FRIDAY HALL OF FAMERS, 11/15/19 - GORE VIDAL

CBS in their all-knowing and wise beneficence (I know how to kiss network ass with the best of them) has been airing the first season of ‘The Good Fight’ over “regular CBS” this summer.    It’s a great marketing “strategery” to get more viewers to sign up for CBS All-Access. (However, while I do love this series as I did ‘The Good Wife’, I’m adhering to my pledge of three premium platforms and no more.  But that trailer for ‘Star Trek: Picard’ is awfully damned tempting.)

‘THE GOOD WIFE’
“SOCIAL MEDIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS”

In a recent episode about drafting new terms of service for a major client who is basically the Toobworld version of Google, the following dialogue came up:

MARISSA GOLD:
They're working to get around your racist N-word ban.
DIANE LOCKHART:
How? 
MARISSA:
Whenever they mean N-word they instead type ‘Neil Gross’.
DIANE:
Yeah.
MARISSA:
I can print up the posts, but there are a lot.
DIANE:
All racist jokes with Neil Gross as the punchline….
That's not gonna go over well.

Later, Diane meets with the client, one Neil Gross…..

NEIL GROSS:
They're using my name? 
DIANE:
Yes.
NEIL:
I-I don't understand.  How? 
DIANE:
As a replacement for the N-word.
NEIL:
What, seriously? 
DIANE:
- Yes.
NEIL:
- Why? 
DIANE:
- They know you can't censor it.
NEIL:
- Oh, my God.

That idea of substituting a person’s name for what could be an obscene word was very familiar to me.  And while I didn’t read it at the time, I remember the reviews for “Myron”, Gore Vidal’s prequel to “Myra Breckinridge”.

From Wikipedia:

“Myron” is a novel by American author Gore Vidal, published in 1974. It was written as a sequel to his 1968 bestseller “Myra Breckinridge”. The novel was published shortly after an anti-pornography ruling by the Supreme Court; Vidal responded by replacing the profanity in his novel with the names of the Justices involved (e.g., "He thrust his enormous Rehnquist deep within her Whizzer White", etc.)

In his introduction to the novel, Vidal mentions the Supreme Court decision Miller v. California, which in his words "leaves to each community the right to decide what is pornography." Saying that the decision has "alarmed and confused peddlers of smut" by eliminating guidelines, Vidal says he has decided to substitute the names of the five Justices who voted for the decision, plus the names of anti-pornography crusaders Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature and Father Morton A. Hill, S.J. of Morality in Media (whom Vidal had debated on ‘The David Susskind Show’ in 1968), for the "dirty words". He has done this to conform to the Supreme Court's imposition of the "community standards" test, as he wants "to conform with the letter and spirit of the Court's decision."

These are the words and their substitutions:

blackmun: ass
burger: fuck
father hills: tits
keating: shit
powells: balls
rehnquist: cock
whizzer white: cunt

Later editions of the novel do not use these substitutions.

The young gay, racist, neo-Nazi in this episode who was spearheading this online attack against the search engine ChumHum was no dummy.  He was intelligent and more than likely had come up with this campaign inspired by the same source I was thinking of – he knew about Vidal’s literary technique of name substitution to get around a problem.  He may have even read the televersion of the book “Myron”.

And of course there would be a televersion of “Myron”.  It was written by Gore Vidal, after all, and there is a televersion of the author in the main Toobworld as well as in the Tooniverse.

In Toobworld, Vidal’s fictional televersion is best known for his visit to a little town called Fernwood, Ohio in 1976….

‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’
- Episode #2.08 (1976) ... (credit only)
- Episode #2.10 (1976) ... (uncredited)
- Episode #2.18 (1976) ... (uncredited)
- Episode #2.20 (1976) ... (uncredited)
- Episode #2.21 (1976) ... (credited)
- Episode #2.22 (1976) ... (uncredited)
- Episode #2.23 (1976) ... (credit only)
- Episode #2.25 (1976) ... (uncredited)

As for the Tooniverse:

‘The Simpsons’
- “Moe'N'a Lisa” (2006)

‘Family Guy’
- “Mother Tucker” (2006)

These three appearances make Gore Vidal eligible for the TV Crossover Hall of Fame as a multi-dimensional, even without a definitive link to ‘The Good Fight’. 

And as November is the month in which newsmakers like the late Gore Vidal are inducted, we’ve chosen the author to join the ranks.

Welcome to the Hall, Mr. Vidal…..

O'BSERVATION:
When I began the research on this post and learned that only the first edition of the novel had the substitute words, I decided to get a copy for myself, if only for the crass reasoning that it would be worth money - more money than I paid for it anyway.

I got a nice copy of the first edition - and signed by the late Gore Vidal to boot! - for a very reasonable price.  Ha!  And now by publishing this post in November (just over four months from now), I must be trying to increase its value by posting about it here.

I'm probably screwed.....  LOL

BCnU!