Gore Vidal Interview

[Guest SeaGuy]

Gore Vidal, interviewed by Doug Henwood

Thanks to W. Kiernan for doing this transcription.

 

part one

 

Doug Henwood Thank you for joining us, Gore Vidal.

 

Right now we have a lot of liberals wagging their fingers telling us, "I

told you so," about the George Bush regime, that people who said there

was no difference between the two parties are now saying it's enormously

big. How in the wake of the reaction to September eleventh do you read

that kind of "no difference between the two" argument?

 

Gore Vidal Well, Bush acted more quickly with repressive legislation

to push us further along the road to a police state, which Clinton, two

years after Oklahoma City, launched when he signed a special piece of

legislation, the Anti-Terrorist Act, which removed a number of our

freedoms as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. It was a bad bill.

 

Then in the wake of 9-11, the Bush people, particularly Ashcroft, they

were ready with, they had all sorts of terrifying totalitarian

legislation ready, which was promptly passed. The USA PATRIOT act it

was called, went through Congress without any debate, and many people

said many congressmen never read it. Then when they began to look and

see what was in it, you know, the decapitation of the first-born, I

believe, was in there, or something like it, it was filled with....

 

H The liberals would have waited for the second-born...

 

V Well, they would wait till the last-born perhaps, thus doing away

with contraception, which is causing their constituents such worry.

 

Anyway, it was created, the bill, and now it's being corrected, I don't

know what state it's in now and I don't think anybody does. But we are

losing our liberties, and there is no doubt about it. And every day

there are more and more examples, as Ashcroft gleefully says that he

single-handedly suspended the confidentiality between lawyer and client,

"if it's a terrorist situation." And now he's trying to lock up a woman

who, a woman laywer who's worked for a terrorist, which it seems it has

got the legal profession quite angry.

 

The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy, is

allowing this to go past them without any question, puts me in mind of

my favorite Emperor - and I always talk about Emperors when I do

Pacifica, at least on the West Coast - Tiberius, who was a very

brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the

Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent

them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word

and he said, "You're crazy. Suppose, suppose the Emperor is mad,

suppose he's ill, suppose there's a palace coup and somebody else is

sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you're

passing is really his, or should be passed?" They sent it back:

"Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us." And Tiberius

said, "How eager they are to be slaves."

 

And this is more and more my view of the American people in general.

They've allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no

fuss. We have perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have the

Enemy-of-the-Month Club: one month it's Noriega, one month it's Saddam

Hussein, one month it's Khadafy, currently it's Osama bin Laden, we

are...

 

"It's going to be a loooooong war!" said George W. Bush, with such glee,

'cause it means he has Imperial powers. And it also means that we are

not going to get the Constitution back. Once civil rights are gone,

they are gone. People get out of the habit of them.

 

There is no peace party in the United States, a party that might say

stop spending all this money on pointless wars, particularly in the

Middle East and with the Moslem world - there are one billion Moslems

and only a quarter billion Americans, and they seem to be extremely

angry at us for a number of reasons. Since I am in the "why" business,

I give in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," I go through many of the

things that we have done to other countries that make them angry at us.

And that's why the subtitle is, "How We Came to be so Hated."

 

Americans say, "What? How could we be hated? We're the good guys.

Everybody else, they're evil-doers." And when I heard the baby-talk

coming out of George W. Bush's mouth in front of Congress, there's this

Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq and ... North Korea? I mean, he doesn't know

where these places are, much less what evil is, and he doesn't even

know...

 

H Two of them hate each other and the third has nothing to do with

them...

 

V Exactly, and he doesn't know what an axis is, also. So...

 

H Somebody else wrote the words for him.

 

V Somebody else wrote them, would God made somebody else say them,

but...

 

I've never seen Americans so supine. I'm one of the few people around

who remembers Pearl Harbor. I was fifteen years old. And that was the

worst thing that had happened to us until 9-11. I also remember that

two years after Pearl Harbor I enlisted in the Army. People like me did

in those days. Unlike George W. Bush and Vice-President Cheney who both

fled from the Vietnam War. Bush ends up in the Texas Air Force and

Cheney was hidden away in some invulnerable place...

 

H Setting a precedent for...

 

V Setting a precedent for a Vice-President. And here these total

non-patriots, they're what we used to call "draft-dodgers," are now

leading the United States into war, war, war, next is Iraq, next will be

Iran. They've listed about twelve possibilities for us to attack.

Nobody quite knows why, except they might turn terrorist. Well, I can

assure you one thing, if we attack them, they'll hit back, and we will

have created terrorists, so we can have more war.

 

H I want to get back to a point you made a while ago. Do you think

the American public is ignorant, or kept deliberately so, of the real

behavior of our government abroad, or do you think they're complicit

even if only tacitly, as they sort of know what's going on but don't

really want to hear the details. They might on some level realize

it takes some ugly force to keep us a hundred times richer than the

world's poorest people? How much complicity is there?

 

V Very little. Eighty percent of Americans are doing badly, and they

range from poverty to middle-class people who've lost their jobs at

Enron due to the crookedness of the management, newly-unemployed

formerly rather well-off people. That's eighty percent. Twenty percent

are doing very well, working for the one percent that owns the country.

The twenty percent, they go to Congress, they sit on the courts, and

they run the corporations. So if you're talking about the eighty

percent, you're talking about people who've never been educated.

 

They stopped teaching geography about the time I left school. They

don't teach it any more. Here, now we've got a world empire, nobody

knows where anything is. They showed a bunch of students a map of the

globe, all the continents and the oceans and so on, but with no labels,

and they asked them to identify the United States. Well, eighty percent

couldn't. Didn't know where it was. A number had a real sense of humor

and they picked Panama, 'cause it looked kind of cute, you know, with

two big blobs, one above it, one below it.

 

So if they don't know where we are, I don't think they're ever going to

know why we are. The media is so poisonous, and so brilliant at

demonizing the Enemy-of-the-Month Club as I call it, you go from Khadafy

one month, Hussein, Saddam Hussein another month, it never lets up,

we've always got a new enemy. Because they're evil-doers; they have no

motive for being evil, except they like being evil. That is the George

W. Bush mantra. Well, we have made everyone in the world hate us. The

contempt that Europeans have for Americas now, even in Italy where I

live part of the year, and Italians have always been the most tolerant

of us, even they are turning. I'm getting very nervous. I mean, their

oil all comes from the Middle East, If we screw up again with Iraq -

and I'll make you a bet that we are at war in Iraq in October, and Bush

will be conducting that war in order to get more Republicans elected in

a wartime atmosphere, so he can remove more of our liberties.

 

And also get a crack at Caspian oil and natural gas. The last great

reserves are in those five republics that used to be part of the Soviet

Union and are now independent states with names like Kazakhistan. Well,

we're after the oil in the five Istans.

 

We went into Afghanistan not to get Osama bin Laden, that would have

been nice if we did. We went in for a very good reason. The Taliban

had been invented by us, to fight the Russians when they were occupying

Afghanistan. The Taliban turned out to be flaky beyond belief and we

couldn't do anything with them. Unocal, which is an oil company in

California, had made a deal with the Tailban, to put a pipeline from,

that would take, siphon off Caspian oil, pipe it through Afghanistan and

down through Pakistan, to Karachi, to the Indian Ocean, and ship it off

to China and make a fortune. It's the last great oil reserves in the

world. That's what we were doing in Afghanistan, and that why we'll be

hitting at Iraq. We are entering to steal.

 

Now between stealing things that might benefit us, as you suggest, and

going to war out of vanity, which was Vietnam. There was nothing there

we wanted. But we went there because they dared defy us. And the

domino theory, and every country would go Communist... I mean, the

American people have been so pumped up with laughing gas that it's a

wonder that they're sane enough to go about their business, which should

be business and not war.

 

So there we are, embarked upon a great adventure, with one billion

Moslems hating us, and the contempt of all of Europe, the hatred of most

of Latin America - for very good reason, we can't blame that on George

W. Bush, we've had two hundred years to make them hate us down there.

And we're making trouble in China, we're looking forward to a war in

China. If I could find a way to get to the American people and say,

"This junta that is governing us, this Enron/Pentagon junta, dedicated

only to enrichment through the oil business, as all the Bushes and

Cheneys and so on are oil people, they are going to destroy, for

personal profit, the United States. We are going to be destroyed by the

hatred of the rest fof the world."

 

Suicide bombers. We always thought, well, we're pretty safe, we've got

more bombers and more missiles and so on, when you're up against that,

they could take out every city if we make enough of them angry. Every

move that these fools in Washington make antagonizes more people. The

first law of physics is there's no action without reaction. This has

never been learned by an American government. We can swagger around,

kill all the Indians, enslave these people, steal money - anything we

want. And they're not supposed to get irritable. They do.

 

H George Bush, a blue-blood exposed to the most expensive education

money can buy, seems like one of the dimmest men ever to occupy the

White House, and there's a lot of competition for that title. He almost

makes Reagan look like an intellectual. What if anything does this say

about the state of American society, or does the individual not matter

that much?

 

V Doesn't matter. We're run by corporate America, they have their

interests. I've just explained why we're in Afghanistan, and back of

that, if you want to go into the real "why," in this little book of mine

that I've just done, I explain really why the Moslem world was

sufficiently angry at what we had been doing to strike us at 9-11. We

had built up a lot of hatred there and they took it out on us.

 

I don't think it's Osama, I think he's part of it in some way, but...

The best, the only news you really get, unless you know people who are

actually involved, is from the European press, they do follow this, and

they are not as strictly censored as the American press, where we don't

get any facts of any kind. But the former foreign minister Mohammed

Hakum, I used to know, of Egypt, he said, look, we've been tracking

Osama for years. We know all about him, talking about the Egyptian

Secret Service, as also Mossad had, the CIA has, we know everything

about him. He's no more capable of pulling off as intricate a stunt as

9-11, organizing it, putting it in place, he said, that's a major

country's has done that, with a secret service and modern forces. It

isn't coming from a bunch of religious fanatics no matter how

dedicated. They can't do it, any more than Timothy McVeigh all alone

could have made that bomb and detonated it without blowing himself up.

There was a larger group involved. And the FBI had a pretty good idea

who they are.

 

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

part two

 

V Who governs? Obviously the oil companies are involved in our

Middle-Eastern capers. And for those reasons we have motive, and we've

provoked a response from Moslems. What Mohammed Hakul is suggesting,

was that a country was involved, and he didn't say which one, but he was

sort of pointing his finger at Pakistan. They had the secret service,

they had the intelligence. And we do know that the head of their secret

service, which is called ISI, a man called Mahmoud Ahmed, happened to be

in Washington by the way at the time of 9-11, he had sent about two

weeks before 9-11, a hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta, the

first suicide bomber who was in the United States. This was

embarrassing when it came out, and he took early resignation, early

retirement.

 

So it probably comes from something like that. But our country is so

put together and the media is so poisonous and collusive with

government, none of this gets out to the people. They're never told any

of this. They're told that there are evil-doers, and good people,

that's us. And evil-doers do evil because that's their nature. And

we're supposed to be satisfied with that. Maybe they think that all

this sick religiosity we're suffering, particularly in the Protestant

movement, and I am a Protestant, Southern department, that that may have

made everybody sort of Fundamentalists and slightly simple-minded.

 

But Americans are not simple-minded, and they're very quick when their

interests are at stake, to figure out what's wrong. So I think that

anyone who could find a way to break through - because you have to break

through the media, the media is controlled by the bad guys - to break

through, and start to tell them about things, why such-and-such has

happened, why it is we always have two candidates, one Republican, one

Democrat, that nobody wants to see President. This has been going on

every election since Franklin Roosevelt, nobody has wanted any of them,

and people used to ask, they don't ask any more, they just take it for

granted, it's going to be somebody we don't care about. How does he get

the job?

