'The United States Of Amnesia'

This is a transcript of Gore Vidals's March 12, 2003 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, inyour 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 ofmy 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 anybodywho has the position, has a platform, must do so. It's also a family tradition. My grandfather lost his seatin the Senate because he opposed going into the First World War. And he won it back 10 years later on exactlythe same set of speeches that he'd lost it. 

So, attitudes change, attitudes can be changed but, now, I am notterribly optimistic that there is much anyone can do now the machine is set to go. And, to have a majordepression going on, economic, really, collapse all round the world and begin a war against an enemy that hasdone 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 numbersare not as good as the Bush regime would have us believe. A great...something like 70% really only wants to gointo war with United Nations sanction and a new resolution. I would prefer, however, that we use ourconstitution, which we often ignore, which is --Article 1 Section 8 says, "Only the Congress may declarewar. 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 theconstitution --liberty, human rights, free speech. Indeed, you've probably damned every administrationthroughout 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'sa whole theory now that he's inspired by love of Our Lord -- that he is an apocalyptic Christian who'll begoing 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, thenin 1950, the great problem began when Harry Truman decided to militarise the economy, maintain a vast militaryestablishment in every corner of the Earth. Meanwhile, denying money to schools but really to theinfrastructure of the nation. So we have been at war steadily since 1950. 

I did a...one of my little pamphletswas A Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace -- how that worked. I mean, we've gone everywhere --we have the Enemyof the Month Club. One month, it's Noriega -- king of drugs. Another one, it's Gaddafi. We hated his eyelineror something and killed his daughter. We moved from one enemy to another and the press, the media, has neverbeen more disgusting. I don't know why, but there are very few voices that are speaking out publicly. 

Thecensorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly in network television. So nobody'sgetting the facts. I mean, I spend part of the year in Italy and really, basically, what I find out I find outfrom European journalists who actually will go to Iraq, which our people cannot do or will not do, and arecertainly 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 thelord 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 ofthing for us. There are ways of getting around official media and there are ways of getting around agovernment which is given to lying about everything, and the people eventually pick up on it, but things aremoving so swiftly now.

Mark Davis: You charge what you call the 'Cheney-Bush junta' with empire-building but hasn't America alwaysbeen an empire and isn't this junta just a little bit more honest about it? They aren't shy in proclaimingtheir 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 animperial streak from the very beginning, but it didn't get going until 1898, when we picked a war with Spainbecause we had our eye on Spanish colonial possessions, specifically the Philippines, which got us into yourpart of the world --into Asia and, from that moment on, we really were a global empire. And then, by the timeof 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 oldStalinists and then they were Trotskyites and then, finally, they are neo-conservatives now. They preachopenly and they're all over the war department as we used to call it, the Defence Department. Mr Wolfowitz isone of their brains and they write really extraordinarily frightening overviews of the United States and therest of the world that we, after all, have all the military power that there is and let's use it. Let's takethe Earth. It's there for us. 

They're talking glibly now about after they get rid of Saddam -- which they thinkis going to be a very easy thing to do -- well, Iran is next. One of them, not long ago, made a publicstatement --"It's time we really had regime change in ALL the Arab countries." Well, there are 1billion Muslims and I don't see them taking this very well, and if a smallish place like wherever it wasultimately can produce so many suicide bombers, 1 billion Muslims can take out the whole United States orwestern Europe. 

I would always opt for peace, as war is always a mess. But I was in a war which the junta, MrBush and Mr Cheney, did everything possible to avoid being involved in --Vietnam. Cheney when asked, as hebecame 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 onegroup, the World War II veterans, we are a shrinking group obviously, but we are the ones that are the mostsolidly against the war. The people who stayed out of Vietnam, the rest who have never known war, are justgung-ho for other people to go fight. They, themselves, don't do it. 

But there is a split here between thosewho've had a bit of experience of the world and of war and the others who are mostly interested, certainly thejunta, as I call them, in Washington, they're all in the gas and oil business. People ask me, "Are yousaying there's a conspiracy?" -- because that's the word where everybody starts laughing. It means youbelieve in flying saucers. "No," I said, "I'm going to change the world." We won't sayit's a conspiracy that all the great offices of state are occupied by gas and oil people -- the President, theVice-President, National Security Adviser -- it's not a coincidence. "It's a coincidence," andeverybody smiles --that's a nice word --"Oh, yes, of course, it's a coincidence" that they arerunning 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 peacefulIraq, even with the stench of oil in the air, George Bush probably can deliver that --a free and peaceful Iraqthat 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. Youdon't go in and smash up a country, which we will do, and gain their love so that they then want to imitateour highly corrupt political system and, on the subject of democracy -- I happen to be something of a studentof the American constitution -- it was set up in order to avoid majority rule. 

