Received from the Green Party of Northern CA:
laweekly.com
The Last Defender of the American Republic?
An interview with Gore Vidal by Marc Cooper
HE MIGHT BE AMERICA'S LAST small-r republican.
Gore Vidal, now 76, has made a lifetime out of critiquing
America's imperial impulses and has -- through two dozen
novels and hundreds of essays -- argued tempestuously
that the U.S. should retreat back to its more Jeffersonian
roots, that it should stop meddling in the affairs of other
nations and the private affairs of its own citizens.
That's the thread that runs through Vidal's latest best-seller --
an oddly packaged collection of essays published in the
wake of September 11 titled Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated. To answer the question
in his subtitle, Vidal posits that we have no right to scratch
our heads over what motivated the perpetrators of the two
biggest terror attacks in our history, the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing and last September's twin-tower holocaust.
Vidal writes: "It is a law of physics (still on the books when
last I looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction.
The same appears to be true in human nature -- that is, history."
The "action" Vidal refers to is the hubris of an American empire
abroad (illustrated by a 20-page chart of 200 U.S. overseas
military adventures since the end of World War II) and a budding
police state at home. The inevitable "reaction," says Vidal, is
nothing less than the bloody handiwork of Osama bin Laden
and Timothy McVeigh. "Each was enraged," he says, "by our
government's reckless assaults upon other societies" and was,
therefore, "provoked" into answering with horrendous violence.
Some might take that to be a suggestion that America had it
coming on September 11. So when I met up with Vidal in the
Hollywood Hills home he maintains (while still residing most
of his time in Italy), the first question I asked him was this:
L.A. WEEKLY: Are you arguing that the 3,000 civilians killed
on September 11 somehow deserved their fate?
GORE VIDAL: I don't think we, the American people, deserved
what happened. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments
we have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have
brought this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have
a list in my new book that gives the reader some idea how busy
we have been. Unfortunately, we only get disinformation from
The New York Times and other official places. Americans have
no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. The number
of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other
countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major
strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn't even a
complete list. It doesn't include places like Chile, as that
was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.
Americans are either not told about these things or are told
we attacked them because . . . well . . . Noriega is the center
of all world drug traffic and we have to get rid of him. So we kill
some Panamanians in the process. Actually we killed quite a
few. And we brought in our Air Force. Panama didn't have an
air force. But it looked good to have our Air Force there, busy,
blowing up buildings. Then we kidnap their leader, Noriega,
a former CIA man who worked loyally for the United States. We
arrest him. Try him in an American court that has no jurisdiction
over him and lock him up -- nobody knows why. And that was
supposed to end the drug trade because he had been
demonized by The New York Times and the rest of the
imperial press.
[The government] plays off [Americans'] relative innocence,
or ignorance to be more precise. This is probably why
geography has not really been taught since World War II --
to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing
things up. Because Enron wants to blow them up. Or
Unocal, the great pipeline company, wants a war going
some place.
And people in the countries who are recipients of our
bombs get angry. The Afghans had nothing to do with
what happened to our country on September 11. But Saudi
Arabia did. It seems like Osama is involved, but we don't
really know. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan to take
over the place and blow it up, our commanding general
was asked how long it was going to take to find Osama
bin Laden. And the commanding general looked rather
surprised and said, well, that's not why we are here.
Oh no? So what was all this about? It was about the
Taliban being very, very bad people and that they treated
women very badly, you see. They're not really into women's
rights, and we here are very strong on women's rights; and
we should be with Bush on that one because he's taking
those burlap sacks off of women's heads. Well, that's not
what it was about.
What it was really about -- and you won't get this anywhere
at the moment -- is that this is an imperial grab for energy
resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has been our main
source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not
to get Osama and wreak our vengeance. We went to
Afghanistan partly because the Taliban -- whom we had
installed at the time of the Russian occupation -- were
getting too flaky and because Unocal, the California
corporation, had made a deal with the Taliban for a pipeline
to get the Caspian-area oil, which is the richest oil reserve
on Earth. They wanted to get that oil by pipeline through
Afghanistan to Pakistan to Karachi and from there to ship
it off to China, which would be enormously profitable.
Whichever big company could cash in would make a fortune.
And you'll see that all these companies go back to Bush or
Cheney or to Rumsfeld or someone else on the Gas and
Oil Junta, which, along with the Pentagon, governs the
United States.
We had planned to occupy Afghanistan in October, and
Osama, or whoever it was who hit us in September,
launched a pre-emptory strike. They knew we were coming.
And this was a warning to throw us off guard.
