy Pelosi becoming the first woman to serve as speaker of the House of Representatives. Oh, we’re not concerned about her being a woman, they assured us, it’s just that she’s so liberal, and she’s from San Francisco, and you know what that means. The country knew exactly what it all meant, and it had had enough.

We oppose women clerics, corporate and war leaders for reasons that sound no less disingenuous than the Taliban’s. But in our society we’re constrained to pay lip service to ideas we abominate, which is why the smirk is as common as flag pins on blue suits in Washington.

We’re not engaged in a great patriotic crusade against Islamo-fascists. We’re engaged in a worldwide conflict over whether women and children will be treated decently. If the battle lines are drawn more sharply in Muslim countries it’s only because a consensus has yet to form among them as to which century to inhabit.

This war is a disgrace from which none of us will emerge unsoiled. The longer we persist in couching it in terms of oil, arms and ideology the harder it will be to admit to ourselves that it’s about the denigration of women and the warping of children into video-game figures.

It’s time to give our mouths a rest and look each other in the eye for a long, silent, thoughtful time, the way the great Renaissance artist Artemisia
Gentileschi (inset, Judith Beheading Holofernes) looked at the male-dominated world that betrayed her. Without the other half of the human race we are mean cripples.

I always thought the Palestinians would have had better luck with American public opinion if Yasser Arafat had looked like Omar Sharif, and it wouldn’t have hurt the Israelis if Benjamin Netanyahu had been able to put on something other than that oily smirk of his.

But we don’t like to admit our opinions are influenced by faces any more than we like to admit the thoughts we have about each other are often X-rated.

We’re pretty well resigned as a species to a certain amount of pretense and hypocrisy justified in the main by our fear of chaos if it were otherwise.

Which leads me to Saddam Hussein. I don’t dislike his face, although I think I ought to. Sometimes I actually like it. And when I think about this dilemma I remember the day I walked out of The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, basking in the remembered light of Adolph Hitler’s smile. I had just seen Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. On the one hand, it’s enough to cure a lover of blondes for a while, but on the other hand it’s enough to cause you to ask yourself, just for a moment, if this is really the guy you grew up hating.

Well, that’s the nature of propaganda, and when it came to propaganda Ms. Riefenstahl and Josef Goebbels had few peers, if any. There was the big lie in sun-struck black and white. The happy-making Führer and his beautiful idolators. I had to slap myself upside the head as I stood outside a building Der Führer and his master builder, Albert Speer, would have loved, in a grandiose city they would have loved. A city where the Big Lie is almost indistinguishable from all the little lies that sicken our body politic every day.

What a wonderful guy he was, I said to myself. Then I said, You’re sick, Marbrook, really sick. But I was only having the same reaction millions of other human beings had had.

Have you ever seen a photograph of William H. Bonney? How could the legend of Billy the Kid have grown up around that moronic face?

The obvious moral is that evil often wears an endearing if not beautiful face; goodness often wears a common if not homely face. And our own faces don’t always reflect our most telling thoughts. If they did, children wouldn’t be molested, women wouldn’t be date-raped, many of our clergy would have to abandon the pulpit, many of our leaders would leave town in disgrace, but we would be forewarned about each other, for better or worse.

Oscar Wilde, as was his wont, complicated the issue immensely when he observed that by the time we’re forty we pretty much have the faces we deserve. I’m inclined to believe him, but the implications are awful.

I remember the faces of the men and women who molested me in boarding school and elsewhere. Nothing in them forewarned me. And afterwards, when I had been, like millions of others, irreparably damaged, nothing in their faces told the story, nothing reminded me of it. I was left to my doubts, left to think that of all the children they had encountered I alone had somehow incurred their justifiable tampering with me. That’s how they get away with it, the evildoers. They make us doubt ourselves.

Sometimes I think we are forewarned and choose to ignore the signals. I’m not convinced Der Führer always looked as he did for Ms. Rienfenstahl’s slavish camera. I’m not convinced we haven’t noticed the smirk on Mr. Netanyahu’s face or our President’s. I think we just ignore them and hope (pray?) for the best.

I don’t know why the Palestinian street sent up great huzzahs for Mr. Arafat. I don’t know if Paul Newman’s face could get him elected president. But I know, intuitive as I am, I am all too often misled by a comforting face, and all too often misled by a discomforting one, just as I know people are misled by my own face, which some find severe and unwelcoming.

Again and again over a lifetime I’ve searched the photographed faces of World War II German soldiers and officers, looking for the historic evil that disfigured my century. Rarely do I find it. I think I saw it in the handsome face of Reinhard Heydrich, but I didn’t find it in Adolph Eichmann. Did the Israelis who captured and tried him? Or were they too baffled?

The late Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” She might as well, as Charles Baudelaire did, have written of its beauty. Or its commonness, for that matter. I think in a sidelong glance I’ve glimpsed it in church, on the street, all the usual unexpected places. I think we all do, but for the sake of convenience—because we don’t know what kind of a world we’d have if we let ourselves be more honest—we overlook it.

We do choose books and people by their covers. We may know better, but acting as if we don’t is easier. We’re fond in the West of saying we make decisions based on the free flow of plentiful information. But that’s not how we got into the Iraq war. We were conned into that war by suspending our disbelief. Yes, we were told lies, but the lies were more palatable than the much more complex truth.