The two things the foundingfathers hated were majoritarian rule and monarchy. So they devised a republic in which only a very few whitemen of property could vote. Then, to make sure that we never had any democracy at work at the highest levelsof governance, they created something called the electoral college, which can break any change that mightupset them.

We saw what happened in November 2000, when Albert Gore won the popular vote by 600,000, heactually 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 otherlands 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 somecynicism, are still meaningful to people around the world. It's interesting to note the support that Americais getting from the former eastern bloc European nations --Rumsfeld's "new Europe". The Americanmessage 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 outwhat kind of country the Soviet Union was and they didn't like that one bit and they associate us with theirrelative liberation. That's all. What we're really about they don't know. They believe the propaganda. Theybelieve the media, which is constantly going on about democracy and freedom and liberty and the greatestcountry on earth and so on and the only thing wrong in the world is there are EVIL people who hate us becausewe are SO good. 

Well, I don't know how anybody can buy this line, but people do. People are not very wellinformed. The well-informed countries -- western Europe -- know perfectly well what our game is. General deGaulle took France out of NATO because he suspected that we were in the empire--building business, and hedidn't want to go along with it yet, simultaneously, France remained an ally in case there was a major warwith 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 theirgovernment with some drawbacks, they can express their opinions. On the eve of a war, whatever Machiavellianbenefits might accrue to the US, isn't there still moral weight in the voice of America, given its history asa 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'mspeaking to you now. There were 100,000, lots of police, many helicopters overhead which, as the speaker gotup, would lower themselves to try and drown your voice out. The press did not record that there were 100,000people. They said, "Oh, 30,000 perhaps. That might be an exaggeration," they said. Unfortunately forthem, the Los Angeles Times, generally a fairly good paper, had a long shot from La Brea where I wasspeaking on a stage straight up to Vine Street, which was a mile or two away, and you saw 100,000 people, sotheir very picture undid them. 

What I'm saying is the censorship is very tight. Don't think we're a freecountry to say anything we want. We can say it, but it's not going to be printed and you're not going to geton television. One of our great voices for some time now for peace in the world is Noam Chomsky. I've neverseen 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 acouple of hundred thousand copies of a pamphlet. No word of it will appear in the New York Times. To myamazement this time, they actually put it on their bestseller list. Generally, they won't do that. I can'ttell you how tightly controlled this place is and it's beginning to show, because talk radio and so on -- I'vedone 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. Hedidn't. That was Osama bin Laden or somebody else. We still don't know because there has been no investigationof that, as Congress and the constitution require. So we are totally in the dark and we have a president whois even in a greater darkness, who's totally uninformed about the world, leading us into war because, becausebecause.

Mark Davis: Well, the defence of American civil liberties has been a consistent theme of yours, mostvocally in recent months, in response to the Patriot Act and the new Homeland Defence Agency. But it wouldseem 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 wecertainly watch a lot of television. You can pick up a tremendous audience across --you know, millions ofpeople 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 orthe very dramatic constitutional changes that have been made in the Patriot Act. We're not really hearing astrong 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 expensiveones and very corrupt ones. But we don't have politics. We made a trade-off somewhere. This was after HarryTruman established the national security state, and suddenly television came along and elections costbillions. It cost $3 billion to elect Bush. That's a lot of money. And it was a campaign almost without issuesexcept 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 politicalparties. There are movements of people, which go largely unrecorded. There are eloquent voices out there, butyou 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 anation is in a pre-fascist era, a mega banana republic increasingly dominated by the military. Is it a viewthat you share?

Gore Vidal: I have those days, yes, such as Norman is having. But I am more deeply rooted in the oldconstitution with all of its flaws and in the Bill of Rights with all of its virtues. That was somethingspecial on Earth and Jefferson was something special on Earth when he said that life, liberty and the pursuitof happiness -- nobody had ever used that phrase in the constitution before or set that out as a political goalfor everyone. So, out of that came the energies of the United States to have made it the number one country inthe world and the most inventive and the most creative, and then the Devil entered Eden and we ended up withan Asiatic empire, and a European empire, and a South American dependency and we are not what we were. 

Thepeople 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 getit in school and they don't get it from the media. So people do read my books. But there should be more byother 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 thislittle colonial world of 3 million people. We had Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These wereextraordinarily wise men and understood the ways of the world, and they gave us a very good form ofgovernment. 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 timein devising a republic. 

To have lost that and to have lost all memory of it --we've been having a big argumentabout we've got "In God we trust" on the money. Well this is over the dead bodies of ThomasJefferson and the other founders, most of whom did not believe in God and wanted to keep Church and Stateseparate. Every American seems to think, "In God we trust" was put on the money by GeorgeWashington. Well, it was put on there by Dwight Eisenhower in trying to get some southern votes, Baptistpreachers.