Gore Vidal on Presidential Candidates

“Any individual who is able to raise [enough money] to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent…whatever moneyed entities are paying for him…. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.”

Gore Vidal: We Are the Patriots

Excerpts from Gore Vidal’s “We Are the Patriots” THE NATION               (June 2, 2003)

I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that’s that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity–Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last century–and I lived through three-quarters of it–we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation–of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace–demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.

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I suppose it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a new generation would get the bright idea, Why not stop fooling around with diplomacy and treaties and coalitions and just use our military power to give orders to the rest of the world? A year or two ago, a pair of neoconservatives put forward this exact notion. I responded–in print–that if we did so, we would have perpetual war for perpetual peace. Which is not good for business. Then the Cheney-Bush junta seized power. Although primarily interested in oil reserves, they liked the idea of playing soldiers too.

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In response to things not seen, the USA Patriot Act was rushed through Congress and signed forty-five days after 9/11. We are expected to believe that its carefully crafted 342 pages were written in that short time. Actually, it reads like a continuation of Clinton’s post-Oklahoma City antiterrorist act. The Patriot Act makes it possible for government agents to break into anyone’s home when they are away, conduct a search and keep the citizen indefinitely from finding out that a warrant was issued. They can oblige librarians to tell them what books anyone has withdrawn. If the librarian refuses, he or she can be criminally charged. They can also collect your credit reports and other sensitive information without judicial approval or the citizen’s consent.

Finally, all this unconstitutional activity need not have the slightest connection with terrorism. Early in February, the Justice Department leaked Patriot Act II, known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, dated January 9, 2003. A Congress that did not properly debate the first act will doubtless be steamrolled by this lawless expansion.

Some provisions: If an American citizen has been accused of supporting an organization labeled as terrorist by the government, he can be deprived of his citizenship even if he had no idea the organization had a link to terrorists. Provision in Act II is also made for more searches and wiretaps without warrant as well as secret arrests (Section 201). In case a citizen tries to fight back in order to retain the citizenship he or she was born with, those federal agents who conduct illegal surveillance with the blessing of high Administration officials are immune from legal action. A native-born American deprived of citizenship would, presumably, be deported, just as, today, a foreign-born person can be deported. Also, according to a recent ruling of a federal court, this new power of the Attorney General is not susceptible to judicial review. Since the American who has had his citizenship taken away cannot, of course, get a passport, the thoughtful devisers of Domestic Security Enhancement authorize the Attorney General to deport him “to any country or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government.” Difficult cases with no possible place to go can be held indefinitely.

Where under Patriot Act I only foreigners were denied due process of law as well as subject

Gore Vidal R.I.P.

It grieves the DISSENTING DEMOCRAT to report the passing of the great American novelist, playwright and polemicist, GORE VIDAL. Mr. Vidal was born into the American elite, he was related to a number of the ‘400’ and knew most of the rest. Jackie O was a cousin of sorts and Gore Vidal frequented Kennedy circles when Camelot was fresh. One family relation of great influence on Gore was that of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore, through whom Vidal was a cousin of sorts to Al Gore as well. The old Senator was blind and young Gore frequently read to him and served as his guide. The Senator’s “old Republican” virtues and inclination to a non-interventionist foreign policy made a strong impression on Vidal.

His first novel, Williwaw, written at the age of 19, was a success although it tackled homosexuality with an honesty far ahead of its time in 1946. A succeeding novel with a gay theme so offended the New York Times critic that Vidal’s work was banned at the grey lady of journalism.

Vidal turned to the theater completing plays which wowed the theater and were made into popular films as well, “The Best Man” provided an insider’s perspective on a presidential convention, and “Visit to a Small Planet” used an E.T.’s visit to satirize American mores. His magnum opus, a series of novels encompassing an American Saga began with Aaron Burr, was anchored in a work on Abraham Lincoln and was brought up to modern times.*

He had the ability to tick people off and he used it to great effect. Bill Buckley, a master of sarcasm himself, was so peeved as to be at a loss of words leading him to threaten to punch Vidal out during a television broadcast. Norman Mailer also took a swing at him. As a consequence some of his best writing was in essay form. Gore Vidal out-thought and out-wrote many contemporaries producing critiques of American domestic and foreign policy.

A one-time Democrat, he roamed outside the mainstream to advocate independent and third-party politics, writing this about the two-party “system”:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties

Gore Vidal was actually a Conservative, that is, one seeking to preserve the heritage of one’s nation and the constitutional government at the core of that heritage. He took the bipartisan assault on our rights and liberties seriously and sought to skewer the bunkum of jingoism and faux-patriotism with righteous, and witty, indignation.

Dying at age 86, he outlived many of his enemies, there can be no more satisfying achievement.

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* Gore Vidal’s AMERICAN SAGA: Washington DC (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and, The Golden Age (2000); and, several of his essays-collections: The Decline & Fall of the American Empire (1992), The Last Empire (2001), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002), and, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004).

Gore Vidal on American Politics

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

— Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977)