"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war,
 might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been."
/
 - Kurt Vonnegut
/
 "I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. 
We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process."
/
- Gore Vidal
"Mark my words. He will leave office the most unpopular president in history.
The junta has done too much wreckage."
- "The Last Defender of the American Republic? An interview with Gore Vidal", L.A. Weekly, July 2002 (below)
_______________________________________________
/
/

A Wry Scourge On The Attack
 
By Arthur Jones
National Catholic Reporter
http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2003c/080103/080103k.php
8-2-03
/

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays and short stories, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. Two of his American empire novels, Lincoln and 1876, were the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek, respectively. In 1993, a collection of his criticism, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award. He received an award from the Cannes Film Festival for best screenplay for The Best Man. He divides his time between Ravello, Italy, and Los Angeles.

In December 2000, Gore Vidal, termed America's master essayist by The Washington Post, told "irregularly elected" President-elect George W. Bush to "rein in the warlords who were seeking $30 billion a year over and above the 51 percent of the budget that now already goes for war."
 
Two-and-a-half years later -- after Sept. 11, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden's disappearance, Iraq and Saddam Hussein's vanishing act -- Vidal summarized what the Bush "warlords" have achieved in occupying Iraq: "Chaos."
 
"Chaos," Vidal told NCR by fax, "until we either come to our senses and leave -- not likely any time soon -- or complete the neocon plan so boldly stated by their youthful 'warriors,' by annexing as much of the Mideast oil states as possible."
 
Vidal seems at least farseeing, if not prophetic, in his assessment of more than a month ago, as the United States finds the footing in Iraq increasingly unsteady and dangerous.
 
As an occupying power in Iraq, U.S. civilian administrators backed by U.S. soldiers are "downsizing" the national bureaucracy, handing out a half million pink slips to former officials and military. Iraqi soldiers are demanding their pay and pensions. It is an uneasy peace. There is gunfire.
 
Americans there and here are paying a price.
 
Up to now, said Vidal, while the Bush administration's "down payment" for Iraqi oil "has been cheap -- the Bill of Rights," the cost has not been light "for the people -- there or here." The U.S. cost has been to its civil liberties. Vidal said, "USA Patriot Acts 1 and 2, the second leaked but not yet sent to Congress, neatly folds the republic. What next?" he asked rhetorically, "Franklin predicted despotism."
 
Vidal is accustomed to delivering chilling predictions. He does not lack a penchant for going on the attack. Even so, it took guts, post 9/11 and throughout the Iraq war, to criticize the commander-in-chief. After 9/11 he was the rare writer who did an analytical commentary on the background to both the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings -- commentary that his customary U.S. outlets refused to publish.
 
All this and more was made available late last year in Perpetual Peace for Perpetual War: How We Got To Be So Hated and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (Nation Books, 2002). They are collections of his Vanity Fair and Nation columns with added introductions and commentary.
 
Vidal sees the country in the grip of a corporate-oil patch-military oligarchy. Asked if the Iraq war was an oil patch-White House deal so huge Americans can't stand back far enough to see it, Vidal replied, "Kindly Dr. Goebbels used to say that the greater the lie a government tells (and repeats loudly), the more it will be believed. Yes, it is -- was -- about oil and, of course, giving the Cheney-Bush junta's friends like Halliburton vast contracts to rebuild what we have carefully knocked down."
 
He told NCR, "No one will ever see all the details but the [current] crookedness is unique in our history. Enron was the first storm warning but no one realized how easily accepted that cluster of capers would be by a polity marinated in corruption -- as Ben Franklin predicted, in 1789, as our eventual fate."
 
Vidal has become a scourge of the Bush dynasty. The books reprise writings on what he sees as the Bush family usurpation of the 2000 presidential election, Bush family business connections to the bin Laden family, the Texas oil patch's pipeline dealings with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the subsequent war there, why bin Laden was not pursued, and how the focus shifted to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
 
As a scourge he is a wry one.
 
"American politics is essentially a family affair, as are most oligarchies," he wrote. And he should know. He grew up in the home of his grandfather, Oklahoma Sen. Thomas P. Gore, in Washington, D.C., and was close to the Kennedy clan because he was related to Jacqueline Kennedy. He is distantly related to former Vice President Al Gore, whose father was a U.S. senator, and Gore Vidal himself was an unsuccessful liberal candidate for Congress in 1960 in New York and the U.S. Senate in California in 1982.

Under the headline "The Legend and the Wrecker,"  this 1960 issue of a New York tabloid says of Vidal: 
"A playwright-novelist sets out to defame anything and everything in U.S. politics."
 The handshake between President-elect Kennedy and Vidal took 
place backstage at a production of Vidal's play The Best Man. (The Gore Vidal  Index)

He knows about corruption in politics and oligarchic power.
 
Long before George W. Bush was irregularly ushered into the White House due to the "Supreme Court's purloining" of the 2000 election, writes Gore, the nation had "previously enjoyed a number of quietly corrupt elections decently kept from public view."
 
He referred to 1888, when Grover Cleveland's plurality was canceled by the Electoral College's maneuverings, and 1876 when Democrat Samuel Tilden had a quarter-million more votes than the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but a Congressionally selected commission gave the victory to Hayes by a single vote.
 
Gore (Eugene Luther) Vidal, who lives in Italy but was contacted by NCR when he was recently in the United States, was born in 1925 at West Point, where his father was an instructor. He graduated from Philips Exeter Academy, served on an Army supply ship in Alaska in World War II, and published his first novel, Willawaw, to quote one account, "at 19 while still in U.S. Army uniform."
 
He grew up with the Army and served in the military, yet he unabashedly regards war as "the ultimate no-win, all-lose option."
 
He writes, "Fifty years ago [Feb. 27, 1947], Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg told [President Harry S.] Truman he could have his militarized economy only if he first 'scared the hell out of the American people that the Russians were coming.' Truman obliged. The perpetual war began."
 
Vidal continues, "We are now faced with a Japanese seventh-century-style arrangement: a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors. Do they dream, as did the shoguns of yore, of the conquest of China?"
 
Sept. 11, Vidal writes, "transformed [Bush] into the cheerleader he had been in prep school. Bush promised us not only 'a new war' but 'a secret war' and, best of all, according to the twinkle in his eye, 'a very long war.' "
 
Continued Vidal, "[President James] Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic, 'Of all enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops germs of every other.' "
 
Vidal sees other comparisons with the past.
 
"The [founding] fathers had such a fear and loathing of democracy that they invented the Electoral College so the popular voice of the people could be throttled, much as the Supreme Court throttled Floridians on Dec. 12 [2000] where Bush was entrusting his endangered Florida vote to the state's governor, his brother, Jeb."
 
Historian Vidal was asked if there was a point in U.S. history when the democracy functioned. He replied, "Before Polk's 1846 war with Mexico in order to acquire California. General -- then Lieutenant -- Grant said that the Civil War was the vengeance of God upon us for what we had done to Mexico."
 
These two books signal more than Vidal at the top of his form as a thunderer, however. In listing his collected writings, Vidal refers to the slim volumes as "pamphlets." It is a distinction with a subtle warning.
 
The pamphleteer is the point on the shaft of political dissent; the sharp art of a political tradition the established order never takes kindly to.
 
Pamphlets were the spark that helped ignite the American Revolution. Tom Paine, with his famous pamphlet, Common Sense, could "electrify the whole of colonial life," wrote John M. Robertson in his 1915 introduction to Paine's The Age of Reason.
 
Vidal, who sees both rights and democracy fast ebbing, seeks to electrify, too. But the populace, comfortably uninformed and occupied with its daily self, is inert.