With that background, it now becomes explicable why the first
thing Bush did after we were hit was to get Senator Daschle
and beg him not to hold an investigation of the sort any normal
country would have done. When Pearl Harbor was struck, within
20 minutes the Senate and the House had a joint committee
ready. Roosevelt beat them to it, because he knew why we
had been hit, so he set up his own committee. But none of
this was to come out, and it hasn't come out.
Still, even if one reads the chart of military interventions in
your book and concludes that, indeed, the U.S. government is
a "source of evil" -- to lift a phrase -- can't you conceive that there
might be other forces of evil as well? Can't you imagine forces
of religious obscurantism, for example, that act independently
of us and might do bad things to us, just because they are
also evil?
Oh yes. But you picked the wrong group. You picked one of
the richest families in the world -- the bin Ladens. They are
extremely close to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, which has
conned us into acting as their bodyguard against their own
people -- who are even more fundamentalist than they are.
So we are dealing with a powerful entity if it is Osama.
What isn't true is that people like him just come out of the blue.
You know, the average American thinks we just give away
billions in foreign aid, when we are the lowest in foreign aid
among developed countries. And most of what we give goes
to Israel and a little bit to Egypt.
I was in Guatemala when the CIA was preparing its attack
on the Arbenz government [in 1954]. Arbenz, who was a
democratically elected president, mildly socialist. His state
had no revenues; its biggest income maker was United Fruit
Company. So Arbenz put the tiniest of taxes on bananas, and
Henry Cabot Lodge got up in the Senate and said the
Communists have taken over Guatemala and we must act.
He got to Eisenhower, who sent in the CIA, and they overthrew
the government. We installed a military dictator, and there's
been nothing but bloodshed ever since.
Now, if I were a Guatemalan and I had
the means to drop something on somebody in Washington,
or anywhere Americans were, I would be tempted to do it.
Especially if I had lost my entire family and seen my country
blown to bits because United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes.
Now, that's the way we operate. And that's why we got to be so
hated.
You've spent decades bemoaning the erosion of civil liberties
and the conversion of the U.S. from a republic into what you call
an empire. Have the aftereffects of September 11, things like the
USA Patriot bill, merely pushed us further down the road or are
they, in fact, some sort of historic turning point?
The second law of thermodynamics always rules: Everything is
always running down. And so is our Bill of Rights. The current
junta in charge of our affairs, one not legally elected, but put in
charge of us by the Supreme Court in the interests of the oil and
gas and defense lobbies, have used first Oklahoma City and
now September 11 to further erode things.
And when it comes to Oklahoma City and Tim McVeigh, well,
he had his reasons as well to carry out his dirty deed. Millions
of Americans agree with his general reasoning, though no one,
I think, agrees with the value of blowing up children. But the
American people, yes, they instinctively know when the
government goes off the rails like it did at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
No one has been elected president in the last 50 years unless
he ran against the federal government. So, the government
should get through its head that it is hated not only by foreigners
whose countries we have wrecked, but also by Americans whose
lives have been wrecked.
The whole Patriot movement in the U.S. was based on folks
run off their family farms. Or had their parents or grandparents
run off. We have millions of disaffected American citizens who
do not like the way the place is run and see no place in it where
they can prosper. They can be slaves. Or pick cotton. Or whatever
the latest uncomfortable thing there is to do. But they are not
going to have, as Richard Nixon said, "a piece of the action."
And yet Americans seem quite susceptible to a sort of jingoistic
"enemy-of-the-month club" coming out of Washington. You say
millions of Americans hate the federal government. But
something like 75 percent of Americans say they support
George W. Bush, especially on the issue of the war.
I hope you don't believe those figures. Don't you know how
the polls are rigged? It's simple. After 9/11 the country was really
shocked and terrified. [Bush] does a little war dance and talks
about evil axis and all the countries he's going to go after. And
how long it is all going to take, he says with a happy smile,
because it means billions and trillions for the Pentagon and
for his oil friends. And it means curtailing our liberties, so this
is all very thrilling for him. He's right out there reacting, bombing
Afghanistan. Well, he might as well have been bombing Denmark.
Denmark had nothing to do with 9/11. And neither did Afghanistan,
at least the Afghanis didn't.
So the question is still asked, are you standing tall with the
president? Are you standing with him as he defends us?
Eventually, they will figure it out.
They being who? The American people?
Yeah, the American people. They are asked these quick
questions. Do you approve of him? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh
yeah, he blew up all those funny-sounding cities over there.
That doesn't mean they like him. Mark my words. He will leave
office the most unpopular president in history. The junta has
done too much wreckage.
They were suspiciously very ready with the Patriot Act as soon as
we were hit. Ready to lift habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-
client privilege. They were ready. Which means they have already
got their police state. Just take a plane anywhere today and you are
in the hands of an arbitrary police state.