Now, when we listen to journalists and scholars tell us that Arabs live in a myth-based society and therefore can’t be persuaded that fact-based democracies will give them better lives than dogma-based theocracies, we should remember that many of our sons and daughters, and many of Iraq’s, have been killed because we preferred myth to the more intellectually demanding truth. In short, the Arabs aren’t the only ones who prefer myth.
The lust of Taliban, al Qaeda, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, all extremists, for simple answers will bring us nothing but misery and disgrace. Extremists seek to put the brakes on human evolution, to return to halcyon simpler times that never really existed. The evolution of the human race depends on our understanding our responses to each other’s faces, to the covers of books and other things. It depends on our ability to assess facts, to savor them, to respect them. It depends on our willingness to allow each other to evolve in different ways. The siren song of the extremists is that they know the truth. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush and their pig-headed advisors knew the truth. What they knew, it turns out, is that our elected representatives preferred to be gullible. Truth was never an issue.

I think lies, the flowers of evil, are often much more alluring than truth, and at the end of the day this may be a democratic society’s nemesis. I think we consent to a certain mutilation in order to get along. I think there is little difference between sexual and psychic mutilation, and a more advanced civilization will come to see this. I think the process of growing up is often the destruction not only of our innocence but our intuitive powers in the name of some common good that can go as haywire as Germany went. I think we consent too much.

I think—you were waiting breathlessly for what I think, right?—I think Americans need to change our job description. I mean, we didn’t exactly clamor to be alpha consumerists, did we? It was sort of foisted on us by people who had a lot to sell. They promised us that if we bought all they had to sell they’d keep on raising our salaries, securing our old age, and in general helping us pursue what they called the American Dream. We elected politicians who assured us this was true. They swore it up and down. They’re still swearing it up and down. The difference is we don’t trust them any more.

They didn’t keep their promise, did they? No, they froze our salaries, they even cut them. They stole our benefits and started shipping our jobs to India and China. And now the big heads that fill our pricey HDTV and plasma screens every night are telling us we’re a second-rate nation, and the future is over there where they sent our jobs. And all because we were so obedient and trusting.

So why not chuck our job description as alpha consumerists and assume the job of giving a damn about each other? Would that be fun or what?
We could say to the big multinationals, Hey guys, you know what, if our young people are going to risk their lives protecting you, we want you to bring your fake headquarters back from Bermuda and pay taxes right here in the good old US of A. Oh yeah, and the next time you screw us with piratical gasoline prices, guess what, we ain’t rewarding you with any tax breaks. Got it?

We could say, Yeah, we like gewgaws and doodads, but we like our fundamental faith in human decency even more. We don’t want our grandparents to die miserable, neglected deaths in rat holes. We don’t want our poor kids to have to kowtow to spoiled brats because we couldn’t afford to educate them. And hey, you politicians, the next time you send any of our kids to war you better make damned sure some of your own are with them.

We could say these things. So why don’t we? Why do we let greedy bastards and their ass-kissing politico stooges tell us to shut up and buy, and when our credit cards and our equity are maxed out, hock ourselves to China? We’re better than that, aren’t we? Smarter too.

Oh yeah, and you phony hand-wringers worrying out loud about our kids’ math and reading scores, you’re not so dang smart yourselves if you think we haven’t figured out that this middle class you’re trying to bleed
to death happens to be your market. Or is it your plan that by the time we figure that out the market will have moved to Asia along with our future?
Doesn’t matter much to you, right? You can do business in Shanghai as
well as Cincinnatti. right? Doesn’t matter what flag you do it under, right? Except of course when you get in trouble, you’ll be asking us to die for your right to make another buck at our expense.

All we have to do is trade in our alpha consumerist job description and remember that rugged individualism doesn’t mean buying ourselves into poverty while fat cats laugh themselves sick in their offshore Shangri-Las.
We get to define the kind of capitalism we want. Where is it written we ever gave globe-trotting pirates permission to define it? Where is it written that we can’t have a polite and searching discourse about what is a moral profit margin in a humane society?

I don’t think we live long enough to become wise. Most of us wouldn’t use a longer life to do that anyway. Ignorance is such fun. With wisdom comes responsibility, a burdensome sense of the interconnectedness of things, and so our freedom to be feckless exhibitionists would be dampened. Besides, the facts are so noisome.

Perhaps that’s why we prefer a market-driven tastemaking apparatus; it relieves us of the task of appraising a development or a product for ourselves. We let the marketers do their research, and, voila, that’s how we feel! They say they’ve taken our pulse and they’re giving us what we want. I’ve never personally experienced a marketer asking me anything, but then again I’m a bit reclusive.

It makes matters like education and war simple. They respond to whatever the market will bear. After all, hasn’t education become a cost-prohibitive matter of doing as little as we we can for a fancy little piece of paper and then make money? And as for war, well, the big brains have yet to imagine an economy without the military-industrial complex.

But suppose we had a population that didn’t give a damn about the best-seller lists, didn’t care about who’s running ahead or who’s running neck-and-neck, and was perfectly capable of making up its own mind about quality, decency, honesty and capability? That is, of course, what we say we have now, but if we really did it would be a disaster for our tastemakers to the booboisie.

I’ve lived just long enough and gotten just smart enough to be appalled by my sterling record as a boob. For the sheer number of questions I haven’t asked there is, alas, nothing to be applied directly to the forehead. My tables are stacked with books I haven’t read. There are nations full of faces I haven’t seen, ideas that have never darkened my threshold. The things I haven’t done are like a sky full of stars, unreachable and exquisite, and yet there’s no one to whom I’m not connected, nothing that doesn’t affect me. That’s a smidgen of wisdom, isn’t it?

(Note: Fukurokuju (inset) is Chinese god of wisdom, wealth and longevity).

—DM