[Peace-discuss] Us and the Right

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Another indication of the conjunction between the anti-war Left and parts
of the non-neocon Right.  This is from the June 2003 issue of Chronicles,
an interesting Rightist journal.  --CGE]


	REVIEW

	The Patriot
	by Bill Kauffman

	Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta
	by Gore Vidal
	New York: Nation Books;
	197 pp., $11.95

Edward Abbey used to say that he took great pride in getting more radical
as he got older-no easy task for the anarchist son of a communist father,
but an impeccably American maturation just the same. As the American
Empire staggers into senseless senescence, what patriot, whether populist,
reactionary, or just cantankerously American, isn't being radicalized by a
Cheney-Bush state that bids to make FDR's reign look like an edenic age of
flower-power pacifism and carefree liberty?

Our greatest living man of letters, 78-year-old Gore Vidal, has grown into
our greatest living dissident. If his latest work, Dreaming War, does not
pass muster with the literary critics of the Department of Homeland
Security, so much the better. For patriotic Gore Vidal is fighting a last
valiant battle to preserve-no, to reclaim-the American republic that once
was.

Vidal as pamphleteering elder is in the mold of his forebear Edmund
Wilson, who contributed the corrosive classic The Cold War and the Income
Tax (1963), in which the absent-minded Sage of Talcottville explained his
guileless failure to pay the publicans from 1946 to 1955. Wilson concluded
in this strange and prophetic little book that the United States had
become "self-intoxicated, homicidal and menacing"-this before LBJ had
fulfilled his promise to bring the Great Society to Vietnam, at a cost of
only a million-plus Vietnamese and 58,000 American boys dead and a few
sleepless nights for Robert McNamara.

In his radical old age, Edmund Wilson protested with equal vigor the
depredations of the unspeakable Robert Moses, who was stealing land from
the Tuscarora Indians on which to build a power plant, and the state
highway department's destruction of the elm tree in front of his house in
order to widen one of the highways that were so sacred to the Greatest
Generation. A patriot of the America that had produced Bronson Alcott and
Johnny Appleseed, Henry Thoreau and James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick
Douglass and Eugene V. Debs, Wilson despaired that

    our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled
more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more
difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I
can accept neither this power unit's aims nor the methods it employs to
finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or
not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.

And so off Wilson went, hopping down the bunny trail, burrowing ever
further into his ancestral home of Talcottville, New York. Mary McCarthy
called him an "unreconstructed isolationist"-which brings us to Gore
Vidal.

Vidal, then a mere stripling in his 30's, was almost alone in praising
Wilson's alternately exasperated and despondent polemic. Now it is his
turn to play the Ghost of America Past. The most brilliant essayist of his
age, Vidal, like Wilson, has taken up the pamphleteer's pen in his two
most recent works, Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How
We Got To Be So Hated. "How Gore Vidal Got To Be So Hated" would make for
an interesting essay in itself, but I get the feeling that we have been
down that path before. (See the March 1989 issue of Chronicles and the
resultant "Stop Payment" orders on foundation checks.)

So what are the policy prescriptions of this dangerous radical? Eliminate
the income tax and devolve the taxing power to states and municipalities.
Call off the ruinous drug war. Decentralize political power along the
lines of the Swiss cantonal system. Bring home our troops. Slash the
"atrocious taxes that subsidize this permanent war machine." Decimate the
budget of the War Department (coyly renamed the "Department of Defense" by
the amusingly surnamed President True-Man). Fine ideas all, and within the
Jeffersonian tradition. Gore Vidal ought to be a revered elder of the
libertarian side of the American right. Alas, said side has simply
vanished. As far as I can tell, there is no place for old-fashioned
Americans in the party of Limbaugh and Rumsfeld. Hell, I voted straight
Green last November, and even that did not seem nearly radical enough.

The essays in Dreaming War compose a witty and erudite isolationist
critique of U.S. foreign policy since Pearl Harbor. You must remember that
Vidal was a teenage populist who was catechized in Bryanite truths by his
Roosevelt-hating grandfather Thomas P. Gore, the blind senator from
Oklahoma whose pet cause was submitting any congressional declaration of
war to a popular vote. ("Congressional declaration of war": an archaism
today on the order of "the cat's pajamas.")

