A few years ago, graciously deigning to appear on a British
talk-show, Gore Vidal was irked to find himself interrupted in
mid-flow by the host, Clive Anderson. “I’m not finished yet,” he
snapped.

“Well, who knows?,” said Anderson. And he has a point. Vidal is
never finished. Across the unbounded horizons of his masterful
vision, a vast army of name-dropping anecdotes, droll aphorisms,
doubtful statistics, and dubious propositions trots languidly in
service of the wearily magisterial controversialist’s
idiosyncratic thesis of the twentieth century, one as remarkably
indifferent to humdrum reality as the man himself. In an ideal
world, he might have been another Cole Porter or Noel Coward,
content to glitter brilliantly on the surface. Instead, he’s the
Noel Coward of conspiracy theorists, bitching queenily in the
subterranean canyons of America’s dark heart.

On this side of the ocean, with two-hundred television channels,
most of us are glued happily to the wrestling network or the
lesbian station, blissfully unaware that somewhere out there on
channel 187 the old boy is still going through his well-loved
routine. In Britain, with (until recently) only three or four
channels, the chances of encountering Vidal are far higher. For
one thing, he prides himself on being an expert on not just
U.S. affairs, but also on those of the United Kingdom, France,
Italy, you name it. Some years back, he appeared on the BBC and
launched into one of his little riffs about how every major
decision in Britain was made