 

So to get back to your obsession with George W. Bush, yes, he is very

dumb, but his father's dumber. Poppy. When I was at Exeter, Poppy was

at Andover, and Poppy's son George W. also went to Andover, where he was

a cheerleader. A very distinguished cheerleader. Then he muddied

around with a lot of Osama bin Laden's people, who have interests in

Texas, and helped him with a little oil company, so they're all helped

out by Saudi Arabians, people, future terrorists, of course they

couldn't have known that. But they were chosen because they're

malleable, they'll do whatever Enron, Andersen, you name the great

financial entity wants them to do, they'll do it.

 

H I'm speaking with Gore Vidal, author of many books but most recently

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

 

American lefties are used to looking to Europe as a somewhat more

civilized, humane environment; we're also looking at the rise of a very,

of people painted as a kind of neo-fascist right in Europe. They've got

Heider, Berlusconi, we're recording this just after Le Pen lost the

runoff election. But what are your thoughts on this rise of the

European right?

 

V I think a lot of it is the American influence. I think they're so

appalled by... They're calling the U.S. "the new Rome." And "the new

Rome" doesn't, at least the lefties you advert to don't like it, and

there's a great anti-American feeling, and they know that we tend to be

always on the side of totalitarian politicians. We've never been on a

liberal's side unless by accident. So they think of us as a pretty bad

influence and there we are with NATO, which controls them militarily,

and the CIA, controls a lot of their politics, their newspapers and how

they view the world. I think also there's a sense of anomie going on in

Italy and in France, that they've lost the old nation-state - at least

that's the latest received opinion - and people are becoming

nationalistic, 'cause now that's all one common currency and one common

market. They have no sense of identity any more, other than a dislike

of immigrants, foreigners, much like the United States.

 

There are many jobs that Americans who are doing well in the

twenty-first century were doing well that they don't want to do, they

don't want to collect the garbage. So we go down, smash up a country

like Colombia or Guatemala, and we get a lot of immigrants from those

countries, and they do the work for less than the usual wage. That's

how we keep our empire going, they depend on Moslems, they depend on

Bengalis, people from that part of the world, and they're having trouble

assimilating them, and they really don't know what going to happen to

their culture. I think that's what they're going through now. I see no

signs of fascism, certainly not in Italy. The French have always been

bad-tempered, and they always come up with somebody really bad-tempered,

who represents, you know, the national hangover, which is endemic due to

that red wine they drink.

 

H Tell us how you got to be friendly with Tim McVeigh, and ended up as

a witness to his execution.

 

V Well, I didn't go to the execution. I was invited by him. Very

delicate, you know, when somebody asks, "Will you come to my

execution?" If you say "no" you sound, you know, cold-hearted, as

though you were rejecting him. If you say "yes" sounds as if you were

delighted that he's being executed, I mean it's a very delicate thing.

 

I did a piece on our loss of Bill of Rights in Vanity Fair, which piece

is included in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace." This was about,

this was after he'd been condemned to death about five, six years ago.

And he read it when he was on death row in Colorado, and he wrote me a

letter about the piece. I'd also mentioned his trial, and how part of

the loss of our civil liberties was also the loss of our control over

the Government, that suddenly the FBI declares war on a religious order

in Waco, Texas, the Branch Davidians, and calls the Army in, and uses

Army weaponry, poison gas and so on, against the Posse Comitatus Act of

1875, I think it was, and I then tied that in with what McVeigh had

done, which was take revenge on the Federal Government. What they had

done, Janet Reno presided, she's the head of the FBI or was at that time

as Attorney General, it was the greatest massacre of Americans by

Americans at Waco since Wounded Knee. Timothy McVeigh then, if he did

it, went her one better and he killed more people at Oklahoma City. Do

I have proof of that? No, I don't.

 

But we started a correspondence, and he was very intelligent and very

bright. He knew exactly what he felt about what had happened because

he'd been a highly decorated soldier in the Gulf War. Got the Bronze

Star, and he was a born sort of Eagle Scout type. An Eagle Scouter, he

couldn't be responsible for many evils like killing innocent people in

Oklahoma City. It would have been much better if he'd blown up an empty

buiding.