Young Vidal grew up "at the heart of an isolationist family"; he was a
leader of the America First Committee at Exeter before enlisting in the
Navy. Even in the bleakest hours of World War II, Gen. Robert E. Wood,
chairman of that noble Middle American committee, kept an amusing tally of
the isolationists in uniform and the warhawks on the homefront. Or as
Vidal writes, "in our politics the sissies are always cheerleading the
real guys to go on to give their lives." That pipping squeak you hear
behind the clanking of the tanks is George W. Bush, yell leader at
Andover.

Vidal was raised on plausible tales of Rooseveltian perfidy, of
disregarded warnings of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he asks,
quite naturally, if September 11 might not have been "a replay of the 'day
of infamy' in the Pacific sixty years earlier?" As a populist whose
bloodlines run through Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Mississippi, he wonders
what on earth U.S. soldiers are doing 8,000 miles from their homes. He
understands that an isolationist America is a peaceful America; had we
minded our own business, Bin Laden and his deranged murderers would be as
indifferent to our land as George W. Bush is to the works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

Dreaming War features Vidal in full populist voice; anyone who would
criticize him as "anti-American" simply does not know what a real American
sounds like. Let him speak for himself:

    Our people tend to isolationism and it always takes a lot of corporate
manipulation, as well as imperial presidential mischief, to get them into
foreign wars.

    [O]ur more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of
games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people)
will never learn of.

    Since George Washington, the isolationist has always had the best
arguments. But since corporate money is forever on the side of foreign
adventure, money has kept us on the move . . .

Vidal is a proprietary patriot. The country is his, his ancestors built
it, and he has been an exemplary citizen-writer of the sort once found in
antebellum America. His sense of belonging to America enables him to
perform acts of lese majeste with glee and impunity. For instance, Vidal
has a healthy disrespect for Harry Truman, the nearsighted Godzilla who
taught the mothers and children of Nagasaki a thing or two about weapons
of mass destruction. Truman, in committing us to an apparently eternal
involvement in the broils of Europe-precisely the mistake against which
Washington and Jefferson warned-"replac[ed] the republic for which we had
fought with a secret National Security State" whose subjects we are. A
draft, loyalty oaths, the uprooting of millions of American boys in the
service of militarism, "the highest personal income taxes in American
history": Such were the rotten fruits of a Cold War that waged war on
republican government, local culture, and good old American individualism
with an effectiveness the grim commies must have admired from afar.

The Constitution is a dead letter; since Truman, we have lived under the
poisonous assumption, writes Vidal, that

    the United States is the master of the earth and anyone who defies us
will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown. We are beyond law,
which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond
common sense.

Vidal's politics are really quite simple. As he once told an interviewer,
"I hate the American Empire, and I love the old republic."

To what extent the Bush-whacking of Iraq was motivated by oil, Israel,
or-my choice-simply the mad logic of empire, I have no idea. I only know
that committing the young men and the treasure of the United States to the
semipermanent policing of the other side of the world is not in the
American interest and is especially not in the interest of the small
places, the havens of particularity, the villages and neighborhoods that
produce what is healthy about American culture. Gore Vidal is right: The
petulant rich kid in the White House and his retinue of war-dreamers are
the enemies of this country. They dream war; we dream America. Welcome to
their nightmare.

"Today, we are not so much at the brink as fallen over it," remarks Vidal.
Not that he, too, isn't an American Dreamer, given to fits of optimism. In
his giddier moments, he dreams of "the coming impeachment trial of George
W. Bush." Sweet dreams-and maybe constitutional government-are made of
these.

Vidal concludes an essay on Guatemala, scene of his underrated early novel
Dark Green, Bright Red (1950), with this exchange:

    I was at school with Nathaniel Davis, who was our ambassador in Chile
at the time of Allende's overthrow. A couple of years later Davis was
ambassador to Switzerland and we had lunch at the Berne embassy. I
expressed outrage at our country's role in the matter of Chile. Davis
"explained" his role. Then he asked, "Do you take the line that the United
States should never intervene in the affairs of another country?" I said
that unless an invasion was being mounted against us in Mexico, no, we
should never intervene. Davis, a thoughtful man, thought; then he said,
"Well, it would be nice in diplomacy, or in life, if one could ever start
from a point of innocence." To which I suppose the only answer is to
say-Go!

How about it, patriots? If it's long past morning (if not mourning) in
America, the chimes of midnight have yet to ring. Go!

[Bill Kauffman's Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette has just been
published by Henry Holt.]

Copyright 2003, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org

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