The other night Alyson and I watched "Gore Vidal's The American Presidency: Heroes or Villains?" (what an astoundingly klutzy title!), a video collecting Vidal's three-part series on the presidency, made for the BBC and the History Channel in 1999 but played here only once, in a highly bowdlerized version. As Alyson noted, no way could they ever get away with playing something like that here, without comment.

Thoughts:

1.) The style of the program is refreshingly far from the Ken Burns/History Channel technique, which pumps so much fake-drama into an essentially static form that it ends up like Digiorno frozen pizza; soggy, cardboard-base and still just as far as ever from the real thing. In one of my classes last year we watched a documentary on the anniversary of the Constitutional Convention. It consisted of three 15-minute interviews with experts on the Constitution. No camera tricks, no frills, no dramatic music. Far from being boring, it was actually riveting - kids my age are programmed to respond to EVERYTHING on television, and we're accustomed to everything important being thrust right at us, so when the camera holds on something, our first reaction is to think "Damn, that must be important!" and become glued to the screen.

2.) The program consists of Vidal sitting at a table and talking, with occasional clips flashing up now and then. At times, these clips are merely amusing (a clip of Nixon warming up for his farewell address, and clowning around like a frat boy); at times, astonishing (a sound clip of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech - why the hell don't they give us this stuff in high school history?). It's an admirably simple and eminently watchable format.

3.) Vidal, as usual, waxes rhapsodic over the noble Founding Fathers. Even when he spouts the old Charles Beard economic interpretation of the Constitution (long discredited, but still a favorite of the lazy left), his heart never seems to be in it. Jefferson seems to be the only man he admires without much reservation.

4.) As much as I adore Vidal's essays, I find his novels a bit hard to slog through. For one thing, every single character talks like him, and being stuck in a big mansion full of Gore Vidals spouting expository dialogue ("My word, Secretary Seward! Does the president really mean to suspend habeas corpus? Such a thing was not done even when the British sacked Washington in 1813!") is a bit tiresome after a while. Yet he's a fantastic character to see holding forth on any subject. I find it tough to apply any critical standards to him at all. It's like listening to a retired Shakespeare character telling you all the things that old Will left out.

5.) Vidal's villains are familiar: Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and the rest of the cabal who took us into the Spanish-American War and made of our republic an empire-in-the-cradle. He's unsentimental about FDR. Truman he regards as the worst of the worst: a "machine politician" posing as the guy next door. Disappointingly, he doesn't comment on Clinton.

6.) Vidal is ambivalent about our most fascinating president, Lincoln, whom he regards as simultaneously a ruthless tyrant and a great man. I personally have never accepted the "sic semper tyrannis" view of Lincoln, and think it might better be applied to Jefferson Davis (the Confederacy, with its ruthless one-party rule over a nation in which it was illegal to even discuss the abolition of slavery, was in many ways the first modern totalitarian state), but Vidal's reading of Lincoln's great "towering genius disdains a beaten path" speech is spine-chillingly powerful. It reminds you of the power locked in those words, a power that can be felt in most of Lincoln's writings, but which remains somewhat obscured by AL's cornball image.

7.) The program ends on a somber note, with Vidal sadly noting that all the presidents' wars, "as it were" (a Masterpiece Theatre-style rhetorical gesture that probably comes easier than breathing to Vidal), had brought them some degree of glory but that their major effect was to deprive the country of millions of its sons. A gloomy thought, but one that ought to give us something at least to be grateful for - had popular discontent not forced the U.S. government to give up the draft, imagine how many countless more lives might be wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq.