INTERVIEW: gore vidal

>>INTERVIEW: gore vidal
===================

CounterPunch
Re: http://www.counterpunch.org/vidal03142003.html
March 14, 2003

The Erosion of the American Dream
It's Time to Take Action Against Our Wars on the Rest of the World
by GORE VIDAL

This is a transcript of Gore Vidals's March 12 interview on Dateline, SBS TV
Australia.

MARK DAVIS: Gore Vidal, welcome to Dateline.
GORE VIDAL: Happy to have crossed the dateline down under.

MARK DAVIS: In the past few years, you have shifted from being a novelist to
principally an essayist or, in your own words 'a pamphleteer'. It's almost
the reverse of most writers' careers. Why the shift for you?
GORE VIDAL: Why the shift in the United States of America, which has obliged
me --since I've spent most of my life marinated in the history of my country
and I'm so alarmed by what is happening with our global empire, and our wars
against the rest of the world, it is time for me to take political action. And
I think anybody who has the position, has a platform, must do so. It's also a
family tradition. My grandfather lost his seat in the Senate because he
opposed going into the First World War. And he won it back 10 years later on exactly
the same set of speeches that he'd lost it. So, attitudes change, attitudes
can be changed but, now, I am not terribly optimistic that there is much anyone
can do now the machine is set to go. And, to have a major depression going
on, economic, really, collapse all round the world and begin a war against an
enemy that has done nothing against us other than what our media occasionally
alleges, this is lunacy. And I have a hunch --I've been getting quite a bit
around the country --most people are beginning to sense it. The poll numbers are
not as good as the Bush regime would have us believe. A great...something like
70% really only wants to go into war with United Nations sanction and a new
resolution. I would prefer, however, that we use our constitution, which we
often ignore, which is --Article 1 Section 8 says, "Only the Congress may declare
war. The President has no right to go to war and he is Commander-in-Chief once
it starts."

MARK DAVIS: Over the past 40 years or so, you've written about the
undermining of the foundations of the constitution --liberty, human rights, free
speech. Indeed, you've probably damned every administration throughout that period
on that score. Is George Bush really any worse?
GORE VIDAL: No, he certainly is worse. We've never had a kind of reckless
one who may believe --and there's a whole theory now that he's inspired by love
of Our Lord --that he is an apocalyptic Christian who'll be going to Heaven
while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn't the case. I hope that's
exaggeration. No. We've had...the problem began when we got the empire, which was
brilliantly done, in the most Machiavellian --and I mean that in the best
sense of the word --way by Franklin Roosevelt. With the winning of World War II,
we were everywhere on Earth our troops and our economy was number one. Europe
was ruined. And from that, then in 1950, the great problem began when Harry
Truman decided to militarise the economy, maintain a vast military establishment
in every corner of the Earth. Meanwhile, denying money to schools but really
to the infrastructure of the nation. So we have been at war steadily since
1950. I did a...one of my little pamphlets was 'A Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace' --how that worked. I mean, we've gone everywhere --we have the Enemy of
the Month Club. One month, it's Noriega --king of drugs. Another one, it's
Gaddafi. We hated his eyeliner or something and killed his daughter. We moved from
one enemy to another and the press, the media, has never been more disgusting.
I don't know why, but there are very few voices that are speaking out
publicly. The censorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly
in network television. So nobody's getting the facts. I mean, I spend part of
the year in Italy and really, basically, what I find out I find out from
European journalists who actually will go to Iraq, which our people cannot do or
will not do, and are certainly not admired for doing so. We are in a kind of
bubble of ignorance about what is really going on.

MARK DAVIS: Well, is the pamphlet the only viable option for voices of
dissent at the moment?
GORE VIDAL: Well, it's a weapon. I suppose one could --Khomeini had a
wonderful idea, which made him the lord of all Iran. When the Shah was on his way
out, Khomeini flooded Iran with audio recordings of his voice, very cheaply made
in Paris, and they were listened to by everybody in Iran --it's too late for
that sort of thing for us. There are ways of getting around official media and
there are ways of getting around a government which is given to lying about
everything, and the people eventually pick up on it, but things are moving so
swiftly now.