 

But he was serious about our liberties and about the country. He was

also part of a much larger plot. I've gone into a lot of FBI reports in

my book, indicating that there were so many leads that they did not

follow up on. Why didn't they? They wanted one lone, crazed killer,

and that was it. So I slightly undid them when I wrote about McVeigh,

in a separate piece after his execution, suggesting what the defense had

made a great case for, that it was a much larger plot.

 

Now, the word "conspiracy" has been so demonized in America. America is

the home of conspiracy. There has never been a conspiracy as large as

Enron. It's the largest financial conspiracy on Earth. And what is a

political party but a conspiracy to take power? We are the home of

conspiracies, and fixing prices, and getting our money away from us for

wars.

 

And giving us nothing back. We're the only first-world country that

does not have national health, does not have decent education for the

general public. Every other country insists on that. That's why when

you adverted to those American lefties who seem to think Europe is

ahead, well, it is ahead, in the amenities of life, and in

civilization. And we're way behind. And we're just pleased to have

somebody as inferior as George W. Bush doing a war dance in front of

Congress about axis-of-evils and how many enemies we've got, we're going

to go after terrorism wherever it is on Earth! 'Cause we're good!

 

H Everyone else envies the American way of life, right?

 

V Not in my opinion.

 

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 

part three

 

H Several times you suggested that American democracy's been hijacked

or circumscribed over the years, but when was there a time when it was

really more robust than now? Hasn't it always been an oligarchy, or has

it gotten worse in that regard?

 

V Well, it's much worse, because there are fewer safeguards for the

average citizen. We always had the Bill of Rights, and if you could

afford a lawyer, right there that puts you in a small category, you

could fight the Government, you could maintain a certain amount of

freedom. That's the thing that has been visibly most lost in the last

few years. A perfect state we never achieved, because after all, we

were founded with, slavery is in the Constitution, it was part of, it's

a national institution, and though some of the Founders disliked

slavery, there it is. It took a great civil war to get rid of it and

the Civil War wasn't even about slavery, it was about preserving the

Union.

 

I would say that the years that produced the Depression, up to then I

think we had a pretty good country. Certainly had a good public

educational system - geography was my favorite, was a great school

subject. And we had a good educational system, and those of us who went

into the Army in the Second World War were far better educated at

seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, than our equivalents today.

 

H You ran for Congress many decades ago. Would you recommend that

strategy to anyone else?

 

V No, not today. You have to be a born mendicant, that is, beggar, to

go in for Federal office. It costs too much. I went in to a Democratic

primary for Senate in California about fifteen years ago, just to see

what was going on. And a rather nice guy, senator from California, said

to me, "You know, what do you want to do this for?" He was one of the

good guys. And I said, well, I want to see what's going on, and by

entering the race I can at least change the dialogue. I can bring up

issues, and the papers have to cover you, that other people won't talk

about, and so from that point of view I'd enjoy that.

 

But get this: he said to me, "You realize," he said, this is his own

experience, and he was not a rich man, nor was he owned by rich men, he

said, "When I was elected, to a six year term, if you want to be

re-elected six years later, you must raise ten thousand dollars a week

for all six years of your first term." Well, how do you do that without

selling your ass? So, I don't advise it for anybody unless you are in

the prostitute business, or unless you like begging, there are some

people who really like going around asking for money. Not I.

 

H That's a strange fetish, I think.

 

V Yes.

 

H You were born to the elite and raised accordingly. How did you end

up as a critic of oligarchy and empire? You could have written novels

and not gotten into as much trouble as you have for taking political

stands. How'd you end up this way?

 

V Well, I think I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, probably,

something that is largely lacking in our fellow citizens, who are

brought up with this totally different ethos from many of us in my

generation. It's just, you know, how do you get ahead, that's what most

people think about. They think about themselves, their careers, and why

not? At the same time, there should be issues that affect everybody.

