Let us now praise Gore Vidal.

[Minstrel Boy]

Now, and always.

No one speaks so eloquently and mournfully about the passing of the Old Republic as Vidal. He's America's Cicero.

This morning, I bought his latest "pamphlet," Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. Merely reading this excerpt from the back cover, describing Bush, gave me the shivers:

"He is like a man in one of those dreams who knows he is safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him. His overall behavior suggests a kind of madness, unless he knows something we don't."

He plugs Bev Harris's book Black Box Voting and calls her "a splendid journalist-patriot." He writes of "the great hollow pumpkin head of that gambling dude who has anointed himself the nation's moralist-in-chief, William 'Bell Fruit' Bennett." He quotes Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention: "I believe...that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism...when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other." Vidal adds:

"Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush administration....

"Franklin's prophecy came true in December 2000, when the Supreme Court bulldozed its way through the Constitution in order to select as its President the loser in the election of that year. Despotism is now securely in the saddle. The old Republic is a shadow of itself, and we now stand in the glare of a nuclear world empire with a government that sees as its true enemy 'we the people,' deprived of our electoral franchise. War is the usual aim of despots, and serial war is what we are going to get unless - with help from well-wishers in new old Europe and from ourselves, awake at last - we can persuade this peculiar administration that they are acting entirely on their vicious own, and against all our history."

What a sad pleasure it is to read such rare wisdom.