"Everybody with an IQ above room temperature is on to the con act of our media"

On the occasion of his 84th birthday, I feel it is important to once more celebrate the absolute genius that is Gore Vidal.

At a recent performance of the acclaimed West End play Mother Courage, Mr Vidal apparently stood and addressed the audience with an anti-war speech. His ascerbic analysis of the state of the Western world, and American society in particular, its wars, the duplicity and corruption of its politicians, and the lies peddled by the media, is legendary.

Read my blog on the wit and wisdom of Gore Vidal last year.

On the state of journalism today, he says:

"Everybody with an IQ above room temperature is on to the con act of our media. They are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public - which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing."

When asked how he thought President Barack Obama is doing:

“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.”

"America has no intellectual class and is rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is."

On the Republicans:

"Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred - religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Read this fascinating interview with the great man in The Times

Here is the man himself, doing what he does best - excoriating the lies of the media:

Gore Vidal in the media

Gore Vidal's partner of 53 years Howard Austen, who died in 2003, took myriad portrait photographs during their life together, from the handsome young Vidal to the older "man of letters".

His book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare is available from Amazon