Gore Vidal & the sacred texts of the new seminole

Since Trump got elected president I've been having a hard time sleeping at the Embassy. I keep thinking about my passed father-in-law and founder of the New Seminole, Busimanolotome Osceola. Busi for short. Or at least it was for me. Anyway, he borrowed heavily from just about everything to invent the New Seminole. Part of its "Mission Statement" is built on pop culture and the influencers of his time. One of those influencers was the witty and urbane iconoclast novelist and essayist Gore Vidal. Busi introduced me to him deep in the Everglades while watching a YouTube video during "Family Night" under a chickee thatched roof (you can learn how we did that in my books). He loved watching him take on arch Republican conservative thinker William F. Buckley, especially the time when the two were debating on TV during the tumultious 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (see below). I mean, he nearly got Buckley to belt him one as he pressed the repressed man's buttons by calling him a Crypto-Nazi (around 10:45 in the video). Looking at that video clip now almost 50-years later reminds me of how "Right On!" (as they use to like saying back in the day) Vidal was about cops, oppression, and America which is to say, not much has changed.

Part of Vidal's thoughts about America serve as the foundation of the New Seminole. You can find most of them in an article that appeared in the 410-page January 1979 25th Anniversary Issue of Playboy magazine. I am not making that up. Busi always swore he read the magazine for the articles and one day gave me that smelly old issue to read up in my tree (see other blog posts)-- provided I returned it as I received it: mint condition. It's called "Sex is Politics" and part of it can be found here.  It's one of the few things in that issue that isn't embarrassing (the jokes are sexist despite Playboy's pretense of championing women) but the nudes, although objectifying women, are refreshingly naive. Here's a sampling of the Vidal mind re sex and politics and how one rules the other in America.

"Although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled. Any sexual or intellectual or recreational or political activity that might decrease the amount of coal mined, pyramids built, the quanity of junk food confected will be proscribed through laws that, in turn, are based on the divine revelations handed down by god or whatever gods happen to be in fashion at the moment. Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and not the other way around.

Now, it is not possible for a governing class to maintain its power if there are not hot buttons to push...
In desperation, the nation's ownership has now gone back to the tried-and-true hot buttons: Save Our Children, our fetuses, our ladies' rooms from the godless enemy."
​--Gore Vidal, 1979