You see, I have a sense of country, and I have a great affection for the

country, and particularly the country as devised by the Founders, and

modified, sometimes in a good way and sometimes not, by their

successors. I take it personally. It's a family affair. My family was

in on the founding of the United States. So I take it personally. And

I know quite a few people of my generation who did take it personally.

 

I don't meet anybody now... can you imagine Bush Jr., staying out,

obviously he was thinking about a political career, 'cause his father

was doing well in one, but he felt safe staying out of a national war?

Or Cheney, who became a congressman before he rose to invisibility,

staying out? Even Clinton, whom I kind of liked... The only noble deed

that Clinton ever did was the famous letter to the draft board saying

why you...

 

H Mixed bag, he was also worried about his political career...

 

V Yeah, he was worried about that, but it was a Hell of a good letter,

and very noble.

 

H How does he get excoriated for that, then Bush and Cheney get a free

pass?

 

V Well, because everybody knows they've been bought. Everybody knows

they're hired. And, you see, no one takes them seriously. Clinton,

people took seriously, because he was a wonderful speaker, he was a

great explainer, he understood the economy, everybody knew that. The

other presidents just went blank on the subject of economics. Clinton

could lecture your ear off. So if you don't respect the man who's

president, you don't expect much from him.

 

H Years ago I heard that White Supremacist Tom Metzger, on his Aryan

Uptake phone hot-line offering a video of one of your lectures for sale,

and the sympathetic things that you said about Tim McVeigh also have

given people pause. Now there's a long-standing...

 

V I want to know more about Tom Metzger.

 

H He just offered this video on his hotline for sale of one of your

lectures.

 

V. Is he alive?

 

H Yeah, he is. He runs White Aryan Resistance, in Southern

California.

 

V Oh, that Metzger.

 

H Yeah.

 

V He was around twenty years ago.

 

H There is this long-standing, kind of right-leaning nativist critique

of Empire and centralizing power. What affinities or lack of affinities

do you feel in that?

 

V Well, look at Pat Buchanan, who borrowed a great deal from me, for

"A Republic, Not an Empire." That is what I've been saying for half a

century, that we're not in the Empire business, or we should not be in

the Empire business, because we're not very good at it, and we have so

much wrong in our own country. So there is a moment, I would suspect,

that the far-right has to have something positive to talk about, instead

of worrying about getting rid of the inferior breeds, or what they think

of as the inferior breeds. So, the anti-imperial is an interesting

thing for them to take up, 'cause I'd think they'd be on the other

side. But as many people want to join that, why not?

 

H How do we extricate ourselves from this drive toward a repressive

imperial state? Is there any way the American population can rise and

throw off the chains, or are you kind of pessimistic that it's going to

be irresistible?

 

V Well, we have very little, since we don't have representative

government I don't see how we could do it.

 

I see it ending, and I see it ending fairly soon. You're an economist

of sorts, I gather? We're going to go broke. This deficit spending

that we're doing now, in just the last few days, it's horrendous. We're

in the, they've already spent Social Security, as if it had ever been

saved, 'cause they used to replace the real money that we sent in, in

the form of taxes, they replaced them with IOUs called Treasury Bonds.

I owe you some money, and one day I'll pay it back. As if we'll ever

get that back. Now they're going to use it all up, that famous surplus

that Clinton went on about, was the Social Security surplus. They were

counting that as Federal revenue. Well, it wasn't Federal revenue, it's

a separate trust fund, not to be touched. I think all the money in it

is gone, or has been, you know, put off to one side as collateral, to

pay for perpetual war.

 

H Well, there's a lot of room in the country, as Adam Smith said.

 

You once anointed Christopher Hitchens as your successor. Has his

support of the war, and even the kind things he's had to say about

George W. Bush, made you think about rewriting your intellectual will?

 

V Well... growing pains. This will pass. It's like acne.

 

H OK, I think that will bring it to a close. Thanks for joining us,

Gore Vidal.

 

V Thank you.