Don't you want to have that kind of protection when you fly?
It's one thing to be careful, and we certainly want airplanes to be
careful against terrorist attacks. But this is joy for them, for the
federal
government. Now they've got everybody, because everybody flies.
Let's pick away at one of your favorite bones, the American media.
Some say they have done a better-than-usual job since 9/11. But I
suspect you're not buying that?
No, I don't buy it. Part of the year I live in Italy. And I find out more
about what's going on in the Middle East by reading the British,
the French, even the Italian press. Everything here is slanted. I mean,
to watch Bush doing his little war dance in Congress . . . about
"evildoers" and this "axis of evil" -- Iran, Iraq and North Korea. I
thought, he doesn't even know what the word axis means. Somebody
just gave it to him. And the press didn't even call him on it. This is
about as mindless a statement as you could make. Then he comes
up with about a dozen other countries that might have "evil people" in
them, who might commit "terrorist acts." What is a terrorist act?
Whatever he thinks is a terrorist act. And we are going to go after
them. Because we are good and they are evil. And we're "gonna
git 'em."
Anybody who could get up and make that speech to the American
people is not himself an idiot, but he's convinced we are idiots.
And we are not idiots. We are cowed. Cowed by disinformation
from the media, a skewed view of the world, and atrocious taxes
that subsidize this permanent war machine. And we have no
representation. Only the corporations are represented in Congress.
That's why only 24 percent of the American people cast a vote for
George W. Bush.
I know you'd hate to take this to the ad hominem level, but indulge
me for a moment. What about George W. Bush, the man?
You mean George W. Bush, the cheerleader. That's the only thing
he ever did of some note in his life. He had some involvement with
a baseball team . . .
He owned it . . .
Yeah, he owned it, bought with other people's money. Oil people's
money. So he's never really worked, and he shows very little
capacity for learning. For them to put him up as president and
for the Supreme Court to make sure that he won was as insulting
as when his father, George Bush, appointed Clarence Thomas to
the Supreme Court -- done just to taunt the liberals. And then, when
he picked Quayle for his vice president, that showed such
contempt for the American people. This was someone as clearly
unqualified as Bush Sr. was to be president. Because Bush Sr.,
as Richard Nixon said to a friend of mine when Bush was elected
[imitating Nixon], "He's a lightweight, a complete lightweight, there's
nothing there. He's a sort of person you appoint to things."
So the contempt for the American people has been made more
vivid by the two Bushes than all of the presidents before them.
Although many of them had the same contempt. But they were
more clever about concealing it.
Should the U.S. just pack up its military from everywhere and go
home?
Yes. With no exceptions. We are not the world's policeman. And
we cannot even police the United States, except to steal money
from the people and generally wreak havoc. The police are perceived
quite often, and correctly, in most parts of the country as the enemy.
I think it is time we roll back the empire -- it is doing no one any
good. It has cost us trillions of dollars, which makes me feel it's
going to fold on its own because there isn't going to be enough
money left to run it.
You call yourself one of the last defenders of the American
Republic against the American Empire. Do you have any allies
left? I mean, we really don't have a credible opposition in this
country, do we?
I sometimes feel like I am the last defender of the republic. There
are plenty of legal minds who defend the Bill of Rights, but they
don't seem very vigorous. I mean, after 9/11 there was silence
as one after another of these draconian, really totalitarian laws
were put in place.
So what's the way out of this? Back in the '80s you used to
call for a new sort of populist constitutional convention. Do
you still believe that's the fix?
Well, it's the least bloody. Because there will be trouble, and
big trouble. The loons got together to get a balanced-budget
amendment, and they got a majority of states to agree to a
constitutional convention. Senator Sam Ervin, now dead,
researched what would happen in such a convention, and
apparently everything would be up for grabs. Once we the
people are assembled, as the Constitution requires, we can
do anything, we can throw out the whole executive, the judiciary,
the Congress. We can put in a Tibetan lama. Or turn the country
into one big Scientological clearing center.
And the liberals, of course, are the slowest and the stupidest,
because they do not understand their interests. The right wing
are the bad guys, but they know what they want -- everybody
else's money. And they know they don't like blacks and they
don't like minorities. And they like to screw everyone along the way.
But once you know what you want, you are in a stronger position
than those who can only say, "Oh no, you mustn't do that." That
we must have free speech. Free speech for what? To agree with
The New York Times?
The liberals always say, "Oh my, if there is a constitutional
convention, they will take away the Bill of Rights." But they have
already done it! It is gone. Hardly any of it is left. So if they, the
famous "they," would prove to be a majority of the American
people and did not want a Bill of Rights, then I say, let's just
get it over with. Let's just throw it out the window. If you don't
want it, you won't have it.
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