Ah but Joanna, whose to say that Gore Vidal doesn't sympathize with Berlusconi's nativist views? You remember his piece in The Natin in the 80's on the "Yellow Peril, " saying that the USSRand the USA ought to form annalliance against the Asiatic Hordes? Michael Pugliese
America First! ... As Gore Vidal notes in his foreword, "By studying ... Bill Kauffman (Elba. NY) is editor and columnist ... magazines, including Reason, Liberty, and Chronicles. ... www.hutch.demon.co.uk/prom/amfirst.htm
National Review Book Service ... to The American Scholar, Chronicles, andLiberty uses words like ... as the far right. Kauffman quotes and profiles Gore Vidal and Sinclair Lewis along ... www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=C5411
http://home.salamander.com/~wmcclain/kauffman.txt ... and Politics" by Bill Kauffman, Prometheus Books 1995, $24.95 ... intimate of the "Chronicles" crowd. He wraps up ... the advice of Gore Vidal on matters American ... 3k - Cached - Similar pages
NATO Research Fellowships 1994-1996 ... unity of purpose. As Kauffman explains in relation ... Ross Perot, although Gore Vidal also claims this ... palae-conservatives is Chronicles, published by the ... www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/dunn/04.htm
ChroniclesMagazine99 ... Teachout. reviewed by Bill Kauffman. pp. 41 Letter from ... pp. 9 Participation of Chronicles staff in panel by ... our stables. by Gore Vidal ** He is connected ... www.templeofdemocracy.com/ChroniclesMagazine99.htm -
The Independent Institute | Biography | Gore Vidal ... a cousin of Al Gore and was brother-in ... Golgotha, and the ?American Chronicles? series (Burr, 1876, Lincoln ... Age, and Washington DC). Vidal?s essays have been ... www.independent.org/tii/forums/vidal_bio.htm
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http://www.examiner.com/examiner_qa/default.jsp?story=n.qa.0415w
Publication date: 04/15/2002
This Gore blames the media
Gore Vidal, 76, has been critiquing and criticizing the American empire nearly his entire life. Some see him as the conscience of the country, while others see him as a Chicken Little, constantly screaming the sky is about to come crashing down. In his latest book, "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How we got to be so hated," Vidal offers his take on the Sept. 11 attacks, skewers the political system and decries the intentional blindness of American media.
Dan Evans: Why, in your mind, were roadblocks put in place to publish your thoughts about the Sept. 11 attacks?
Gore Vidal: There is a list, which I got off the Internet, put together by the Federation of American Scientists. A bunch of Nobel Prize winners, rocket scientists. They put together a list of all the military strikes we have made against Second and Third World countries since the 1940s.
This list was too horrifying for The Nation and Vanity Fair, magazines where I publish my work. They couldn't face it, face that we have been involved in so much mischief, so much that a lot of people would like to bomb us. To put it politely, we have been provocative.
Q: All of those military missions you speak about were done with ill intent?
A: We are always up to something stupid and vicious.
Q: What about Osama bin Laden?
A: We still don't know if Osama bin Laden was involved in the attacks. Just generically we assume it is he, because he's so delighted about what happened. It is not clear, because our media exists to keep the truth, or at least information, from us. There is an elaborate network in Saudi Arabia, and he has not fallen out of it.
Think about this. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia is to protect the royals, because the people are getting very irritable about the ruling family. We're acting as a bodyguard for them, and to bin Laden that's a terrible affront because the Americans are infidels.
Q: What do you think of President Bush's handling of the war?
A: Bush is just talking and running off at the mouth. It's not a war. You can have a metaphorical war, like a war on poverty or drugs, but you can't have a war on a gang. We have to think about bin Laden as similar to the Mafia. When the Mafia blew up a chief of police, the Italian government did not respond by bombing Sicily.
But we've bombed a perfectly innocent country, and smashed it to bits. Now we want to be applauded to the violence we've done to the average Afghans. We should declare war on Denmark. We'd get some nicer land, and the bombing of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people should really get the world's blood racing.
Q: Why do you say the America media hides the truth?
A: The United States is tightly run and a tightly censored society. Corporate America has bought our Congress, and paid for the election of Bush, who was not elected. This is a little more than a mild embarrassment.
We have a president who is beholden to the oil junta, just as his father was. The whole Afghan thing, the Taliban, was all our invention to fight the Russians. Why do we want that terrible piece of real estate? Caspian Sea oil is far more important than Persian Gulf oil, which is what the last war was about. We need a pipeline for all that oil, one that would run through Afghanistan and Pakistan, finally ending in the Indian Ocean.
