The Last Defender of the American Republic?
Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
July 3, 2002
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:
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.
plays off 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 . 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. 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 , "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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