____________________________________________________________________________
 
Arthur Jones is NCR editor-at-large. His e-mail address is arthurjones@comcast.net
 
From the Introduction to Perpetual War:
 
"In the last six years two dates are to be remembered for longer than usual in the United States of Amnesia: April 19, 1995, when a much-decorated infantry soldier called Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 innocent men, women and children. Why? McVeigh [who may have committed mass murder to avenge the government slaughter of the religious cult at Waco] told us at eloquent length, but our rulers and their media preferred to depict him as a sadistic, crazed monster. On Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Islamic terrorist organization struck at Manhattan and the Pentagon.
 
"The Pentagon Junta in charge of our affairs programmed their president to tell us that bin Laden was an 'evildoer' who envied us our goodness and wealth and freedom.
 
"None of these explanations made much sense, but our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention, in McVeigh's case, our own.

"All we are left with are blurred covers of Time and Newsweek where monstrous figures from Hieronymous Bosch stare out at us, hellfire in their eyes, while The New York Times and its chorus of imitators spin complicated stories about mad Osama and cowardly McVeigh, thus convincing most Americans that only a couple of freaks would ever dare strike at a nation as close to perfection as any human society can come."That U.S. government policies and actions "might have seriously provoked McVeigh and bin Laden was never dealt with. Things just happen out there in the American media and we consumers don't need to be told the why of anything."
 
©2003 National Catholic Reporter

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays and short stories, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. Two of his American empire novels, Lincoln and 1876, were the subject of cover stories in Time and Newsweek, respectively. In 1993, a collection of his criticism, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award. He received an award from the Cannes Film Festival for best screenplay for The Best Man. He divides his time between Ravello, Italy, and Los Angeles.

NOVEMBER 14 - 20, 2003

It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America's Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.

When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year.

This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.

Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display - vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity - their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.

The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.

As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.

MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.

GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles - slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.

But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism - the only form of government suitable for such a people.

But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.

Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working. Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn't care.

Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.

This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.

Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America's two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?

Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is punished for squandering the people's money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with - even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh - how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time - was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.

In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?

Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.

So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.

But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country - like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans - most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?

I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.

But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the Ambassador East in Chicago - which of course is ridiculous.

And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.

 
Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?

No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don't want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?

So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can't lose.

But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?

Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.

But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.

You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level, isn't there still a democratic underpinning?

No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the welfare of the rich.

Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won't be pretty.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The New Statesman Interview 
Johann Hari Monday 15th October 2001

"Vidal sees the new powers that Bush has claimed to combat terrorism as completing the destruction of the Bill of Rights. "They're now going to lock up anybody they want to, silence anybody they want to. Those powers are now theirs, the dreamed-of powers for the state. The state will come out of this very, very powerful, and we the people, in or out of Congress assembled, will come out much weaker. That said, we glory in the fact that we are the United States of Amnesia. We won't remember a thing the next day." What has emerged is nothing less than "a police state. There's no euphemism for it . . . Now the attorney general can act against terrorism, which has never been defined. It's like 'un-German activities' under Hitler - what's an un-German activity?"

"How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. It's far worse than anything that occurred in the Roman empire, until the praetorian guard started to sell the principate. We're not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the world in the way of political ideas or political arrangements. God knows, the mention of justice is like a clove of garlic to Count Dracula."

HE MIGHT BE AMERICA'S LAST small-r republican. Gore Vidal, now 76, has made a lifetime out of critiquing America's imperial impulses and has -- through two dozen novels and hundreds of essays -- argued tempestuously that the U.S. should retreat back to its more Jeffersonian roots, that it should stop meddling in the affairs of other nations and the private affairs of its own citizens.

That's the thread that runs through Vidal's latest best-seller -- an oddly packaged collection of essays published in the wake of September 11 titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated. To answer the question in his subtitle, Vidal posits that we have no right to scratch our heads over what motivated the perpetrators of the two biggest terror attacks in our history, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and last September's twin-tower holocaust.

Vidal writes: "It is a law of physics (still on the books when last I looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature -- that is, history." The "action" Vidal refers to is the hubris of an American empire abroad (illustrated by a 20-page chart of 200 U.S. overseas military adventures since the end of World War II) and a budding police state at home. The inevitable "reaction," says Vidal, is nothing less than the bloody handiwork of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh. "Each was enraged," he says, "by our government's reckless assaults upon other societies" and was, therefore, "provoked" into answering with horrendous violence.

Some might take that to be a suggestion that America had it coming on September 11. So when I met up with Vidal in the Hollywood Hills home he maintains (while still residing most of his time in Italy), the first question I asked him was this:

L.A. WEEKLY: Are you arguing that the 3,000 civilians killed on September 11 somehow deserved their fate?

GORE VIDAL: I don't think we, the American people, deserved what happened. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have a list in my new book that gives the reader some idea how busy we have been. Unfortunately, we only get disinformation from The New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.

Americans are either not told about these things or are told we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the center of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an air force. But it looked good to have our Air Force there, busy, blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega, a former CIA man who worked loyally for the United States. We arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction over him and lock him up -- nobody knows why. And that was supposed to end the drug trade because he had been demonized by The New York Times and the rest of the imperial press.

[The government] plays off [Americans'] relative innocence, or ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II -- to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war going some place.

And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs get angry. The Afghans had nothing to do with what happened to our country on September 11. But Saudi Arabia did. It seems like Osama is involved, but we don't really know. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan to take over the place and blow it up, our commanding general was asked how long it was going to take to find Osama bin Laden. And the commanding general looked rather surprised and said, well, that's not why we are here.

Oh no? So what was all this about? It was about the Taliban being very, very bad people and that they treated women very badly, you see. They're not really into women's rights, and we here are very strong on women's rights; and we should be with Bush on that one because he's taking those burlap sacks off of women's heads. Well, that's not what it was about.

What it was really about -- and you won't get this anywhere at the moment -- is that this is an imperial grab for energy resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has been our main source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not to get Osama and wreak our vengeance. We went to Afghanistan partly because the Taliban -- whom we had installed at the time of the Russian occupation -- were getting too flaky and because Unocal, the California corporation, had made a deal with the Taliban for a pipeline to get the Caspian-area oil, which is the richest oil reserve on Earth. They wanted to get that oil by pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan to Karachi and from there to ship it off to China, which would be enormously profitable. Whichever big company could cash in would make a fortune. And you'll see that all these companies go back to Bush or Cheney or to Rumsfeld or someone else on the Gas and Oil Junta, which, along with the Pentagon, governs the United States.

We had planned to occupy Afghanistan in October, and Osama, or whoever it was who hit us in September, launched a pre-emptory strike. They knew we were coming. And this was a warning to throw us off guard.

With that background, it now becomes explicable why the first thing Bush did after we were hit was to get Senator Daschle and beg him not to hold an investigation of the sort any normal country would have done. When Pearl Harbor was struck, within 20 minutes the Senate and the House had a joint committee ready. Roosevelt beat them to it, because he knew why we had been hit, so he set up his own committee. But none of this was to come out, and it hasn't come out.

Still, even if one reads the chart of military interventions in your book and concludes that, indeed, the U.S. government is a "source of evil" -- to lift a phrase -- can't you conceive that there might be other forces of evil as well? Can't you imagine forces of religious obscurantism, for example, that act independently of us and might do bad things to us, just because they are also evil?

Oh yes. But you picked the wrong group. You picked one of the richest families in the world -- the bin Ladens. They are extremely close to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, which has conned us into acting as their bodyguard against their own people -- who are even more fundamentalist than they are. So we are dealing with a powerful entity if it is Osama.

What isn't true is that people like him just come out of the blue. You know, the average American thinks we just give away billions in foreign aid, when we are the lowest in foreign aid among developed countries. And most of what we give goes to Israel and a little bit to Egypt.

I was in Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack on the Arbenz government [in 1954]. Arbenz, who was a democratically elected president, mildly socialist. His state had no revenues; its biggest income maker was United Fruit Company. So Arbenz put the tiniest of taxes on bananas, and Henry Cabot Lodge got up in the Senate and said the Communists have taken over Guatemala and we must act. He got to Eisenhower, who sent in the CIA, and they overthrew the government. We installed a military dictator, and there's been nothing but bloodshed ever since.

Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had the means to drop something on somebody in Washington, or anywhere Americans were, I would be tempted to do it. Especially if I had lost my entire family and seen my country blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes. Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so hated.

You've spent decades bemoaning the erosion of civil liberties and the conversion of the U.S. from a republic into what you call an empire. Have the aftereffects of September 11, things like the USA Patriot bill, merely pushed us further down the road or are they, in fact, some sort of historic turning point?

The second law of thermodynamics always rules: Everything is always running down. And so is our Bill of Rights. The current junta in charge of our affairs, one not legally elected, but put in charge of us by the Supreme Court in the interests of the oil and gas and defense lobbies, have used first Oklahoma City and now September 11 to further erode things.

And when it comes to Oklahoma City and Tim McVeigh, well, he had his reasons as well to carry out his dirty deed. Millions of Americans agree with his general reasoning, though no one, I think, agrees with the value of blowing up children. But the American people, yes, they instinctively know when the government goes off the rails like it did at Waco and Ruby Ridge. No one has been elected president in the last 50 years unless he ran against the federal government. So, the government should get through its head that it is hated not only by foreigners whose countries we have wrecked, but also by Americans whose lives have been wrecked.

The whole Patriot movement in the U.S. was based on folks run off their family farms. Or had their parents or grandparents run off. We have millions of disaffected American citizens who do not like the way the place is run and see no place in it where they can prosper. They can be slaves. Or pick cotton. Or whatever the latest uncomfortable thing there is to do. But they are not going to have, as Richard Nixon said, "a piece of the action."

And yet Americans seem quite susceptible to a sort of jingoistic "enemy-of-the-month club" coming out of Washington. You say millions of Americans hate the federal government. But something like 75 percent of Americans say they support George W. Bush, especially on the issue of the war.

I hope you don't believe those figures. Don't you know how the polls are rigged? It's simple. After 9/11 the country was really shocked and terrified. [Bush] does a little war dance and talks about evil axis and all the countries he's going to go after. And how long it is all going to take, he says with a happy smile, because it means billions and trillions for the Pentagon and for his oil friends. And it means curtailing our liberties, so this is all very thrilling for him. He's right out there reacting, bombing Afghanistan. Well, he might as well have been bombing Denmark. Denmark had nothing to do with 9/11. And neither did Afghanistan, at least the Afghanis didn't.

So the question is still asked, are you standing tall with the president? Are you standing with him as he defends us?

Eventually, they will figure it out.

They being who? The American people?

Yeah, the American people. They are asked these quick questions. Do you approve of him? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, he blew up all those funny-sounding cities over there.

That doesn't mean they like him. Mark my words. He will leave office the most unpopular president in history. The junta has done too much wreckage.

They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already got their police state. Just take a plane anywhere today and you are in the hands of an arbitrary police state.

Don't you want to have that kind of protection when you fly?

It's one thing to be careful, and we certainly want airplanes to be careful against terrorist attacks. But this is joy for them, for the federal government. Now they've got everybody, because everybody flies.

Let's pick away at one of your favorite bones, the American media. Some say they have done a better-than-usual job since 9/11. But I suspect you're not buying that?

No, I don't buy it. Part of the year I live in Italy. And I find out more about what's going on in the Middle East by reading the British, the French, even the Italian press. Everything here is slanted. I mean, to watch Bush doing his little war dance in Congress . . . about "evildoers" and this "axis of evil" -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea. I thought, he doesn't even know what the word axis means. Somebody just gave it to him. And the press didn't even call him on it. This is about as mindless a statement as you could make. Then he comes up with about a dozen other countries that might have "evil people" in them, who might commit "terrorist acts." What is a terrorist act? Whatever he thinks is a terrorist act. And we are going to go after them. Because we are good and they are evil. And we're "gonna git 'em."

Anybody who could get up and make that speech to the American people is not himself an idiot, but he's convinced we are idiots. And we are not idiots. We are cowed. Cowed by disinformation from the media, a skewed view of the world, and atrocious taxes that subsidize this permanent war machine. And we have no representation. Only the corporations are represented in Congress. That's why only 24 percent of the American people cast a vote for George W. Bush.

I know you'd hate to take this to the ad hominem level, but indulge me for a moment. What about George W. Bush, the man?

You mean George W. Bush, the cheerleader. That's the only thing he ever did of some note in his life. He had some involvement with a baseball team . . .

He owned it . . .

Yeah, he owned it, bought with other people's money. Oil people's money. So he's never really worked, and he shows very little capacity for learning. For them to put him up as president and for the Supreme Court to make sure that he won was as insulting as when his father, George Bush, appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court -- done just to taunt the liberals. And then, when he picked Quayle for his vice president, that showed such contempt for the American people. This was someone as clearly unqualified as Bush Sr. was to be president. Because Bush Sr., as Richard Nixon said to a friend of mine when Bush was elected [imitating Nixon], "He's a lightweight, a complete lightweight, there's nothing there. He's a sort of person you appoint to things."

So the contempt for the American people has been made more vivid by the two Bushes than all of the presidents before them. Although many of them had the same contempt. But they were more clever about concealing it.

Should the U.S. just pack up its military from everywhere and go home?

Yes. With no exceptions. We are not the world's policeman. And we cannot even police the United States, except to steal money from the people and generally wreak havoc. The police are perceived quite often, and correctly, in most parts of the country as the enemy. I think it is time we roll back the empire -- it is doing no one any good. It has cost us trillions of dollars, which makes me feel it's going to fold on its own because there isn't going to be enough money left to run it.

You call yourself one of the last defenders of the American Republic against the American Empire. Do you have any allies left? I mean, we really don't have a credible opposition in this country, do we?

I sometimes feel like I am the last defender of the republic. There are plenty of legal minds who defend the Bill of Rights, but they don't seem very vigorous. I mean, after 9/11 there was silence as one after another of these draconian, really totalitarian laws were put in place.

So what's the way out of this? Back in the '80s you used to call for a new sort of populist constitutional convention. Do you still believe that's the fix?

Well, it's the least bloody. Because there will be trouble, and big trouble. The loons got together to get a balanced-budget amendment, and they got a majority of states to agree to a constitutional convention. Senator Sam Ervin, now dead, researched what would happen in such a convention, and apparently everything would be up for grabs. Once we the people are assembled, as the Constitution requires, we can do anything, we can throw out the whole executive, the judiciary, the Congress. We can put in a Tibetan lama. Or turn the country into one big Scientological clearing center.

And the liberals, of course, are the slowest and the stupidest, because they do not understand their interests. The right wing are the bad guys, but they know what they want -- everybody else's money. And they know they don't like blacks and they don't like minorities. And they like to screw everyone along the way.

But once you know what you want, you are in a stronger position than those who can only say, "Oh no, you mustn't do that." That we must have free speech. Free speech for what? To agree with The New York Times?

The liberals always say, "Oh my, if there is a constitutional convention, they will take away the Bill of Rights." But they have already done it! It is gone. Hardly any of it is left. So if they, the famous "they," would prove to be a majority of the American people and did not want a Bill of Rights, then I say, let's just get it over with. Let's just throw it out the window. If you don't want it, you won't have it.

"

As a man is said to have a right to his property;
 he may be equally said to have a property in his rights."
/
- James Madison 

/
/
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, 
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. "
/
- James Madison

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to
 the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." 

The End of Liberty

Shortly before the twin tower disaster, Vanity Fair commissioned a piece from their favourite author, Gore Vidal. It was returned with a kill fee sometime after 11 September for 'market reasons'. It had, however, already been published in a collection of Vidal's essays by Fazi Editore in Italy under the title La fine della libertà: verso una nuova totalitarianismo.

http://www.indexonline.org/news/202_20020426_vidal.shtml

According to the Qoran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness.

