Volume 49, Number 3 · February 28, 2002

'Everything Is Yesterday'

By Gore Vidal

It was the halcyon spring of 1946. (Increase your word-power! Look up 'halcyon' in the dictionary then, while you're at it, look up 'avatar' because, if you are a well-paid journalist, you have been misusing both words for years.) In wintry March of '46 I was released from the army. O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway and the Pulitzer Prize for biography was awarded to—yes! The Son of Wilderness by Linnie Marsh Wolfe—even so, America's postwar golden age was suddenly upon us and lasted all of five years, ending with our undeclared war to bring freedom and democracy to Korea, a nation hitherto unknown to most Americans but whose loss to freedom would have put in question our Credibility and so, incredibly, we have been at war ever since unless sly Wolf Blitzer is telling us fibs on CNN.



Review, 2534 words

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