Gore Vidal was right

WARNING: politics

“Thus the honest man has a reputation as a liar.”

I do not have Gore Vidal’s United States here with me, but I do remember something he wrote: the individual stories of history are largely an amalgam of facts accepted as genuine by a shifting majority. This was not some deconstructionist diatribe, rather Gore was resignedly accepting, among the controversies over his novel Lincoln, that his contemporaries’ self-serving gossip was being taken as fact. (Gore did not understand how Truman Capote, by far the worst offender, could never bring his astonishing gift of fabulism to his actual fiction.)

Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is dead, and Nick Berg's father says:

“Zarqawi felt my son’s breath on his hand as held the knife against his throat. Zarqawi had to look in his eyes when he did it,” Berg added, pausing to collect himself. “George Bush sits there glassy-eyed in his office with pieces of paper and condemns people to death. That to me is a real terrorist.”

In other news, the Donner family, late of the infamous Donner party, was stranded with a broken axle twenty-one miles behind the cannibals in the main party, munching on wildlife, roots and the family dog.

People do like to note that three-quarters of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi-born. No one likes to note that the Saudis had already exiled half of them from the kingdom. Zarqawi was Jordanian, as was Abu Nidal, and the kingdom of Jordan wanted them both dead, and performed valuable field assists to the American effort to bring a thousand pounds of high explosives to Zarqawi. Both countries are valuable American allies. Both have problems. Both are far less dysfunctional than, say, Egypt or Iran. Or, for that matter, Ba’athist Iraq or the Afghani Taliban.

Accepted facts. Handle with care.

All weakness tends to corrupt; impotence corrupts absolutely. — Spalding Gray