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CounterPunch
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, Dreaming
War.
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