Elegy for a Crackpot

The NatPo's Robert Fulford pens an unaccountably reverent send off to "iconoclast" Gore Vidal. I prefer Bruce Bawer's irreverent "tribute" to the old crank:

He despised capitalism; he ridiculed what he considered Americans’ naïve enthusiasm for a freedom he regarded as a chimera; and he mercilessly mocked religion, Christianity above all (although the way in which he wrote about Israel and about certain Jewish authors led many to peg him, not unfairly, as an anti-Semite). To the supremely cynical Vidal, America was a “national-security state” run by power-mad oligarchs whose perfidious designs, obvious to him, escaped the notice of the moronic, mouth-breathing multitudes. (One of the paradoxes of Vidal is that even as he professed to be deeply concerned about the life circumstances and prospects of the American people, his prose dripped with condescension toward them.)

Bawer sums him up thus:

His career is a cautionary tale of a considerable intellect in thrall to an ego that, more and more, commanded him to shock and sneer as if from an imperial height – the consequence being that, increasingly, he merely captured attention and caused bemusement where he might, instead, have delivered insight, illumination, and wisdom. 

Also, he wrote Myra Breckinridge. 'Nuff said.

Here's my salute to the man:

There once was a writer named Gore,
A snob who wrote nonsense galore.
Anyone who'd read Burr
Couldn't help but concur
That most of his books were a snore.

Update: Hitchens on Vidal--a must-read (h/t BCF).