Last 11 September, when suicide-pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac river. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called 'Defense', there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.

While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two - missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons, the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked airliners.

Also, like so many of those born to wealth, Osama is not one to throw money about. Apparently, the airline tickets of the 19 known dead hijackers were paid through a credit card. I suspect that United and American Airlines will never be reimbursed by American Express whose New York offices Osama - inadvertently? - hit.

On the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, a passenger telephoned out to say that he and a dozen or so other men - several of them athletes - were going to attack the hijackers. 'Let's roll!' he shouted. A scuffle. A scream. Silence. But the plane, allegedly aimed at the White House, ended up in a field near Pittsburgh.

We have always had wise and brave civilians. It is the military and the politicians and the media that one frets about. After all, we have not encountered suicide bombers since the Kamikazes, as we called them in the Pacific where I was idly a soldier in World War II. Japan was the enemy then. Now, bin Laden... The Muslims... The Pakistanis... Step in line.

The telephone rings. A distraught voice from the United States.

'Berry Berenson's dead. She was on Flight...'

The world was getting surreal. Arabs. Plastic knives. The beautiful Berry. What on earth did any of these elements have in common other than an unexpected appointment in Samarra with that restless traveller Death?

The telephone keeps ringing. In summer I live south of Naples, Italy. Italian newspapers, TV, radio, want comment. So do I. I have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: Isn't this exactly like Sunday morning 7 December 1941?

No, it's not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of last Tuesday's attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets which our enemies always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all.

President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book, The Golden Age. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England's aid against Japan's ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race. But what was - is - on bin Laden's mind?

For several decades there has been an unrelenting demonisation of the Muslim world in the American media. Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place but then it is not usual for us to examine why aNYThing happens other than to accuse others of motiveless malignity.

'We are good,' announced a deep-thinker on American television. 'They are evil,' which wraps that one up in a neat package. But it was Bush himself who put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint-session of Congress where he shared with them - as well as all of us somewhere over the Belt-way - his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: 'They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.'

A million Americans nodded in front of their TV sets. 'Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.'

At this plangent moment what Americans' gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait? Should the 44-year-old Saudi-Arabian, bin Laden be the prime mover, we know surprisingly little about him. We can assume that he favours the Palestinians in their uprising against the European- and American-born Israelis, intent, many of them, on establishing a theocratic state in what was to have been a common holy land for Jews, Muslims and Christians.

But if Osama ever wept tears for Arafat, they have left little trace. So why does he, and millions of other Muslims, hate us?

Let us deal first with the six foot seven inch Osama who enters history in 1979 as a guerrilla warrior working alongside the CIA to defend Afghanistan against the invading soviets. Was he anti-communist? Irrelevant question. He is anti-Infidel in the land of the Prophet. Described as fabulously wealthy, Osama is worth 'only' a few million dollars, according to a relative.

It was his father who created a fabulous fortune with a construction company that specialised in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama's 54 brothers and sisters. Although he speaks perfect English, he was entirely educated at the Saudi capital, Jeddah, he has never travelled outside the Arabian Peninsula. Several siblings live in the Boston area and give large sums to Harvard.

We are told that much of his family appears to have disowned him while many of his assets in the Saudi kingdom have been frozen. Where does Osama's money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He is also a superb organiser within Afghanistan.

In 1988, he warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait. Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerilla against the Russians, he and his organization would be used by the Saudis to stop the Iraqis. To Osama's horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: thus, were infidels established on the sacred sands of Mohammed. 'This was,' he said, 'the most shocking moment of my life.' 'Infidel', in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence - like cheating sexually on your partner; rather it means lack of faith in Allah, the one God, and in his Prophet.

Osama persuaded 4,000 Saudis to go to Afghanistan for military training by his group. In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan. In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizenship, Osama was already a legendary figure in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, he could tell the royal Saudis, 'I banish you. There is a world elsewhere.' Unfortunately, that world is us. In a 12-page 'declaration of war', Osama presented himself as potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modern corruption, the United States.

When Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, Osama blew up two of our embassies in Africa, put a hole in the side of an American war-ship off Yemen, and so on to the events of Tuesday, 11 September . Now President George W Bush, in retaliation, has promised us not only a 'new war' but a secret war.

That is, not secret to Osama but only to us who pay for and fight it.

'This administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have,' said Bush. 'We're going to find these evil-doers... and we're going to hold them accountable' along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter in order to teach them the one lesson that we ourselves have never been able to learn: in history, as in physics, there is no action without re-action. Or, as Edward S Herman puts it, 'One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognise US crimes.'

When Osama was four years old, I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Nasser to appear in Look Magazine. I was received by Mohammed Hekal, Nasser's chief adviser. Nasser himself was not to be seen. He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile. Later, I found out that a plot to murder him had just failed and he was in well-guarded seclusion.

Heikal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, cynical. 'We are studying the Qoran for hints on birth control.' He sighed. 'Not helpful?' 'Not very. But we keep looking for a text.' We talked off and on for a week.

Nasser wanted to modernize Egypt. But there was a reactionary, religious element... Another sigh. Then a surprise.

'We've found something very odd, the young village boys - the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists and so on - are turning religious on us.' 'Right wing?' 'Very.'

Hekal was a spiritual son of our Eighteenth Century Enlightenment. I thought of Hekal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernised Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, 40 years earlier, Nasser's model for a modern state.

Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practising, as opposed to zealous, Muslim. Ironically, he was trained as an engineer. Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact.

But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet's holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy 'the Crusader-Zionist Alliance'.

Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahhabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell-Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, 'the head of the serpent'.

Even more ambitiously, he would rid all the Muslim states of their western-supported regimes, starting with that of his native land. The word 'Crusader' was the give-away. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian West, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for 1,000 years tried to dominate the lands of the Umma - the true believers.

That is why Osama is seen by so many simple folk as the true heir to Saladin, the great warrior king who defeated Richard of England and the western crusaders. Who was Saladin? Dates 1138-1193. He was an Iraqi Kurd [born in Takrit in what is now Iraq]. In the century before his birth, western Christians had established a kingdom at Jerusalem, to the horror of the Islamic Faithful. Much as the United States used the Gulf War as pretext for our current occupation of Saudi Arabia, Saladin raised armies to drive out the Crusaders.

He conquered Egypt, annexed Syria and finally smashed the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a religious war that pitted Mohammedan against Christian. He united and 'purified' the Muslim world and though Richard Lion-heart was the better general, in the end he gave up and went home. As one historian put it, Saladin 'typified the Mohammedan utter self surrender to a sacred cause.'

But he left no government behind him, no political system because, as he himself said, 'My troops will do nothing save when I ride at their head...'

Now his spirit has returned with a vengeance.

The Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its principal task which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilised nations subscribe - like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia.

As the Bushites go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund) which, like Lucky Strike green has gone to war, they have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok - or not budge at all, leaving us, the very first 'indispensable' and at popular request last global empire, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out.

Latest Bushism to the world, 'Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists.' That's known as asking for it. To be fair, one cannot entirely blame the current Oval One for our incoherence. Though his predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they, too, assiduously served the 1% that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift. Particularly culpable was Bill Clinton.

Although the most able chief executive since FDR, Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state which his successor is now happily squeezing. Police state? What's that all about? In April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act, a so-called 'conference bill' in which many grubby hands played a part including the bill's co-sponsor Senate Majority leader Bob Dole.

Although Clinton, in order to win elections, did many unwise and opportunistic things, he seldom, like Charles II, ever said an unwise one. But faced with opposition to Anti-Terrorism legislation which not only gives the attorney-general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it also, selectively, suspends Habeas Corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty, Clinton attacked his critics as 'unpatriotic'. Then, wrapped in the flag, he spoke from the throne: 'There is nothing patriotic about our pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.'