MARK DAVIS: You charge what you call the 'Cheney-Bush junta' with
empire-building but hasn't America always been an empire and isn't this junta just a
little bit more honest about it? They aren't shy in proclaiming their belief that
America has something worth exporting?
GORE VIDAL: I prefer hypocrisy to honesty any time if hypocrisy will keep
the peace. No, we have had an imperial streak from the very beginning, but it
didn't get going until 1898, when we picked a war with Spain because we had our
eye on Spanish colonial possessions, specifically the Philippines, which got
us into your part of the world --into Asia and, from that moment on, we really
were a global empire. And then, by the time of the Second World War, we'd
achieved it. It was all ours. No, what is going on now is kind of interesting.
We've never seen anything like it. There's a group of what they call
neo-conservatives --most of them were old Stalinists and then they were Trotskyites and
then, finally, they are neo-conservatives now. They preach openly and they're
all over the war department as we used to call it, the Defence Department. Mr
Wolfowitz is one of their brains and they write really extraordinarily
frightening overviews of the United States and the rest of the world that we, after
all, have all the military power that there is and let's use it. Let's take the
Earth. It's there for us. They're talking glibly now about after they get rid
of Saddam --which they think is going to be a very easy thing to do --well,
Iran is next. One of them, not long ago, made a public statement --"It's time we
really had regime change in ALL the Arab countries." Well, there are 1 billion
Muslims and I don't see them taking this very well, and if a smallish place
like wherever it was ultimately can produce so many suicide bombers, 1 billion
Muslims can take out the whole United States or western Europe. I would always
opt for peace, as war is always a mess. But I was in a war which the junta,
Mr Bush and Mr Cheney, did everything possible to avoid being involved in
--Vietnam. Cheney when asked, as he became vice--president, they said, "Well, why
didn't you serve your country at the time of Vietnam?" and he said, "Well, I
had other priorities." I'll say he did. Those of us who...we are the one group,
the World War II veterans, we are a shrinking group obviously, but we are the
ones that are the most solidly against the war. The people who stayed out of
Vietnam, the rest who have never known war, are just gung--ho for other people
to go fight. They, themselves, don't do it. But there is a split here between
those who've had a bit of experience of the world and of war and the others
who are mostly interested, certainly the junta, as I call them, in Washington,
they're all in the gas and oil business. People ask me, "Are you saying there's
a conspiracy?" --because that's the word where everybody starts laughing. It
means you believe in flying saucers. "No," I said, "I'm going to change the
world." We won't say it's a conspiracy that all the great offices of state are
occupied by gas and oil people --the President, the Vice-President, National
Security Adviser --it's not a coincidence. "It's a coincidence," and everybody
smiles --that's a nice word --"Oh, yes, of course, it's a coincidence" that
they are running the government and getting us into a war in oil-rich places."

MARK DAVIS: Well, Bush has claimed that the American belief in liberty will
deliver a free and peaceful Iraq, even with the stench of oil in the air,
George Bush probably can deliver that --a free and peaceful Iraq that is. Isn't
there a legitimate case to be argued that there's a greater good at work here?
GORE VIDAL: There is no greater good at work. We cannot deliver it. Only the
Iraqis can deliver that. You don't go in and smash up a country, which we
will do, and gain their love so that they then want to imitate our highly corrupt
political system and, on the subject of democracy --I happen to be something
of a student of the American constitution --it was set up in order to avoid
majority rule. The two things the founding fathers hated were majoritarian rule
and monarchy. So they devised a republic in which only a very few white men of
property could vote. Then, to make sure that we never had any democracy at
work at the highest levels of governance, they created something called the
electoral college, which can break any change that might upset them. We saw what
happened in November 2000, when Albert Gore won the popular vote by 600,000, he
actually won the electoral vote of Florida, but a lot of dismal things
happened and denied him the election. So that's what happened there. So for us to
talk about a democracy that we are going to translate into other lands is the
height of hypocrisy and is simply foolish. We don't invent governments for other
people.

MARK DAVIS: The American virtues of individual liberties, although viewed by
many people with some cynicism, are still meaningful to people around the
world. It's interesting to note the support that America is getting from the
former eastern bloc European nations --Rumsfeld's "new Europe". The American
message still resonates with them, doesn't it?
GORE VIDAL: They're not clued in to what sort of country the United States
is. They've certainly found out what kind of country the Soviet Union was and
they didn't like that one bit and they associate us with their relative
liberation. That's all. What we're really about they don't know. They believe the
propaganda. They believe the media, which is constantly going on about democracy
and freedom and liberty and the greatest country on earth and so on and the
only thing wrong in the world is there are EVIL people who hate us because we
are SO good. Well, I don't know how anybody can buy this line, but people do.
People are not very well informed. The well-informed countries --western Europe
--know perfectly well what our game is. General de Gaulle took France out of
NATO because he suspected that we were in the empire--building business, and he
didn't want to go along with it yet, simultaneously, France remained an ally
in case there was a major war with the Soviets. I don't think we should take
too seriously those eastern European countries. In due course, they will wake
up, as Turkey did, that we are dangerous.