:'(

[Guest alanm]

You have devoted too much space to Gore Vidal. He has been saying the same things for years, although much of what Vidal has been saying makes more sense lately. Vidal always loses me when he says there is no difference between the two parties. Maybe, his allegations make sense to rich, elderly queers who live much of the year in Italy. I do understand that his views represent many people's in Europe, not just the right wing. Vidal might feel differently if he had to face day to day issue of being queer in America. Yes, there is no viable Green Party in the U.S., if there were Bush would have won the 2000 election easily. The Democrats may not be great, but the party's position on gay issue is far better than the Republicans. Democratic presidents nominate more moderate-liberal people to the courts. This week's decision by the Bush Administration to cut off funds to United Nations Population Fund would not have been taken by a Democrat in the White House. One point nullifies all of Gore's comments: Ashcroft, or someone like him, would never have reached such a high position in a Democratic Administration.

[+ bigjoey]

gore is a great writer and a good historian but i am afraid that age is taking its toll. while i liked his remarks about the french, and there is some truth in what he says, this is a great country and i wouldnot live anywhere else. his wonderful europe has its own set of problems we do not have here. much of what he believes is crazy but at least he can say it well (sort of like bill buckley).

 

i do recommend his books,especially "palimpsest", his memoir for a good description of mid century gay life before stonewall. he has bitchy comments about just about everyone he knew and he seemed to know everyone. a quote in the book of primo levi seems to apply to him: "there are...those who...move off...from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality...".

[Guest NakedTony]

While the interview is interesting, don't these large posts really increase cost and bandwidth to HooBoy?

 

In addition, what about potential copyright violations? Wouldn't it be better just to post a link?

[Guest SeaGuy]

Gore Vidal's opinion that there's no major difference between the parties is based on his belief (completely warranted in my opinion) that they are both on the bankrolls of the same people. His remarks about his own congressional race are particularly prescient. Bill Clinton is now a wealthy man and his daughter is buying Versace dresses that cost tens of thousands of dollars and living the high life in London. You don't get that kind of lifestyle on a presidents salary and much less on an Arkansas governor's salary.

 

Of course many people defend the view "corporate America" IS America and what America SHOULD be. There are fewer of those in the wake of the recent corporate scandals and as more corporate scandals brake more people will be searching for an America that doesn't center around the idea of profit and an American dream that isn't dependent on exploitation.

[+ deej]

>While the interview is interesting, don't these large posts

>really increase cost and bandwidth to HooBoy?

 

Yes.

 

>In addition, what about potential copyright violations?

 

Careful! You'll be shouted down as a heretic! (I know this from personal experience.)

 

If there is a copyright violation (and I'll bet there is) it's the poster's responsibility. If the copyright owner's narcs come a-knocking, we'll send them to original poster. It's not our gig to enforce their copyright.

 

>Wouldn't it be better just to post a link?

 

It's sorta the whole point of HTTP and HTML.

[woodlawn]

>Gore Vidal's opinion that there's no major difference

>between the parties is based on his belief (completely

>warranted in my opinion) that they are both on the bankrolls

>of the same people.

 

 

If you take the trouble to check out campaign contributions made to congressional and presidential candidates by representatives of various industries, you find that there are major differences in which industries support candidates of either party. While PACs representing trial lawyers contribute to candidates of both parties, the great majority of their campaign dollars go to Democrats for example. With PACs representing health insurance companies it is the reverse. Now you know why Senate Democrats will not allow passage of a patients' bill of rights that does not give patients the right to sue HMOs. If there were no differences between the parties that bill would have passed months ago. The same goes for the TPA bill on which agreement was just announced. It took months for the two parties to reach agreement on the benefits that would be paid to workers who lose jobs as a result of new trade agreements. Republicans wanted nothing, Democrats wanted everything.

 

>Of course many people defend the view "corporate America" IS

>America and what America SHOULD be. There are fewer of those

>in the wake of the recent corporate scandals and as more

>corporate scandals brake more people will be searching for

>an America that doesn't center around the idea of profit and

>an American dream that isn't dependent on exploitation.

 

I doubt that. You will not find too many disappointed shareholders who think the solution to their problems is for America to become a socialist country. They simply want the stock market regulated in such a way that they will not be cheated in their attempts to make more money.