Over at Shanghaiist an article about the 81 year old American writer Gore Vidal’s appearance/interview at the 2007 Shanghai International Literary Festival. Vidal it reads, is an outspoken, opinionated writer.
He was posed a question about the freedom of speech.
His answer can be summed up by one one of the phrases he used “they’ll work it out, as they intend to do, somehow.”
The Shanghaiist writer comments that:
We can be fairly certain that he is either being polite, afraid, or is just ignorant. Certainly, we don’t expect Vidal to export his brand of dissidence to China, and the fact that Vidal has freedoms that he may take for granted in no way discredits his other arguments.
However, it is always interesting to hear the tone of westerners — particularly liberal intellectuals — change when they find themselves in a context where they perceive that they have no legal protection.
One of the better sentences I read in a while.