MARK DAVIS: Well, unlike Iraq, indeed any members of the 'axis of evil',
Americans can change their government with some drawbacks, they can express their
opinions. On the eve of a war, whatever Machiavellian benefits might accrue
to the US, isn't there still moral weight in the voice of America, given its
history as a democratic force over the past century?
GORE VIDAL: I spoke to 100,000 people two weeks ago in Hollywood Boulevard,
down the hill from where I'm speaking to you now. There were 100,000, lots of
police, many helicopters overhead which, as the speaker got up, would lower
themselves to try and drown your voice out. The press did not record that there
were 100,000 people. They said, "Oh, 30,000 perhaps. That might be an
exaggeration," they said. Unfortunately for them, the 'Los Angeles Times', generally a
fairly good paper, had a long shot from La Brea where I was speaking on a
stage straight up to Vine Street, which was a mile or two away, and you saw
100,000 people, so their very picture undid them. What I'm saying is the censorship
is very tight. Don't think we're a free country to say anything we want. We
can say it, but it's not going to be printed and you're not going to get on
television. One of our great voices for some time now for peace in the world is
Noam Chomsky. I've never seen his name in the 'New York Times' in any context
other than linguistics of which he's a professor at MIT. We go totally
unnoticed. I can do a pamphlet and it's the Internet that gets it to people. So I can
sell a couple of hundred thousand copies of a pamphlet. No word of it will
appear in the 'New York Times'. To my amazement this time, they actually put it
on their bestseller list. Generally, they won't do that. I can't tell you how
tightly controlled this place is and it's beginning to show, because talk radio
and so on --I've done a lot of that lately --the questions you get, the
people are so confused. They don't know where Iraq is. They think Saddam Hussein,
because he's an evil person, deliberately blew up the twin towers in Manhattan.
He didn't. That was Osama bin Laden or somebody else. We still don't know
because there has been no investigation of that, as Congress and the constitution
require. So we are totally in the dark and we have a president who is even in
a greater darkness, who's totally uninformed about the world, leading us into
war because, because because.

MARK DAVIS: Well, the defence of American civil liberties has been a
consistent theme of yours, most vocally in recent months, in response to the Patriot
Act and the new Homeland Defence Agency. But it would seem that Americans
don't share your views in any significant numbers. Why not?
GORE VIDAL: They do. What I do is quite popular. Now, mind you, we're not
much of a reading country, but we certainly watch a lot of television. You can
pick up a tremendous audience across --you know, millions of people have been
marching. If you read the American press...

MARK DAVIS: And yet there's been very little political response to the
establishment of those agencies or the very dramatic constitutional changes that
have been made in the Patriot Act. We're not really hearing a strong movement,
not from the Democrats, not in the media. There is a certain acquiescence.
GORE VIDAL: Well, we don't hear it because they're part of it. You know, we
have elections --very expensive ones and very corrupt ones. But we don't have
politics. We made a trade-off somewhere. This was after Harry Truman
established the national security state, and suddenly television came along and
elections cost billions. It cost $3 billion to elect Bush. That's a lot of money. And
it was a campaign almost without issues except personalities. Nothing was
talked about. Nothing was talked about going to war as quickly as possible, which
of course obviously was in his mind. So you have a country that is not
political, without political parties. There are movements of people, which go
largely unrecorded. There are eloquent voices out there, but you don't see them in
print, you don't hear them on the air.