This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic? There have been ominous signs that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-shirt-and-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of 'generalists', trained in law and accounting into a confrontational 'Special Weapons and Tactics' (aka SWAT) Green Beret style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, the odd ski mask.

 "Loyalty to my country: always. Loyalty to my government: when it deserves it."
- Mark Twain
(M.O.W. editorial insert)  

In the early 80s an FBI super-SWAT team, the Hostage 270 Rescue Team was formed. As so often happens in United States-speak, this group specialised not in freeing hostages or saving lives but in murderous attacks on groups that offended them, like the Branch Davidians - evangelical Christians who were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas until an FBI SWAT team, illegally using army tanks, killed 82 of them, including 25 children. This was 1993.

Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab-Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?) But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist co-conspirators who wanted to turn 'America into a safe house for terrorists'. If the cool Clinton could so froth what are we to expect from the over-heated Bush post-Tuesday?

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now 'at war' with Osama and that those parts of the Muslim world that support him, should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smouldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a phrase? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by 'an act of war'.

Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But it was the mean-spirited Washington Post that pointed out, under US case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an 'act of war'. Good try, W.

This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation. Although the American people have no direct means of influencing their government, their 'opinions' are occasionally sampled through polls.

According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55% of the people believe 'The federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens.' Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74% said they thought, 'It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms.' 86% favoured guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events.

Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield studying these figures, transfixed with joy. 'It's what they always wanted, Dick.' 'And to think we never knew, Don.' 'Thanks to those liberals, Dick.' 'We'll get those bastards now, Don.'

It seems forgotten by our amnesiac media that we once energetically supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran and so he thought, not unnaturally, that we wouldn't mind his taking over Kuwait's filling stations. Overnight our employee became Satan - and so remains, as we torment his people in the hope that they will rise up and overthrow him - as the Cubans were supposed, in their US-imposed poverty, to dismiss Castro a half-century ago, whose only crime is refusal to allow the Kennedy brothers to murder him in their so-called Operation Mongoose.

Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians, and by their evolving leader, Osama bin Laden, whose moment came in 2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable circumstances. The New York Times is the principal dispenser of opinion received from corporate America.

It generally stands tall, or tries to. Even so, as of 13 September, the NYT's editorial columns were all slightly off-key. Under the heading 'Demands of Leadership' the NYT was upbeat, sort of. It's going to be OK if you work hard and keep your eye on the ball, Mr President. Apparently Bush is 'facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leadership.' Thank God. Not only is that all it takes, but it's simple, too! For a moment... The NYT then slips into the way things look as opposed to the way they ought to look. 'The Administration spent much of yesterday trying to overcome the impression that Mr Bush showed weakness when he did not return to Washington after the terrorists struck.'

But from what I could tell no one cared while some of us felt marginally safer that the national silly-billy was trapped in his Nebraska bunker. Patiently, the NYT spells it out for Bush and for us, too. 'In the days ahead, Mr. Bush may be asking the nation to support military actions that many citizens, particularly those with relations in the service will find alarming. He must show that he knows what he is doing.' Well, that's a bull's eye.

If only FDR had got letters like that from Arthur Krock at the old NYT. Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks it wise to eschew Bushite unilateralism in favour of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday's darkness by understanding its origin while ceasing our provocations of cultures opposed to us and our arrangements. Lewis, unusually, for a New York Times writer, favours peace now. So do I.

But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times' Square in favour of an all-out war for other Americans to fight. As usual, the political columnist who has made the most sense of all this is William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (17 September 2001).

Unlike the provincial war-lovers at the New York Times, he is appalled by the spectacle of an American president who declined to serve his country in Vietnam, howling for war against not a nation or even a religion but one man and his accomplices, a category that will ever widen.

Pfaff: 'The riposte of a civilised nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent. 'Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results. 'A maddened US response that hurts still others is what they want: it will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent.

'What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future.' War is the no-win, all-lose option.

The time has come to put the good Kofi Annan to use. As glorious as total revenge will be for our war-lovers, a truce between Saladin and the Crusader Zionists is in the interest of the entire human race. Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history's neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatised by Aeschylus in The Eumenides (a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN).

Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes. He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN - also known as the citizens' assembly at Athens - which he does and is acquitted on the ground that blood feuds must be ended or they will smoulder forever, generation after generation and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until: 'The thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood... and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time.'

Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage. The awesome physical damage Osama and company did us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knock-out blow to our vanishing liberties - the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 combined with the recent request to Congress for additional special powers to wire-tap without judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors and undocumented immigrants without due process and so on.

Even that loyal company town paper the Washington Post is alarmed: '...Justice Department is making extraordinary use of its powers to arrest and detain individuals, taking the unusual step of jailing hundreds of people on minor ... violations. The lawyers and legal scholars... said they could not recall a time when so many people had been arrested and held without bond on charges - particularly minor charges - related to the case at hand.'

This is pre-Osama: 'Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and associations; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.'

The tone is familiar. It is from Hitler's 1933 speech calling for 'an Enabling Act' for 'the protection of the People and the State' after the catastrophic Reichstag fire that the Nazis had secretly lit.

Only one congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California, voted against the additional powers granted the President.

Meanwhile, a NYT-CBS poll notes that only 6% now oppose military action while a substantial majority favour war 'even if many thousands of innocent civilians are killed'. Most of this majority are far too young to recall World War II, Korea, even Vietnam. Simultaneously, Bush's approval rating has soared from the around 50% to 91%.

Traditionally, in war, the President is totemic like the flag. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs he observed, characteristically, 'It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.'

Bush, father and son, may yet make it to Mount Rushmore though it might be cheaper to redo the handsome Barbara Bush's look-alike, George Washington, by adding two strings of Teclas to his limestone neck, in memoriam, as it were. Finally, [DQ] the physical damage Osama and friends can do us - terrible as it has been thus far - is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties.

Once alienated, an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated. Since VJ Day 1945 ('Victory over Japan' and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles A Beard called 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'.

I have occasionally referred to our 'enemy of the month club': each month a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. I have been accused of exaggeration, so here's the scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) to Berlin Airlift (1948-49). You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as 'ongoing', even though many of us have forgotten about them. We are given, under 'Name' many fanciful Defense Department titles like Urgent Fury which was Reagan's attack on the island of Grenada, a month long caper which General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the Provincetown police department.

In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001, we always struck the first blow.

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Imperial America: Gore Vidal Reflects on the United States of Amnesia
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DEMOCRACY NOW! Radio/Television
Friday, June 4th, 2004

LISTEN / WATCH AT: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/04/1353259

TRANSCRIPT

In his latest book Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia acclaimed author Gore Vidal writes that, "Not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." Gore Vidal joins us in our firehouse studio to discuss President Bush, elections and much more. [includes rush transcript]
Our guest for the program is a national icon. He is the author of more than 20 novels and five plays. He is one of the best known chroniclers of American history and politics and his works have been translated into dozens of languages across the globe. He once told a magazine interviewer, "There is not one human problem that could not be solved... if people would simply do as I advise." And for more than a half a century, he has done just that." I am talking about Gore Vidal.

He published his first novel, Williwawa, in 1946 at the age of 21. He began writing poems and stories as a young teen-ager and began his first novel while he was still in high school. His grandfather was a senator and his father worked for the Roosevelt administration. But rather than pursuing a family career of politics and privilege, Gore Vidal dedicated himself to writing and critiquing the injustices of American society. Following the publication of the first two of his latest trilogy of books examining the American empire, Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America's last "small-r" republican. The third and final book of the trilogy has just been published. It is called "Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia."

In his latest book, Gore Vidal writes that "Not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." He describes the current president as being like "a man in one of those dreams who knows he is safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him."

Gore Vidal joins us in our firehouse studio.

· Gore Vidal
RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: In his latest book, Gore Vidal writes that "not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory. He describes the current president as being like a man in one of those dreams who knows he's safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him. Gore Vidal joins us now in our Firehouse Studio here in Chinatown, Downtown Community Television. Welcome to Democracy Now!.

