And Nothing Has Changed

“Gore was himself angry, and very disappointed in what human beings had done and were doing to our planet. His country was among the most powerfully predatory destroyers. Its puritan tradition devoured people’s natural instincts and chances for happiness by rigid, self-serving moralism. Its expansive and self-deluding greed was making dollar materialism more triumphant than ever. In Vietnam we were destroying a semi-helpless people, wasting our own substance, coarsening our national life, dividing America with an intensity that threatened national chaos. And literature seemed to be fading away into either an artifact from the past or the preserve of an elite few.”

Those were Gore Vidal’s reflections in 1965, and none of that has changed, except that we’ve added a couple of more Vietnams and moved closer to national chaos. The people on the tracks who can see the approaching lights of a train are called "pessimists" by those facing in the wrong direction.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan