[Mb-hair] Re: Gore Vidal Interview

[venuetheatre at juno.com]

I think this is worthy of printing on the list, albiet very long, but
most informative.
Corinne


> Gore Vidal: The Undoing of America
>
> Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free elections, and the late, 
> great U.S. Constitution
>
> by Steve Perry
>
> For the past 40 years or so of Gore Vidal's prolific 59-year literary 
> career, his great project has been the telling of the American story 
> from the country's inception to the present day, unencumbered by the 
> court historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys 
> at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's 
> series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC in 
> 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and through his 
> ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across the years. 
> Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own annual State of 
> the Union message, in magazines and on the talk circuit. His words 
> were always well-chosen, provocative, and contentious: "There is not 
> one human problem that could not be solved," he told an interviewer in 
> 1972, "if people would simply do as I advise."
>
> Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a similarly 
> outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news shows. Vidal's 
> most famous TV moment came during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when 
> ABC paired him with William F. Buckley on live television. On the next 
> to last night of the convention, the dialogue turned to the question 
> of some student war protesters raising a Vietcong flag. The following 
> exchange ensued:
>
>     Quote: Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of proto- or 
> crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that, I'll only say 
> that we can't have--"
>
>     Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or 
> I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
>
> That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days Vidal, who 
> put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago and moved 
> full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly through his essay 
> writing about the foreign and stateside adventures of the Bush 
> administration. In the past five years he has published one major 
> nonfiction collection, The Last Empire, and a book about the founding 
> fathers called Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But 
> mainly he has stayed busy producing what he calls his "political 
> pamphlets," a series of short essay collections called Perpetual War 
> for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: 
> Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial America: 
> Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Last month at Duke 
> University, he produced a short run of On the March to the Sea, an 
> older play about the Civil War that he has rewritten entirely.
>
> I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from his 
> home in Los Angeles on March 9.
>
> City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions: Why are we in 
> Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this point?
>
> Gore Vidal: Well, let us say that the old American republic is well 
> and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved 
> not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and 
> it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. 
> We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to 
> the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. 
> Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in 
> debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, 
> is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being 
> done in their name.
>
> And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. 
> It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining 
> resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be 
> found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be 
> extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta 
> in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat.
>
> CP: You've observed many times in your writing that the United States 
> has elections but has no politics. Could you talk about what you mean 
> by that, and about how so many people have come to accept a purely 
> spectatorial relationship to politics, more like fans (or non-fans) 
> than citizens?
>
> Gore Vidal: Well, you cannot have a political party that is not based 
> upon a class interest. It has been part of the American propaganda 
> machine that we have no class system. Yes, there are rich people; some 
> are richer than others. But there is no class system. We're classless. 
> You could be president tomorrow. So could Michael Jackson, or this one 
> or that one. This isn't true. We have a very strong, very rigid class 
> structure which goes back to the beginning of the country. I will not 
> go into the details of that, but there it is. Whether it's good or bad 
> is something else.
>
> We have not had a political party since that, really, of the New Deal 
> of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the highest class, an 
> aristocrat who had made common cause with the people, who were in the 
> midst of depression, not to mention the Dust Bowl, which had taken so 
> many farms in the '30s. We were a country in deep trouble, and he 
> represented those in deep trouble. He got together great majorities 
> and was elected four times to the presidency. And launched us on 
> empire--somewhat consciously, too. He saw to it that the European 
> colonial empires would break up, and that we would inherit bits and 
> pieces, which we have done.
>
> If we don't have class interests officially, then therefore we have no 
> political parties. What is the Republican Party? Well, it used to be 
> the party of the small-town businessman, generally in the Middle West, 
> generally sort of out of the mainstream. Very conservative. It now 
> represents nothing but the gas and oil business. They own it. And the 
> people who go to Congress are simply bought. They are lawyers who are 
> paid to represent Halliburton, big oil, big banking. So the very rich 
> corporate America has a party for itself, the Republican Party. The 
> Democrats don't have much of anything but a kind of wistful style. 
> They just want everyone to be happy, and politically correct at all 
> times. Do not hurt other people's feelings. They spend so much time on 
> political correctness that they haven't thought of what to do 
> politically about anything. Like say "no" to these preemptive wars, 
> which are against not only the whole world's take on war and peace, 
> but against United States history.
>
> This is something new under the sun--that a president, just because he 
> feels like it, can declare war on anybody. And Congress will go along 
> with him, and the courts will support him. The founding fathers would 
> be mortified if they saw what had happened to their handiwork, which 
> wasn't very great to begin with but is now done for. When you have 
> preemptive wars, and you have ambitious companies like Bechtel who 
> will build up what, let us say, General Electric has helped to destroy 
> with its weaponry--these interests are well-represented.
>
> There is no people's party, and you can't even use the word. "Liberal" 
> has been demonized. A liberal is a commie who's also a pedophile. 
> Being a communist and a pedophile, he's so busy that he hasn't got 
> time to win an election and is odious to boot. So there is no 
> Democratic Party. We hope that something might happen with the 
> governor of Vermont, and maybe something will or maybe it won't. But 
> we are totally censored, and the press just follows this. It observes 
> what those in power want it to observe, and turns the other way when 
> things get dark. Then, when it's too late sometimes, you get some very 
> good reporting. But by then, somebody's playing taps.
>
> CP: Has the media played a role in transforming citizens into 
> spectators of this process?
>
> Vidal: Well, they have been transformed, by design, by corporate 
> America, aided by the media, which belongs to corporate America. They 
> are no longer citizens. They are hardly voters. They are consumers, 
> and they consume those things which are advertised on television. They 
> are made to sound like happy consumers. Listen to TV advertising: This 
> one says, "I had this terrible pain, but when I put on Kool-Aid, I 
> found relief overnight. You must try it too." All we do is hear about 
> little cures for little pains. Nothing important gets said. There used 
> to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on 
> television a great deal. People would talk about many important 
> things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on 
> now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number 
> of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. 
> Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the 
> pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a 
> characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. 
> They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't.
>
> CP: You wrote at the end of a 2002 essay that so-called inalienable 
> rights, once alienated, are often lost forever. Can you describe 
> what's changed about America during the Bush years that represent 
> permanent, or at least long-term, legacies that will survive Bush?
>
> Vidal: Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has 
> ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. 
> It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And 
> having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever 
> he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it 
> doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war 
> against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. 
> It's meaningless.
>
> But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of 
> control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people 
> frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them 
> frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who 
> live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing 
> in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We 
> must save our kin.
>
> Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the 
> more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now 
> believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. 
> Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have 
> truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them.
>
> CP: I'd like to ask you to sketch our political arc from Reagan down 
> to Bush II. It seemed to me that Reagan took a big step down the road 
> to Bush when he was so successful in selling the ideology of the 
> market, the idea that whatever the interests of money and markets 
> dictated was the proper and even the most patriotic course--which was 
> hardly a new idea, but one that had never been embraced openly as a 
> first principle of politics. Is that a fair assessment?
>
> Vidal: He was small-town American Republican, even though he started 
> life as a Democrat. He believed in the values of Main Street. Sinclair 
> Lewis's novels are filled with Ronald Reagans, though Babbitt doesn't 
> get to the White House. But this time Babbitt did. So it was very 
> congenial for Reagan to play that part, not that he had a very clear 
> idea of what his lines were all about. Those who were writing the 
> scenarios certainly knew.
>
> I'd say the downward skid certainly began with Reagan. I came across a 
> comment recently, someone asking why we had gone into both Grenada and 
> Panama, two absolutely nothing little countries who were no danger to 
> us, minding their own business, and we go in and conquer them. 
> Somebody said, well, we did it because we could. That's the attitude 
> of our current rulers.
>
> So they will be forever putting--what they do is put us all at risk. 
> You and I and other civilians are going to be the ones who are killed 
> when the Moslems get really angry and start suicide-bombing American 
> cities because of things the Bush/Cheney junta has done to them. We 
> will be the ones killed. Bush/Cheney will be safe in their bunkers, 
> but we're going to get it. I would have thought that 
> self-interest--since Americans are the most easily terrified people on 
> earth, as recently demonstrated over and over again-- we would be 
> afraid of what was going to befall us. But I think simultaneously we 
> have no imagination, and certainly no sense of cause and effect. If we 
> did have that, we might know that if you keep kicking somebody, he's 
> going to kick you back. So there we stand, ignoring the first rule of 
> physics, which is that there is no action without reaction.
>
> CP: Didn't the previous successes of our economy and our empire, post 
> WWII, condition people to expect that consequences were for other 
> people in other places?
>
> Vidal: Well, wishful thinking, perhaps. I spent three years in World 
> War II, and it was a clear victory for our team. But it was nothing to 
> write Mother about, I'll tell you. Walt Whitman once said, of the 
> Civil War, that it is a lucky thing the people will never know what 
> happened in the war. One can think of a lot of things, one can imagine 
> a lot of things, but...
>
> The sense that there are no consequences--that can happen if you keep 
> the people diverted. Television changed everything. Some 60 or 80 
> percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama 
> bin Laden. They hated each other, and they had nothing to do with each 
> other. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But if you keep repeating 
> it and repeating it--and Cheney still does; nobody's switched him off, 
> so he just babbles and babbles like a broken toy--how are they to know 
> otherwise? Yes, there are good journals here and there, like The 
> Nation, but they're not easily found. And with our educational system, 
> I don't think the average person can read with any great ease anything 
> that requires thought and the ability to exercise cause-and-effect 
> reasoning: If we do this to them, they will do that to us. We seem to 
> have lost all track of that rather primitive notion that I think 
> people all the way back to chimpanzees have known. But we don't.
>
> CP: In your latest book, Imperial America, you refer to Confucius's 
> admonition to "rectify the language." In that regard I'm wondering 
> about the Clinton years, and about the success of the Clinton/Morris 
> strategy of "triangulation," which mainly consisted of talking to the 
> left and governing to the right. Did that play a role in setting the 
> stage for a figure like Bush, who throws around words like "democracy" 
> and "freedom" when they bear no relation to reality?
>
> Vidal: Well, certainly it did. Clinton represented no opposition to 
> this. He was so busy triangulating that he was enlisting under the 
> colors of the other team, hoping to pick up some votes. I don't think 
> he did, but he got himself reelected by not doing the job of an 
> opposing political party. In other words, the Republican Party as it 
> now is funded, is the party of corporate America, which is no friend 
> to the people of America. Now that's a clear division. The people of 
> America, if you ever run for office, you find out they're very shrewd 
> about figuring out who's getting what money, and who's on their side. 
> But you have to organize them. You have to tell them more things than 
> they get to know from the general media.
>
> Clinton just gave up. Also, to his credit, or rather, to explain him, 
> the Republican Party realized that this was the most attractive 
> politician since Franklin Roosevelt, and that he had a great, great 
> hold over people. They also realized that if he got going, we really 
> would have National Health--we would actually become a civilized 
> country, which we are nowhere near. I mean, we're in the Stone Age 
> again. He was working toward it, and they saw he had to be destroyed. 
> Later they got a cock-sucking interlude to impeach him. If I were he, 
> I would have called out the Army and sent Congress home.
>
> CP: Really.
>
> Vidal: Yes, really. They went beyond anything in the laws of 
> impeachment. They have to do with the exercise of your powers as 
> president, abuses of power as president. He wasn't abusing any powers. 
> He was caught telling a little lie about sex, which you're not 
> supposed to ask him about anyway, and he shouldn't have answered. So 
> they use that: oh, perjury! Oh, it's terrible, a president who lies! 
> Oh, God--how can we live any longer in Sodom and Gomorrah? You can 
> play on the dumb-dumbs morning, noon, and night with stuff like that.
>
> CP: Clearly Bush does represent something radical and new, and there's 
> been an understandable tendency on the part of people who don't like 
> where the country is going to focus their outrage exclusively on Bush 
> and the Republicans. But don't the media and the Democrats come in for 
> a great deal of blame for creating the political vacuum in which he 
> rose?
>
> Vidal: Well, the media is on the other side. The media belongs to the 
> big money, and the big money, their candidates, their party, is the 
> Republican Party as now constituted. So everybody is behaving 
> typically [in media]. What isn't typical is a Democratic Party that 
> has also sold out. There are just as many lobbyists and propagandists 
> there as on the other side. They're never going to regain anything 
> until they remember that they're supposed to represent the people at 
> large, and not the very rich.
>
> But they need the very rich in order to be able to run for office, to 
> buy television time. I'd say if you really want to date the crash of 
> the American system, the American republic, it was in the early '50s, 
> when television suddenly emerged as the central fact of American life. 
> That which was not televised did not exist. And any preacher, because 
> religion is tax-free--I would tax all the religions, by the way--any 
> evangelical who wants to get up there and say, send me millions of 
> dollars and I will cure you of your dandruff, he gets to spend the 
> money any way he likes, and there's no tax on it. So he can have 
> political action groups, which he's not supposed to have but does 
> have. So you have all that religious money, and then you have the 
> enormous cost of campaigning, which means every politician who wants 
> to buy TV time has got to sell his ass to somebody. And corporate 
> America is ready to buy.
>
> CP: Likewise, there's a great tendency among his detractors to call 
> Bush stupid. You've called him "dumb," albeit not as dumb as his dad. 
> But I'm recalling what you wrote about Ronald Reagan years ago in your 
> review of the Ronnie Leamer book about him: that no one who's stupid 
> aces every career test he faces. The same is clearly not true of 
> George W. Bush, who had failed in a lot of things before he entered 
> politics. But he hasn't failed in politics. Do you think Bush 
> possesses a kind of intelligence akin to Reagan's in that regard, or 
> is that giving him too much credit? How do you think his mind works?
>
> Vidal: I should think very oddly. He's dyslexic, which means--it's a 
> problem of incoherence. I have some dyslexia in my family, and they 
> can be reasonably intelligent about most things, but they have 
> problems with words, the structure of language. Not really getting it. 
> There's an inability to study anything. Sometimes they also have an 
> attention deficiency and so on.
>
> I would say that he is undisturbed by these things. His is a mind 
> totally lacking in culture of any kind. I'm not talking about highbrow 
> culture, just knowledge of the American past, and our institutions. 
> He's got rid of due process of law, which is what the United States is 
> based upon. Once you can send somebody off and put them in the brig of 
> a ship in Charleston Harbor and hold them as long as you like 
> uncharged, you have destroyed the United States and its Constitution. 
> He has done those things.
>
> CP: How did so many Americans come to embrace and even celebrate these 
> bullying, anti-democratic displays of authoritarian, censorial 
> governance? There's a palpable sense of mean- spiritedness about a 
> good deal of public sentiment, it seems.
>
> Vidal: I wouldn't call it the public. There are groups that rather 
> like it. And these are the same groups that don't like black people, 
> gay people, Jews, or this or that. You always have that disaffected 
> minority that you can play to. And it helps you in states with small 
> populations. If you get eight of those states, you don't get much of a 
> popular vote, but you can get the Electoral College--a device that our 
> founders made to make sure we never had a democratic government. In 
> other words, I don't blame the public. He's not popular. I've just 
> been reading a report on Conyers's trip to Ohio with his 
> subcommittee's experts. Ohio was stolen. The Republican Congress will 
> never have a hearing on it. But I think attempts are being made to 
> publish the details of what was done there, and elsewhere too in 
> America.
>
> In other words, I put the case that Bush was never elected--not in 
> 2000, and not in 2004. This is a new game in the world. Through the 
> magic of electronic voting, particularly through Mr. Diebold and 
> friends, you can take a non-president and make him president. But how 
> to keep the people, including the opposition who should know better, 
> so silent, this introduces us to a vast landscape of corruption which 
> I dare not enter.
>
> CP: I saw a recent CIA report that referred to the United States as a 
> "declining superpower." To your knowledge, has the government ever 
> said so before?
>
> Vidal: Well, their style is hortatory and alarmist. And I think they 
> say we're declining every day and every minute. We must do this, we 
> must overthrow this government, we must do that, stop China. Why not 
> nuke China? [The American right] was all set to do that at one point, 
> I remember. William F. Buckley Jr. was in favor of a unilateral strike 
> at their nuclear capacity. A whole bunch of people, moderately 
> respectable, were in favor of that. It all comes from propaganda. It 
> all comes from knowing how to use the media to your own ends, and keep 
> the people frightened.
>
> It was very striking--before the inauguration, CNN showed a bunch of 
> inaugural addresses starting with Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a master 
> politician. What theme does he hit first? "We have nothing to fear but 
> fear itself." Well, that's it. He intuited it, having followed the 
> Nazis and knowing how Hitler was putting together his act, which was 
> creating fear in the Germans of everybody else so he could mobilize 
> them and make the SS. Roosevelt was saying that it was this unnameable 
> fear that we had to watch out for. Then we skip over to Harry Truman, 
> a real dunce, but there was a genius behind him in Dean Acheson. We 
> jump over to him, and he is declaring war on communism, all over the 
> world. They're on the march! Wherever you look, there they are, and we 
> must be on our guard!
>
> He instituted loyalty oaths for everybody--for janitors in high 
> schools as well as members of the cabinet. Unthinkable, the distance 
> from Roosevelt to his admittedly despised successor. We've gone from, 
> we must not succumb to fear itself, to the next one saying, oh, 
> there's so much to be afraid of! We must arm! We must militarize 
> America and its economy, which he did.
