GPA beware to avoid blood and Gore

LAST week we happened to mention an old hero, one Gore Vidal — essayist, novelist, screenwriter, former homeowner in west Cork — and used one of his many bons mots in this very space.

This week, by coincidence, Vidal’s new memoir came out, a volume we picked up around the same time as the GPA-GAA detente was announced. Unlikely though it may appear, the two events are linked. And we don’t mean to draw a connection to Gore’s most famous gem: “It is not enough that I succeed; my friends must also fail.”

To backtrack a little, Vidal’s first memoir was called Palimpsest — as in writing material, like a blackboard, which gets used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. He was making some kind of high-falutin’ point about memory and inscription and such; our point in citing the book is to remind the GPA of three words: Players Advisory Group, and the possibility, however unlikely, of seeing their interests overwritten and wiped away, just as happened to the long-vanished PAG.