Wow. Gore Vidal is a raving wacko. I never read any of his books, but wow, this guy is nutty. A few things struck me about this interview:
We are talking about despotism... 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.
It seems odd to me that Vidal doesn't notice the contradiction between complaining about civil liberties and then speaking approvingly about hanging people, without trial, for their political opinions.
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?
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.
That's right! Why, Russian is almost never offered in high schools. Had we just spent all of the money on social programs instead of the military, who knows. Maybe we'd all be speaking Russian now. Or who knows, maybe German. From what I understand this idiot lived part of his life in California and part in Italy. I wonder whether he didn't spend much of it in Disney Land. Back in the real world, there was a war going on between two superpowers up until the 1990. And we have schools whose primary fault is not lack of money but horrible bureaucracy. And teacher's unions, but that's another story. What's needed for our pre-college schools is vouchers, not more money. Just look at what choice has done for colleges and universities. There's no place better to get an education (especially a graduate education) than the United States (though I should mention that our immigration policies help in that as well).
There is no health care; we know the litany.
What planet does this moron live in? There is health care in the United States. Indeed, the US generally has the best health care in the world. It's true, of course, that generally if you want it you must be able to pay for it, though even that has its exceptions for emergencies, but most people can afford it. There is no socialized health care, but only idiots and Canadians want that. Socialism is as bad an economic policy as communism.
I find it refreshing that he calls it a litany. He admits that it's a stream of words said without significance and heard without understanding, done for the sake of ritual. At least he subconsciously understands that he's not talking sense.
We get nothing back for our taxes.
Yes, at least on some level he understands that he's disconnected from reality. How can a person say something this blatantly false with a straight face?
I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.
Admitting that he's got a pattern of mis-predicting the future of America does not strengthen his current assessment of its future. Shouldn't this be obvious to him?
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?
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.
This is rich. Referring to a collection of make-work projects designed to help get us out of a horrible depression as the halcyon days of old is just amazing. I suppose that the explosion of social programs since the New Deal was done out of pure apathy. I suppose that the civil rights era, in which government began guaranteeing rights to all of its citizens was done out of hatred of its citizens. When does a statement so obviously false actually become an outright lie? Yet the alternative is for this guy to be irretrievably stupid. I wonder which is the greater insult.
How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?
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.
This is from the guy who thought that we wouldn't make it the last 50 years. As long as he's consistent in his accuracy, it looks like we're in for smooth sailing.
I sure hope that this buffoon's books are better than his interviews, or I just lost a lot of respect for a particular highschool history teacher of mine who recommended at least two of them.