>
> CP: One theory about the reason the US invaded Iraq concerns 
> currency--the fear that European deals for Iraqi oil might lead to 
> oil's being denominated in euros rather than dollars. Do you think 
> that notion holds any water?
>
> Vidal: I do. Perhaps more oil than water, but yes, that's what it's 
> about--the terror that Europe...Europe, after all, is more populous 
> than the United States, better educated, better quality of life for 
> most of its citizens. And it has actually achieved, here and there, a 
> civilization, which we haven't. There's a lot of nasty response on the 
> part of those Americans who are eager for more oil, more money, more 
> this, more that, to put Europe down, to regard Europe as a rival and 
> perhaps as an enemy. It was America that saw to it that we got a weak 
> dollar, though. The Europeans had nothing to do with it. In fact they 
> were rather appalled, because they own an awful lot of treasury bonds 
> that will be worthless one day.
>
> So yes, it was a power struggle. Ultimately the whole thing is about 
> oil. We should be looking to hydrogen, or whatever is the latest 
> replacement for fossil fuels. All the money we put into these wars in 
> the Middle East, we should have put into that. Then we wouldn't be so 
> desperate at the thought that in 2020, or in 2201 or whenever, there 
> will be no more oil.
>
> CP: Talk a little more about public education's decay in the current 
> scene. Much of the Bush administration's spending on No Child Left 
> Behind is earmarked for private corporate tutors.
>
> Vidal: I don't think Bush himself is particularly relevant to any of 
> this, since he avoided education entirely throughout his life. Which 
> gives him a sort of purity. He was a cheerleader at Andover, where he 
> learned many skills that have been very useful to him since.
>
> The educational system was pretty good once. I never went to a public 
> school, and the private schools here are generally good, though we are 
> also better indoctrinated than the public schools. It certainly got 
> bad around the '50s. Just as we became a global empire, the first 
> thing I was struck by was that they stopped teaching geography in 
> public schools. Now here we are a global power, and nobody knows where 
> anything is. I loved geography when I was a kid. It's really the way 
> to get to know the world. The success of Franklin Roosevelt was that 
> he was a great philatelist. He collected stamps, and he knew where all 
> the countries were and who lived in them. Now we have people who don't 
> know where anything is. I remember a speech Bush gave in which he was 
> reaching out not only to the "Torks" but the "Grecians" at some point. 
> We live in total confusion time.
>
> There is also something in the water--let us hope it was put there by 
> the enemy--that has made Americans contemptuous of intelligence 
> whenever they recognize it, which is not very often. And a hatred of 
> learning, which you don't find in any other country. There is not one 
> hamlet in Italy in which you can fail to find kids desperate to learn. 
> Yes, there are areas where they might be desperate to become members 
> of the Mafia, but that's because they don't have any money. And a 
> country like Italy is not rich, not as rich as we are. But there isn't 
> a kid in Italy who can't quote Dante. There's no one in America now 
> who knows who Shakespeare is, because they stopped teaching him in 
> high schools.
>
> So we are out of it. And no attempt is being made to put us back into 
> it.
>
> CP: When does this current bout of foreign adventurism end? You've 
> said in other interviews that it ends with us going broke. Can you 
> explain?
>
> Vidal: I haven't changed my line. We don't have the money for these 
> adventures. We don't even have the money to operate those prisons 
> which are the delight of Iraq. All we were doing at Abu Ghraib was 
> export what we do to our own people in our own prisons, you know. We 
> are sharing with the rest of the world penology-- in every sense. No, 
> there isn't the money to do it. And the few who are making most of the 
> money are probably investing it elsewhere, preparing islands for 
> themselves to escape to. And then their followers, who are not very 
> many, will be experiencing rapture. They won't be here.
>
> CP: Is there any winning back some semblance of the older republic at 
> this point?
>
> Vidal: You have to have people who want it, and I can't find many 
> people who do.
>
> CP: What can average people do about this state of affairs at present, 
> if anything?
>
> Vidal: Well, some of the internet has been very useful. Radio has been 
> very useful. There are means of getting things across. It's why I 
> write those little books of mine, the pamphlets as I call them. Our 
> first form of politics was pamphleteering in the 18th century. They 
> serve a purpose--more pamphlets, more readers, more this, more that. 
> There's a battle to do an interesting kind of guide to the American 
> centuries, and how we got where we are and how we can get out of it. 
> I'm engaged with some people working on that. Further, deponent sayeth 
> not.
>
>
 
 

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