19 May 2019

Two Great American Intellects: Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky

Frank Li

America faces a wide variety of deficits, from the budget (U.S. deficit swells to $691 billion in first half of 2019) to trade (Trump's Plan to Reduce Trade Deficit Falters as it Hits an All-Time High Instead). However, the worst deficit is intellectual - We can no longer think properly - America: It's Democracy, Stupid!

In this post, I will highlight two great American intellects: Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky, focusing on their strong opposition to America's #1 enemy at home: The Evil Military-Industrial Complex.


1. Who is Gore Vidal?

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (/vɪˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.[1][2]

Vidal was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907 - 1921 and 1931 - 1937). He was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).[3]

As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire.[4] His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual.[5]

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