GORE VIDAL: Thank you. This is probably my first encounter in the United States with democracy. And I've lived a long time. Here we are in Chinatown, in the firehouse, and I feel free. But we're supposed to in a democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we welcome you

GORE VIDAL: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Why use the word, "imperial," in your title, Imperial America?

GORE VIDAL: Because everyone hates it so much. I remember years ago, Time magazine, in one of its numerous attacks on me, on my first book of essays, which was heaven knows when, 30, 40 years ago, I refer to the American empire and things that we were doing that were not very good across the world, and I referred to the empire. And Time magazine dismissed me. It was an awful review. He's the sort of person that says that the United States has an empire. Well, we've got Guam, that's true. That's all we have got. I pointed out that we had troops and so on in over 1,000 other places around the world. That seems imperial to me, but there we are. Ever since then, I have loved the word, because it just drives them crazy. Now everybody uses it. So, I have to think of something new. Perhaps in the course of this program, we'll get a new word. If we don't, you get a new word and tell me so I can change over from empire. But we are a world empire, hated by all, and not to mention the least, our own people, since we don't have any money left for anything. So, you started to go somewhere and I had written about Bush that he's like a kind of crazy kid in a dream, and he thinks he's invulnerable, and he's marching along through a dry forest, and he's lighting matches, dropping them, watching the fires, dropping another one. I had always assumed, like all good Americans, that he was a hypocrite, particularly on religious matters. Suddenly, it began to hit me, he may be another Reagan. He may really believe these are the end of times. What difference does it make? The world's going to end anyway. Why save the environment? Save it for what, you know? We're all going to be upstairs as sunbeams for Jesus. If he's one of those--well, those of us who can afford it will emigrate, and the others will be with Jesus in a higher sphere.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk about the -- about President Bush throwing matches or lighting matches in the forest. Your book, I thought, some of the most powerful parts were when you go into all of the outright lies of the Bush administration, and you spend quite a bit of time on his Healthy Forest Initiative and his response to wildfires. Can you expound a little bit on this?

GORE VIDAL: Well, part of imperial America is just sort of a list of the lies that he has told us, and there's a special law against people who lie to the American people, whether they're in the Legislative Branch of the government, Judiciary or the Executive, like the president. He has now told so many lies that he knew to be lies, and that we know to be lies about everything that he can be impeached on, I think it's 12 counts -- he can be impeached immediately, without much fuss, if you had a majority of people who wanted to impeach him in the House of Representatives. Then we go on trial in the senate as poor Bill Clinton found when he lied about sex, which in my day that is what gentlemen were supposed to do. Or if everybody told the truth about sex, half the divorce couples in the United States would be in Leavenworth. What are they there for? What are their lawyers there for? Of course, you lie. I didn't do it, she did it. No, no, no. I didn't do it, he did it. Here are the names and places. Well, there are some things in which it is gentlemanly to lie. To lie about the state of the union, to lie about the fact of the empire, what the empire doing. Following your program this morning, Mr. Tenet's resignation, and I thought, "What a nice diversion. He's a figure of no consequence at all." It's like, you know, you fire a secretary because she just simply didn't come to work for a month or so, and got the work wrong. He is of no consequence at all, Mr. Tenet. Now he's gone.

AMY GOODMAN: Lets hear President Bush, just in the last few days, giving the graduation address at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: In 1944, General Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in the English countryside and wrote out a message to the troops who would soon invade Normandy. "Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force," he wrote, "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you." Each of you receiving a commission today in the United States military will also carry the hopes of free people everywhere. As your generation assumes its own duties during a global conflict that will define your careers, you will be called upon to take brave action and serve with honor. In some ways this struggle we're in is unique. In other ways it resembles the great clashes of the last century between those who put their trust in tyrants, and those who put their trust in liberty. Our goal, the goal of this generation, is the same. We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush speaking at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. President Bush comparing the conflict in Iraq to World War II. Today he's headed to Normandy. He just met with the Pope this morning on the anniversary of D-day. Your response, Gore Vidal?

GORE VIDAL: Well, I'd like to be a fly on that wall where he meets the Pope, who highly disapproves of our imperial mission around the world. The Pope, although he's generally interested in sex only, (that is part of the Roman Catholic doctrine of power over the individual) the Pope is a good guy on matters of war and peace. He doesn't like war, and he doesn't like Bush. He doesn't like the United States at this moment. So, I would think that was a very chilling meeting between the two of them.

 It was chilly when Ronald Reagan went to see him, but Reagan went to sleep, and it was a wonderful meeting, you know. The pope said a few prayers, and there was Ron, snoring softly, and everybody was saying in a very ­ "it's been a very long trip, you know, from America here." And there's Reagan, sound asleep in front of all of the cameras. But to compare the preemptive wars of Mr. Bush, which are totally illegal, which offend -- if I may paraphrase Thomas Jefferson -- the decent opinion of mankind. The entire world is horrified by what we do. He goes into an innocent country called Afghanistan, knocks it down. One of his cabinet members knocks it down. Then he gives contracts to rebuild it to his vice president with Halliburton. Then he knocks down another country which has done nothing to us. Why don't you hit Denmark? There are beautiful buildings there. It will cost more to put them up again, but it will keep a lot of money flowing in from the treasury to rebuild Tivoli Gardens and Copenhagen. Hit Denmark, I kept saying. No one listens to me, of course. I thought that would be better fun.

But I'm one of these few people, I suppose, at this table -- I should tell that you we're seated at a most beautiful table and one -- in one of the most beautiful studios downtown. Anyone who thinks this place is a poor program; I have never seen such wealth and riches. The highest technology everywhere I look. We're under laser scrutiny here. This is a superb studio. Sitting here, feeling that the world is going to be all right, which is -- it is not, to compare the mess that Bush has made in the world with preemptive wars, which I thought had gone out of fashion with Adolf Hitler. Now, do not write in. Do not call, and do not march in the streets that I have compared this evil man, George Bush, to Adolf Hitler when we all know it's Mother Teresa, come back--just the wrong sex. Bush is about as evil as you can get, in the way of an American president. The fact that he doesn't know what he's doing is a mitigating factor. I mean, there are times when I'd say he's sleepwalking. He says the most absurd things. Our craven media, which is getting a little better now. I don't know if you enjoy as much as I do, The New York Times's mea culpa. They figured out they have been lying all along, and that Judith Miller, their great inside person about weapons of mass destruction, she was getting it from Chalabi, who was a kind of con man, and they were making it up. It just sounded good. The Times had it on the front page, the weapons of mass destruction. We have to go in there and knock these people around. Well, when you have a press that no longer does its job, you have an uninformed electorate. We have an electorate that really doesn't know what to believe about anything. You can't blame it on the people. They're just not told the truth. So, I have gone a long way around to say that there is no way of comparing series of messes that the Bush people have done. I am a veteran -- brace yourself out there, because you only hear from -- by and large from what I call the yellow rose of Texas, which is Mr. Bush, who being a good yellow rose from Texas, stayed out of all of the wars and Cheney stayed out of them. I like a fool, at 17, enlisted in the Army, in the year 1943, and served three years in the Second World War because that was the thing you did. If your country had been attacked, that's what you do. Nowadays, if your country is attacked, you immediately get a contract to rebuild something. Then perhaps you are a member of the cabinet who knocks down cities, and then you go over to the vice president and get his company, Halliburton, to rebuild them with treasury money. So, I mean, you can see them-"Hey, Rumsfeld, I want to build -- you know, I have this dream" -- you can hear this coming from one of them. "I want a railroad station right in the center of Baghdad. I mean, they need it. They need an old fashioned one with towers on it. Something beautiful. And no cement block. I want brick." You can hear them at this. And then we rebuild it. So, between the destructiveness and all of the lies that are told, there is all of the corruption. In a proper country, the corruption would be reported. You can't find it. Then the president -- well, he's like Lyndon Johnson. If you remember toward the end of Lyndon Johnson's reign and the Vietnam War was going, he couldn't speak anywhere except to Army bases. Now we have this little terrier marching around, "Yap, yap, yap, yap. I'm a wartime president. I'm a wartime president. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Just like the big guys."

