“That was a time when television was still a public
square, when Americans gathered and saw pretty much the same thing. There’s
nothing like that now.”
“The ability to talk the same language is gone. More and
more we’re divided into communities of concern. Each side can ignore the other
side and live in its own world. It makes us less of a nation. Because what
binds us together is the pictures in our heads. But if those people are not
sharing those ideas, they’re not living in the same place.”
Those quotations above reverberate for me long after
hearing it in Best of Enemies, the
documentary about the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley television debates ahead
of the 1968 election. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville wrote and directed the
documentary, an examination of the series of ten debates between Vidal, a
liberal author, and Buckley, a conservative pundit.