Q: What role does the fact President Bush lost the popular vote play in our vulnerability to such an attack?
A: I don't see any cause and effect. But, symbolically, it shows how far we've gone. The Supreme Court was corrupted. It chose the loser because he was Corporate America's choice.
Q: Where do you live?
A: Los Angeles and Italy.
Q: How much time, per year, do you spend in each?
A: I don't know. I spend a lot of time in neither place. Asia, in particular, fascinates me.
Q: Here's what I'm getting at: How is your take on American culture skewed by the fact you live a good deal of the time on a separate continent?
A: It's only the right wing that likes to say I'm not qualified to complain because I don't live here all the time. The idiots will say anything, except addressing the issues I bring up. One they won't answer is: Who won the election?
The New York Times was the voice of unreason in all of this. They had 16 paragraphs about the recount, each trying to show that Bush was the legitimate president. It wasn't just the popular vote. If the Supreme Court had allowed the recount to continue, Gore would have won the electoral vote.
The Times acknowledged this, but in one paragraph deep in the story. Then they turned around and refuted it. This is how information is skewed in America. The Times is so badly written that no one can get through it. It's not because they can't write better. It's badly written because they have to disguise so much.
Q: Is Bush prolonging the fight to be reelected? Will it work?
A: Oh sure. Oh sure. He represents the oil companies. And Afghanistan is key to the control of Caspian Sea oil, the largest on Earth. That means there is going to be a long war, as he promises with a twinkle in his eye. He wants wartime powers, dictatorial power. It's the dream of every president.
Bush, father and son, have supported big oil. They give out political favors, and in return, they get millions to run for president. I think they call that synergy in the business. What it all comes down to is oil. The media is playing right into this by splitting it into two camps: WE are good, THEY are evil. This is not much in the way of analysis (laughs).
Q: So, is there any hope for America? Can we turn things around?
A: I wouldn't be bothering talk about it if I thought we were truly lost. But anyone that is an optimist at this point is around the bend. The republic is gone. It disappeared the day Harry Truman militarized the economy. It's been on a long slide, but the Supreme Court put the final nail in the coffin with the election. The death date on the gravestone of American representative democracy reads November 2000.
Q: You've been criticized as trafficking in conspiracy theories, of going off half- cocked. Do you think you're overreacting?
A: The word conspiracy has been demonized. It makes people chuckle and mutter something like, "You must believe in flying saucers, too." But the United States is nothing but a conspiracy. To get our hands on old Soviet Republic oil, we'd kill everyone on Earth. Most Americans, if you asked, would probably go along with that conspiracy than trying to find another means of energy.
There are people, right now, conspiring to take over the government to overturn Roe V. Wade. I'm all for revealing all they are, and for what they're doing.
Q: Will full public financing for candidates help matters? How? Would it have helped you to win when you ran for office?
A: Don't personalize things. I don't. No matter how you arrange the finances in politics, it will always be crooked. My solution 40 years ago was to have television provide free time for candidates. Allow no one to buy any time at all in the media.
Q: Skipping around a bit, do you believe Timothy McVeigh acted alone when he blew up the F.W. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City?
A: No. I think he took credit for it. The Pentagon, which is not always wrong, said there was no way that a fertilizer bomb could have blown up the building, and there had to be bombs inside that building.
He could have avoided death, but he was a romantic, and he wasn't gong to fink on the others. He was rather pleased he had the federal government killing him. The alternative was living in a box for 50 years. Once he preferred death, he started to claim it was all him.
Q: What does McVeigh represent? The average heartland citizen? People frustrated and angry with their government? A bumbling criminal who went too far?
A: He's pretty much, as I see it, a soldier. If there had been no Waco, there would be no Oklahoma. He was outraged at what the FBI did at Waco. In the letters to me, his great concern was that he would go to his grave seen as an insane crazy man who delighted in killing innocents.
His mindset was that America was an evil government and that he was going to teach it a lesson. I do not think this was a great move. In effect, he was doing exactly what Janet Reno did. But on the other hand, I think she is as culpable as McVeigh.
Q: Why do you say there is "no such thing as a homosexual?" That is, it is a description of act, not a noun. What's the point?
A: It's meaningless. Let's say you're a vegetarian. Does that tell you anything about your character? It tells me you don't eat meat, which isn't particularly interesting to me. We have been turned into a country of hysterics. The term homosexual is just used to divide people.
E-mail Dan Evans at devans at sfexaminer.com