AMY GOODMAN: Gore Vidal is our guest. He has written a new book. It's called Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia. We'll be back with him in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez. Our guest is Gore Vidal with yet another book. This one, "Imperial America ­ Reflections On The United States Of Amnesia." That's the second part, amnesia.

GORE VIDAL: I'm glad you remembered that, because I keep forgetting that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And speaking of amnesia, the ­ one of the big sections in your book is a privatizing of the American elections. Many people have almost forgotten Florida already, but we're now in a new year, a new election year, and already as we reported earlier on the show, CNN has sued the state of Florida to try to get the list of the new -- the newest list of felons about to be purged from the rolls in Florida. You have a lot to say about what will -- what could possibly happen with these elections, and what we, the nation, still have not dealt with about the last election?

GORE VIDAL: Well, the sinister thing ­ or certainly a sinister thing has been the privatizing of the elections, outsourcing, to use the latest cant phrase, is that for some time now people have been dissatisfied with the dangling chads and so on. There's a special act of Congress calling for a lot of money to be spent in order to bring up to date the voting machinery. It's touch screen stuff. It's supposed to be very popular with the voters. Well, it's the most easily corrupted of all, because it's ­ you touch the screen, and you vote for Kerry, and then your vote suddenly is transformed almost immediately, and there's no track of it ever registering anywhere but in the hearts of heaven. The votes are counted not in L.A. County, let us say, where you may have voted, which is the normal thing to do. They're counted in 34th street. I go into great detail in the course of Imperial America into how three companies have absolutely got hold of the voting machinery, and Diebold, is the number one, and in the state of California where I am living, at least the California legislature has suddenly got ­ backed them up and said in Orange County, which is one of the largest counties in L.A. During the recall election, recently something like 7,000 votes ­ nobody can track them. There is no record that you voted. They call it a paper trail. Make a paper trail. They don't have that. In other words ­ I'll tell you one thing about how they get away with it, you see the difficulty I'm having trying to explain it to the kindly people who are listening to it, well it's complicated how they steal elections, but it can be done. It is all done electronically. Well, at least California has now called into doubt these machines, and there's talk of not using them. In other words, the happy look that occasionally you see on George W. Bush's Yellow Rose of Texas face, he knows something we don't know. He's knows he could lose lose the whole election and win the votes because the machinery can be played around with. The head of Diebold, which is the number one manufacturer of these machines, is on record as saying he's a working Republican more power to him. He's a working Republican, and he's already written a fund raising letter to the voters of Ohio, which is a swing state, saying, well, I'll do everything I can to make sure that Ohio votes for President Bush. Well, noble partisanship and we're a free country. You can work for anybody who you want to, but don't make the machines, and don't make them unaccountable. Absolutely it's difficult to find what goes on in these machines. So, California, the legislature has already asked them to re-examine, and perhaps get rid of them, but you see, I mean, November is almost here. They're all over Georgia. They're all over Maryland. You could well lose the election if you had friends in high places with the three companies that produced these machines. You can change the election. Everybody could vote for Kerry, and suddenly, there is Bush once again, an unelected President, but serving his time and quacking away. You know, as though he were the real thing. Wartime President. I'm a wartime President. Why, if we had any media in the country that was honest, and we don't, somebody would have pointed out this is not wartime. You cannot have a war without a declaration. Article two of the Constitution of the United States declaring war, and that should be the House of Representatives. That is the law of the land. He said, "I'm a wartime President." well, good for him, but he isn't. There's no war except what he has declared. That's on Afghanistan and what he has declared on Iraq. There is no war, and why they don't stop him right there. I'd switch him right off the air. I would have the voice going, President Bush is under a misapprehension that we are at war. We are not at war. He is at war. Unfortunately, those in the Armed Services must do what the Commander In Chief -- I'm the Commander In Chief, you know of this whole thing. I'm running it. Then I'm going to send troops to -- you get the first person? I am going to. I spent three years in World War II. I never heard President Roosevelt say -- "I'm going to send troops to China. And I will then send them to Southeast Asia." President Roosevelt never said "I." We. We are the United States. We will do this. All together with our allies. We will do this. So, it's "I." I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. How a fool like this can be tolerated in a country whose median I.Q. cannot be much lower than that of Inner Slovenia, that they allow him to say ridiculous things and get away with it. So, in the absence of a real "New York Times," instead of a bleeding paper now beginning to apologize for its numerous mistakes about -- having convinced us all that there were weapons of mass destruction, hence, a war. I have never felt the country is so naked as it is now. There is no official voice. There is no representative government. Congress doesn't represent anybody. And the Supreme Court, I must say, why some of them are not in jail, I don't know. But be that as it may, to strike a happy note ­

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Gore Vidal, his latest book is "Imperial America -- The United States Of Amnesia." Gore Vidal born at the cadet hospital at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. What can people do now? You have described grave problems. Elections being stolen. A war not declared, but engaged in.

GORE VIDAL: I should think if there were a great and eloquent voice opposite to that of Bush ­ in other words, if Kerry could only take off and start to say the things that I have been saying somewhat light heartedly, if he could say them a bit more heavy heartedly, then would you have an opposition and then would you have a big turnout. You might have a real vote going on. It wasn't until I watched, to my amazement, my cousin Albert Gore give that wonderful speech up at N.Y.U. was it? He sounded ­ you know, the Gore blood. I'm making no pun, but the Gore blood was at last rippling. We are a political family and we go back to the beginning of the country, and we have ­ we were the founders amongst the founders of the old party of the people, which means we are original populists, and we came into public view during reconstruction at the end of the ­ after the Civil War, the end of the 19th century. We are ­ always have been populists, and suddenly, Albert, who could put me to sleep in the year 2000 when he was running, and I thought, where is the Gore blood? There's one thing we know how to do is make a speech. We certainly know where our interests are, which is to preserve, protect and defend the people of the United States against the great financial powers that govern. Suddenly, there he is up there at N.Y.U. And he sounds like a President we didn't get. I mean, he was elected President, and I think this bothers George W. Bush every day, if somebody told you about it. I have a funny feeling that he doesn't know that he lost the election. Because he sounds so confident. I think he thought he was elected by a landslide, you know. Anything he wants to do, he can do. Because I'm a wartime President. And suddenly, here was Albert, a peacetime President who wants to maintain the peace, you know, we made our fortune in the world through making things that people wanted. Some of it was lousy stuff, whether from lousy TV shows to soft drinks, blue jeans and so on, as long as we were selling the world stuff, we were a proper commercial nation. Nothing wrong with that. Doesn't sound glamorous. But now that we're in the Julius Caesar business, to be represented by the Yellow Rose of Texas is a bit, you know, sad.

AMY GOODMAN: The 9/11 commission report?

GORE VIDAL: Well, the 9/11, I haven't heard any final -- there's no final report yet.

AMY GOODMAN: No, no. There isn't. But in terms of the kind of investigation that we have seen.

