What happened to the days when Sontag, Chomsky, Vidal, Mailer, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Joan Didion, and Hannah Arendt would be on the late night chat shows?
What the flip happened?
************
I was just watching HBO's latest doc triumph, The 50 Year Argument, directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, which is about the history of the New York Review of Books.
(I do not read the New York Review of Books nearly enough. I generally only buy it when I am in superb indie bookstores -- which is nearly never now. The last one I bought was at Shakespeare & Company in Paris! In April!)
Anyhoo, the very fine documentary just made me pine for the 60s and 70s when so many of this nation's greatest thinkers would not only appear in print, but were eager to do television, as well.
The 50 Year Argument then led me to the above full length feature film, Town Bloody Hall. That film is bloody brilliant. It is Norman Mailer versus a half dozen leading feminists (and Susan Sontag, in the crowd), and a thousand or so other women in the crowd with Sontag.
You can watch The 50 Year Argument on HBO or HBOGo, and Town Bloody Hall on YouTube. Great stuff.
Still, what the fuck happened, man? Why is it all FoxNews and Housewives of Wherever now that rule our media world?
I posted some time ago a little thing-y about how John and Yoko starred in the first-ever Reality Show and that I thought that their "Show" was still by far the best and most nutritious we have yet seen. The photo attached was a silly screen grab from a recent Ranger game with bears behind home plate.
I mentioned Gore Vidal in the post, as he was one of the Witnesses/Commentators in a documentary about Lennon that was my inspiration for posting in the first place.
Then a few hours later, one of my friend-ies posted a video of the famous Norman Mailer/Vidal fight on the Cavett show many years ago. That video, seen above, actually has a misleading title, by the way. It is actually Cavett who pwns Mailer, notVidal, making Mailer look like an egotistical buffoon.
(It is entirely possible that there was absolutely no cause or effect between these two posts, granted. But I am not a big believer in accidents or coincidences and the chain, or history, is what it is.)
Someone "liked" my friend-ie's post and then a mutual friend of ours posted his own video in the comments underneath, see above, saying, "my favorite is watching William F. Buckley lay into Vidal". This video is even more famous than the Cavett one. This is the famous incident wherein Buckley threatened to punch Vidal after Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi". It happened on live television during coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The link for the video above is to YouTube, as was the original Cavett video, too. The link my friend provided was not to YouTube but to a Conservative/Libertarian blog.
I was stunned. Then furious. But I cooled my boots and commented simply, "good grief, ... ".
Gosh, you might say, What is there to be mad about? I mean, that video is hilarious, a laugh riot. What is funnier than watching William F. Buckley call Vidal a queer and threaten to sock him in the face so hard he will "stay plastered"? Nothing, right?
What is not so funny are the near sixty thousand US soldiers killed in Vietnam. Or the hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese. Or the autogenocide that happened in Cambodia after Nixon's secret bombing campaign there. Or the four dead students at Kent State who were protesting the secret bombing. Or the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. Or the way that the Vietnam War tore families and this nation apart and scarred us for life.
Of course, Buckley supported the Vietnam War. It fit perfectly in to his long standing Crusade Against Communism, which included writing a pro-McCarthy Red Scare book with L. Brent Bozell Jr, the father of L. Brent Bozell III, (and Buckley's nephew) who created the Media Research Center, which ostensibly fights "liberal media bias" in this country.
The friend who posted the Buckley/Vidal video is a Libertarian and a supporter of isolationist, Ron Paul. I cannot imagine that he would actually support the Vietnam War. Which means that he posted an off-topic Conservative chestnut video to score cheap political points and make Gore Vidal look bad.