MARK DAVIS: Well, one of those voices is one of your contemporaries, Norman
Mailer. He wrote recently that, after a long life, he's concluded that
fascism, not democracy, is the natural state and that America as a nation is in a
pre-fascist era, a mega banana republic increasingly dominated by the military.
Is it a view that you share?
GORE VIDAL: I have those days, yes, such as Norman is having. But I am more
deeply rooted in the old constitution with all of its flaws and in the Bill of
Rights with all of its virtues. That was something special on Earth and
Jefferson was something special on Earth when he said that life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness --nobody had ever used that phrase in the constitution
before or set that out as a political goal for everyone. So, out of that came the
energies of the United States to have made it the number one country in the
world and the most inventive and the most creative, and then the Devil entered
Eden and we ended up with an Asiatic empire, and a European empire, and a South
American dependency and we are not what we were. The people get no education.
I call it 'the United States of Amnesia'. I've written now is it 12 books I
think, doing American history from the Revolution up to the Millennium. They're
very popular because they don't get it in school and they don't get it from
the media. So people do read my books. But there should be more by other people
too. It is a terrible thing to lose your past, particularly when you had such
an interesting one, as we did. In the 18th century, we had three of the great
geniuses of the 18th century all living in this little colonial world of 3
million people. We had Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These were
extraordinarily wise men and understood the ways of the world, and they gave us a
very good form of government. No, it was not a liberal government. It was a very
reactionary one. But it was the 18th century --1787 was when the constitution
was written. It was as advanced as the human race had ever got at that time
in devising a republic. To have lost that and to have lost all memory of it
--we've been having a big argument about we've got "In God we trust" on the
money. Well this is over the dead bodies of Thomas Jefferson and the other
founders, most of whom did not believe in God and wanted to keep Church and State
separate. Every American seems to think, "In God we trust" was put on the money by
George Washington. Well, it was put on there by Dwight Eisenhower in trying
to get some southern votes, Baptist preachers.

MARK DAVIS: Well, you're one of America's harshest cultural and political
critics and yet you write and clearly talk very romantically about the republic.
You've documented those ebbs and flows where you believe it's verged from its
founding principles. In the broader sweep, what is the state of America today?
GORE VIDAL: Adrift, but adrift toward war, and it's a war that we can't win.
I suppose we can blow up Baghdad but I think, when that starts, if that
happens, we can count on retaliation from 1 billion Muslims and who knows what
other? We are opening up --I don't know, a Pandora's box --it's as if we're
opening a tomb and God knows what will come out of it. This is dangerous country.
This isn't just ordinary colonial aggression --a European power that wants to
take over Panama, something like that. This isn't it at all. First of all,
they're proudly talking about a cultural and religious clash between Christianity
and Devil's work. Well, that's very dangerous and very stupid. And I don't know
how you win that one.

MARK DAVIS: Well, there are definite echoes of the 1950s in America today.
Some of the loudest critics of that shift are also products of that era
--yourself, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller. Where are the young Vidals, the young
Mailers, the young Millers?
GORE VIDAL: One of the things that happened, although we don't have much of
an educational system for the general public --the writers of the Second War,
all except a few like the three that you've just named went into the
universities to teach. Eisenhower in a rather great speech when he left office --he
warned against the military industrial complex, which he said was taking over too
much of this nation's money and life. A part of it that is never quoted --he
said, in effect, that "The universities and learning will be hurt the most
because, because when places of learning and knowledge, investigation are
dependent upon government bounty, subsidies, for their very lives --which we were
doing, we were giving everything to the science department to develop weapons,
well that also went for the humanities, the history department too, the English
department. We have a whole generation of school teachers and they're not very
good school teachers. Some of them are very talented writers, but they're
quiet. They don't want to rock the boat. They want to keep their jobs. They saw
in the '50s --what happened if you got associated with radical movements. You
lost your job and they weren't easy to find. Now, they're quiet as could be.

MARK DAVIS: Is the '50s back, or are the 1950s back with us?
GORE VIDAL: Well, nothing repeats itself except human folly, so no. I do
feel an energy across the country --this may be because I go to energetic groups
--that are fighting their own government, but they're going to lose because
the government is now totally militarised and ready for war --a war they can't
really sell to the rest of the world, but they're going to do it anyway. This
is something new. We've never had a period like this and it was --to somebody
like me, who is really hooked into constitutional America --this is incredible.
We cannot trust the Supreme Court after their mysterious decisions on the
election of 2000. We have no political parties. We've never had much of them --I
mean the Democrats, the Republicans. We have one party --we have the party of
essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic,
one called Republican. So in the absence of politics, with a media that is
easy to manipulate and, in the hands of very few people with interests in wars
and oil and so on, I don't see how you get the word out, but one tries because
there is nothing else to be done.

MARK DAVIS: Gore Vidal, thanks for joining us on Dateline.
GORE VIDAL: Thank you.
------------------------------------
Gore Vidal is the author of two excellent pamphlets on 9/11 and Bush's wars:

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and, most recently,<A
HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/-/1560255021/counterpunchmaga"> Dreaming War >>