GORE VIDAL: I'm astonished that they allowed anything, and then I was not in the least surprised that urgent questions were not really asked or answered. I mean, it's better than nothing. I mean, you know, we only get a tiny bone of democracy. I can say that on this program, which is dedicated to democracy. Incidentally, for your listeners, viewers, the word "democracy" is not only never mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, but democracy was something that the founding fathers hated. This is not generally known because it shouldn't be known, but it is. I wrote a little book about it called, "Inventing A Nation," that Yale published last year. Our founders feared two things. One was the rule of the people, which they thought would just be a mess. And they feared tyranny, which we had gone on through King George III, and so they wanted a republic, a safe place for men ­ white men of property to do business in. This is not ideal, but it's better than what we have. So, here we are bringing democracy to the poor Afghans, but only real democracy, of course, is in the prisons, which we have specialized in everywhere. One interesting thing that came out of all of that mess was now the world knows how we treat Americans in American prisons. All of that behavior, the humiliation and violence and so on, that is typical of not so much -- of federal prisons somewhat, but state prisons, municipal prisons, detention centers. This is the nation of torture, and those who disagree with me, you can write an angry letter at this very moment, if you can write at all. Sit down and write an angry letter to the Commander In Chief. Have him examine the prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Gore Vidal.

GORE VIDAL: I just barely started. [laughs]

AMY GOODMAN: "Imperial America -- Reflections On The United States Of Amnesia." We'll have you back to continue.

GORE VIDAL: Thank you.

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Gore Vidal on 9/11, the 2000 Election and the War in Iraq
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DEMOCRACY NOW! radio
/
A "must-hear"...Vidal pretty much says it all:
In REALPLAYER (video or audio)at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/13/174244

One of America's most acclaimed essayists and historians in an extended interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. We'll also hear a recent speech by Gore Vidal recorded last week.

On Sunday Sen. Bob Graham accused the Bush administration of engaging in a "coverup" of intelligence failures before and after the Sept. 11 attacks to shield it from embarrassment, and said the war with Iraq has allowed Al Qaeda and other groups to become a greater threat to Americans than ever before. This according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Graham, a presidential candidate and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also accused the administration of jeopardizing the safety of Americans by blocking the release of a landmark congressional report on the government failures that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Florida Democrat said the White House has withheld from the public important information about the continued existence of terrorist cells in the United States - including some with ties to foreign governments that the U.S. has been afraid to go after.

Graham's critique in many ways is similar to one that appeared in a book that recently topped the New York Times Bestseller paperback. The book is Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta. The author is Gore Vidal.

Gore Vidal is one of America's most prolific and best-known writers. He has written more than 22 books and more than 200 essays -- a collection of his essays won the National Book Award in 1993.

Vidal is the author most recently of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta.

Taken together, the books constitute a comprehensive attack on America's imperialist ambitions and the military industrial complex.

Writing in the Scotsman, critic Gavin Esler called Perpetual War "the finest serious critique of America's use and abuse of power in the 21st century that I have read."

I had an opportunity to speak with Vidal last week. We're going to play some of that interview. He begins by discussing his thoughts about the United States post 9-11.

* Gore Vidal, essayist, critic and author of best-selling books Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta in an interview with Amy Goodman

* Gore Vidal, recorded May 4th at the Ethical Culture of Society in New York in a speech sponsored by the Nation Institute.

In REALPLAYER (video or audio)at:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/13/174244

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Gore Vidal is the author of 25 novels, 5 plays, many screenplays, more than 200 essays, and a memoir (Palimpsest). The Times Literary Supplement notes that Vidal's United States: Essays 1952-1992 is "one of the great American books of the twentieth century." It won the 1993 National Book Award. Vidal's most recent book is Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. Vidal expresses his passionate views of Election 2004 and what's at stake.

Amazon.com: How important is this presidential election in the larger context of the Republic and its history?

Gore Vidal: The election of 2004 is the most important--fateful--since 1860, which unlocked the door to civil war.

Amazon.com: Is there one standout issue, and why does it make a difference? What are the most crucial issues?

Vidal: Given the various goals of the Cheney-Bush junta, just about everything is standing out like a row of forest fires in August. To the extent the U.S. Patriot Act is available to us, we are faced with a newly invented presidential power to wage "preemptive war" if he suspects terrorists of lurking in any country--or might one day lurk, or even worse, the inhabitants might one day produce nuclear weapons to keep us from attacking them as we have Afghanistan and Iraq. Mutual deterrence, which kept the U.S. and Soviet Union from war for a half a century, is out the window. The junta is on the march. Meanwhile, the Bill of Rights has been twisted into a pretzel. Any U.S. citizen "suspected" of terrorism can be arrested and held in prison without access to a lawyer, or trial by jury--indeed, without due process of law--until a vague military court exiles him to wherever they choose without revealing his "crime," if any. The list of dictatorial abuses is long. Why so little resistance? Congress, judiciary, and executive have been taken over by radical enemies of our Republic. In this they have been aided and abetted by the most corrupt and totalitarian-minded media in our history. At least in 1860, there were Lincoln and his supporters. Today we have corporate America with its eye on what is left of a dwindling fossil fuel supply. While what is left of those of us who conserve our Constitution is drowned out by CNN, etc., who told us that 70% of the delegates to the Democratic convention favored abortion on demand! Truth is dead on air.

Amazon.com: What are the top five books you'd recommend to become an informed voter? And what can your book Imperial America contribute?

Vidal: I will name four books: my own Burr, Lincoln, and Inventing a Nation, plus the United States Constitution. Annual polls of high school seniors tell us that, when confronted with Bill of Rights issues, they don't like the freedoms that we were originally guaranteed. Apparently "freedom of assembly" is a communist notion--at least for the few who have heard of communism. In my book Imperial America, I itemize what we have lost--are losing--in civil liberties; also the nature and number of the lies told to us to get us into wars which are essentially raids on the oil supplies of weaker nations.

The American Republic has been discredited in favor of a military state with curtailed civil rights for all. Now remove your shoes.

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 "... this is a dangerous condition for any representative democracy to find itself in. 
The tight control of information, as well as the dissemination of misleading information and outright falsehoods, 
conjures up a disturbing image of a very different kind of society."
.
- Walter Cronkite, "Secrets and Lies Becoming Commonplace", April 3, 2004
.

- "When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History", by Thom Hartmann (below)
/
"We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process."


We are talking about despotism. 
The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with
 - even using much of the same language. 
The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. 
And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this
 through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged."
/
- Gore Vidal
/ /

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MORE VIDAL INTERVIEWS:

Gore Vidal, interviewed by Doug Henwood ( http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/VidalTranscript.html )

"The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy, is allowing this to go past them without any question, puts me in mind of my favorite Emperor - and I always talk about Emperors when I do Pacifica, at least on the West Coast - Tiberius, who was a very brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word and he said, "You're crazy. Suppose, suppose the Emperor is mad, suppose he's ill, suppose there's a palace coup and somebody else is sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you're passing is really his, or should be passed?" They sent it back: "Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us." And Tiberius said, "How eager they are to be slaves."

And this is more and more my view of the American people in general. They've allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no fuss. We have perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have the Enemy-of-the-Month Club: one month it's Noriega, one month it's Saddam Hussein, one month it's Khadafy, currently it's Osama bin Laden... "It's going to be a loooooong war!" said George W. Bush, with such glee,
'cause it means he has Imperial powers. And it also means that we are not going to get the Constitution back. Once civil rights are gone, they are gone. People get out of the habit of them."

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PBS' American Masters

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/vidal_g.html

"It could easily be argued that no American since Mark Twain has performed so ably as a man of letters as Gore Vidal. The American chronicle itself represents a vivid counter-narrative of American history and politics. The satirical novels are unique and add a vein of Swiftian humor to American literature unlike anything that preceded them. His workmanlike achievements as a dramatist and screenwriter were, in their time, notable. Finally, his essays and reviews have earned him a permanent place in American letters and politics. In his memoir, PALIMPSEST, he has left a remarkably entertaining record of his life and times, which are also the life and times of the nation. Although the quality of the work has varied, the total effect of his presence in American literary culture has been considerable."

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More Vidal essays & interviews at The Gore Vidal Index (http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html)

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bzdbzs
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George W. Hoover
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Vanishing Votes
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911 Accountability
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(Not-so) Friendly Fascism
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About This Site:
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Kurt Vonnegut Speaks 
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Bill Moyers Rallies/
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Mark Twain Sings
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