Gore Vidal: "Some Very God-awful People"

"What are you going to do with people who aren't educated? I'm not talking about your gorgeous universities and so on. I'm talking about the basic facts of life, which are not taught. Then there was that sickly wave of religion that swept over the country after the Second World War. Don't think that we were not horrified by it, those of us who are natives of the USA. Any kind of idiot could appear on television - television was our ruin - and Congress, which was always very good for the superstitious, said: "Religion is such a good thing that we are not going to tax it." This was the gateway to great wealth for some very God-awful people. "God-awful" is carefully selected there."

Melvyn Bragg interviews Gore Vidal, America's leading octogenarian left-leaning patrician homosexualist man of letters, in the New Statesman