- It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in
an earlier time and somehow stumbled into America's Constitutional Convention.
A man with his views, so deprecative of democratic rule, would have certainly
been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle
of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics
and prolific writers, Gore Vidal.
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- When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago,
he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the
last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic
comments to L.A. Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications
around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal
is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and with
the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no
less explosive than they were last year.
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- This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time
American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the
past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in
the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still
recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard
Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever.
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- Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft
in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing
a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of
the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display
- vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity - their shared and profoundly
rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes
straight to the fore.
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- The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit.
No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain
for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president.
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- As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the
links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present.
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- MARC COOPER:Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams
and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben
Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of
the republic.
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- GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better
than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles - slaveholders
and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful
family and joined the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle
class. In fact, he may have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger
everywhere. They all did. Not one of them liked the Constitution. James
Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power
of the presidency. But they were in a hurry to get the country going. Hence
the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old
and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution,
as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast.
And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government.
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- But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions
have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He
pointed his finger at all the American people. And when the people become
so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but
rather despotism - the only form of government suitable for such a people.
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- But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He
argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.
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- Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must
have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working.
Like taking a car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot
expect a man to wear a boy's jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth
belongs to the living. He was the first that I know who ever said that.
And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Or even
the form of government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want!
Jefferson didn't care.
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- Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders,
and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would
be to give the people a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent
in his answer to Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of
any weight if you think it is only going to last a year.
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- This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And
it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman
around who said we have to start changing this damn thing.
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- Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian
Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively
young America's two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see
any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?
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- Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption
Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is
for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be
the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.
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- Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism.
Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt,
on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not
giving a damn.
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- Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could
just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No
one is punished for squandering the people's money and their pension funds
and for wrecking the economy.
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- So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible
fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue.
Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose
business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the
sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA
PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with - even using
much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to
frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh - how
their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time - was precisely
the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.
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- In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find
themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States?
Certainly Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers,
or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?
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- Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the
parliament, could offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any
means. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with
the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern.
He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always
a little nervous about his own social station. He, of course, married into
wealth and became an aristo. And it is he who argues that we must have
a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich.
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- So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side.
But I can't think of any other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove
of Bush. He was highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current
dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who
came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to
do things. You know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I
think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the
Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what
Franklin predicted.
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- But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious
administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security
state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here
you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration,
are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one
more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?
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- No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only
the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally
made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great
resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with
what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general
or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access
to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or,
in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship
and packed off to another place not even organized as a country - like
Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA
PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism
in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through
the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.
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- So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around
in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then
hanged by the Founders?
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- No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs] Bush
and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong
in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or
Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony,
where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans
- most Americans would not think of them as citizens.
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- Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?
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- I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to
take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president.
We have despotism. We have no due process.
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- Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration
collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And
now with the discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't
you get the impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?
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- I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this
business over outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's
often these small things that get you. Something small enough for a court
to get its teeth into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over
what her husband has done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous
to other CIA agents. This resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90
percent of Americans don't know where Iraq is and never will know, and
they don't care.
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- But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains,
because there isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile,
the right wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people
that we are generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling
welfare mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always
running against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne
at the Ambassador East in Chicago - which of course is ridiculous.
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- And now the people see another $87 billion going out
the window. So long! People are going to rebel against that one. Congress
has gone along with that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats
for that.
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- Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be
re-elected next year?
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- No. At least if there is a fair election, an election
that is not electronic. That would be dangerous. We don't want an election
without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can
look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets?
Isn't their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars?
Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three
owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush
administration. Is this not corruption?
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- So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with
these balloting machines. He can't lose.
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- But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the
democratic instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those
sorts of conspiracies eventually fall apart?
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- Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched.
Who would have thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America
would have come as far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on
the military, while our schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we
know the litany. We get nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn't have thought
that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it
did last.
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- But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper
ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will
be swept from office. He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the economy.
Unemployment is up. People can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total
mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But
the people around him are not. They want to stay in power.
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- You paint a very dark picture of the current administration
and of the American political system in general. But at a deeper, more
societal level, isn't there still a democratic underpinning?
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- No. There are some memories of what we once were. There
are still a few old people around who remember the New Deal, which was
the last time we had a government that showed some interest in the welfare
of the American people. Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years,
that care only about the welfare of the rich.
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- Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?
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- Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he
has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this
one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive
war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have
been bombed.
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- How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to
play out?
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- I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With
each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion
of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them
together, and they will come after us. And it won't be pretty.
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- © 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
Reproduction by Syndication Service only.
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