[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:10395] Fwd: EROSION OF AMERICAN DREAM/GORE VIDAL

[Alfred Kagan]

>X-Sender: willett at liblib.com@mail.infotogo.net
>Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:49:48 -0500
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>From: Charles Willett <willett at liblib.com>
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:10395] Fwd: EROSION OF AMERICAN DREAM/GORE VIDAL
>X-MailScanner: Found to be clean, Found to be clean
>Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>Sender: owner-srrtac-l at ala.org
>X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.5 required=5.0
>	tests=BALANCE_FOR_LONG_20K,FWD_MSG,SPAM_PHRASE_02_03
>	version=2.43
>X-Spam-Level:
>Status: RO
>
>Long, but well worth pondering.
>
>Charles Willett
>
><http://www.counterpunch.org/vidal03142003.html>http://www.counterpunch.org/vidal03142003.html
>
>It's Time to Take Action Against Our Wars on the Rest of the World
>
>The Erosion of the American Dream
>
>by Gore Vidal
>
>March 14, 2003
>
>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 militarize 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 defense 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 militarized 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.
>
>
>US bombings since WWII
>Compiled by
>historian William Blum:
>
>China 1945-46
>Korea 1950-53
>China 1950-53
>Guatemala 1954
>Indonesia 1958
>Guatemala 1960
>Cuba 1959-60
>Congo 1964
>Peru 1965
>Laos 1964-73
>Vietnam 1961-73
>Cambodia 1969-70
>Guatemala 1967-69
>Grenada 1983
>Libya 1986
>El Salvador 1980s
>Nicaragua 1980s
>Panama 1989
>Iraq 1991-99
>Bosnia 1995 (Republic of Srpska)
>Sudan 1998
>Afghanistan 1998
>Yugoslavia 1999
>
>
>Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
>PO Box 90083
>Gainesville, FL. 32607
>(352) 337-9274
>(352) 871-7554 (Cell phone)
><http://www.space4peace.org>http://www.space4peace.org
><mailto:globalnet at mindspring.com>globalnet at mindspring.com


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu