[spectre] The Erosion of the American Dream

[Oliver Grau]

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


http://www.counterpunch.org/vidal03142003.html
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