Book review - "The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001" by Gore Vidal

The received opinion on Gore Vidal seems to be that he is a better essayist than novelist - I admit to being of that received opinion, too,although as Dennis Altman, a biographer of Vidal's has asked, "have you ever read any of the novels?" (Only two, I confess - Myra Breckinridge and Washington DC). This collection shows him to be in decent though declining form - it reminded me of the last decade of reviews from Pauline Kael where it sometimes felt she was going through the emotions. Vidal is always worth reading when he's on a few topics in particular - reminisces about famous people he has known or vaguely knows, and literature. Here there are lovely pieces on Isabel Bolton, Lindbergh, Albert Gore and his family and C P Cavafy. However when he's on politics Gore Vidal becomes increasingly boorish - whining about increased military spending, the military superstate, how evil America is, the impositions on the bill of rights, etc, etc - I know this sort of stuff has its place, its just that Vidal's treatment is dull, repetitive and gets annoying after a while. (He reminds me of Bob Ellis, a similar renaissance man and mostly brilliant essayist who gets de-focused through his anger down on the topics of the evils of the world. I'm not saying don't write about them, just don't forget your humour and fresh insight that you bring to other topics.) The biographer of Vidal I mention above pointed out Vidal is a very American left winger - in that, he is still being a self centered American because he thinks America is responsible for all the ills of the world. The thing that most annoyed me about this book was Vidal going on about how FDR provoked Japan into World War Two - because, he had the audacity to want them to stop invading China??? George W Bush, OK, Cold War shenanigans,OK - but provoking World War Two?? "Japan had no choice". Yeah, right.Maybe that's an interpretation you can put on it, if you consider trying to limit the amount of countries invading other countries. But then Vidal redeems himself with a thoughtful piece on his correspondence with Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma bombings. In addition there are some killer one liners, such as (I'm paraphrasing) as "everyone remembers what they were doing on the day Herbert Hoover died).