To hear two American men congratulating each other on being heterosexual is one of the most chilling experiences - and unique to the United States. You don't hear two Italians sitting around complimenting each other because they actually like to go to bed with women. The American is hysterical about his manhood.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the American culture's obsession with masculinity and heterosexuality.
Gore Vidal highlights how American men often feel the need to publicly affirm their heterosexuality in a way that appears exaggerated and anxious. In contrast, he notes that men from other cultures, like Italy, do not feel the same compulsion to validate their masculinity through overt compliments about their heterosexuality, suggesting a different attitude towards gender and sexuality in those cultures.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about gender norms in American society.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl . . . an aria of fear made audible. The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.
The ox suffers, the cart complains.
Preach in the name of God. The learned will smile; ask the learned what they have done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you; say to the priests that you know God better than all of them together do, and that between God and His law you have no need of any intermediary. The people will understand you, and repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, who is Intelligence and Love, Creator and Teacher of Humanity. And in this saying you and the People will conquer.
Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.
Ultimately a highly complex sentiment, having its first origin in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, confirmed by instruction and habit, all combined, constitute our moral sense or conscience.
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
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