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From: The New Statesman Interview
Johann Hari
Monday 15th October 2001
Parent(s): 15 October 2001
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The New Statesman Interview - The New Statesman Interview - Gore
Vidal
War on Terror - The exile who despairs of his "ignorant" homeland
denounces the war and its hawks. Gore Vidal interviewed by Johann
Hari
The United States has been forced to reimagine itself this past
month. So who better for the New Statesman to track down in his
obscure mountain hideaway (no, not Bin Laden) than the man who has
dedicated his life and wri
ting to telling Americans their real, non-sanitised history: Gore Vidal. This is a
man, after all, who knew and influenced the icons that defined 20th-century America.
He was a close friend of more than one president (not
forgetting that Eleanor Roosevelt urged him to run for elected office), was sucked
off by Jack Kerouac, was attacked (both in print and to his face) by Norman Mailer,
was a confidant of the Oklahoma bomber and Bill Clint
on, and had to tell Tennessee Williams to stop trying to cruise Jack Kennedy. Now that
the 20th century has truly reached its symbolic end, this is surely the ideal man to
help us understand the new, battered America.
When asked if he is sleeping well, knowing that the US is in Dubbya's hands, he
replies: "Let's just say I'm in a total state of insomnia." Unlike those who are
rallying behind the president, Vidal retains his withering c
ontempt for the man. His father was a "failure", and "when you get a bad gene pool,
you don't necessarily enlarge it for high diving, if I may complete the grotesque
metaphor". Bush has, in Vidal's eyes, failed to rise to
the occasion since the attacks. "For those with an eye and ear for the false note,
every note is truly false." It is not his mangled and incoherent words that appal
Vidal, however. "No, I'm judging by actions. Obviously,
requesting all those special powers pushes us even further along the path towards
Hitler's Enabling Act of 1933. That is the worst that he could do."
Vidal sees the new powers that Bush has claimed to combat terrorism as completing the
destruction of the Bill of Rights. "They're now going to lock up anybody they want to,
silence anybody they want to. Those powers are n
ow theirs, the dreamed-of powers for the state. The state will come out of this very,
very powerful, and we the people, in or out of Congress assembled, will come out much
weaker. That said, we glory in the fact that we a
re the United States of Amnesia. We won't remember a thing the next day." What has
emerged is nothing less than "a police state. There's no euphemism for it . . . Now
the attorney general can act against terrorism, which
has never been defined. It's like 'un-German activities' under Hitler - what's an
un-German activity?"
This fits into Vidal's wider history of an American republic progressively destroyed
since the Truman administration, when the branches of government began to be owned and
controlled by increasingly repressive corporation
s. It is this historical framework that leads him to damn the new American imperialism
that is spearheading the invasion of Afghanistan. "I don't see that anything can come
from a country that is so beautifully right that
we would want to impose, either by suggestion or by fiat, our way of life on anyone
else. And particularly so with the United States of America, the most corrupt
political system on earth.
"How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our form of democracy is
bribery, on the highest scale. It's far worse than anything that occurred in the Roman
empire, until the praetorian guard started to sell the
principate. We're not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the world in
the way of political ideas or political arrangements. God knows, the mention of
justice is like a clove of garlic to Count Dracula."
His scorn for what his homeland has become knows no bounds. He suggests, for example,
that the United Nations would be "stronger if they kicked the US out of it: the US
would be in quite a separate orbit". He is also unaf
raid to carry on drawing attention to the illegitimacy of President Bush. "At least
five members of the Supreme Court should have been put on trial [for installing Bush]
by the Senate, which is in charge of that under the
constitution. Two certainly should have recused themselves. Clarence Thomas's wife
was working to recruit people for the Bush administration; he should not have sat in
judgement. Antonin Scalia's son was working for the
law firm that represented Bush before the Supreme Court. That isn't done. Without
those two, the decision would have gone for Gore."
All these criticisms could easily be used to portray Vidal as unpatriotic or, that
laziest of cliches, "on the side of the terrorists". Yet he is plainly disgusted at
the callous nature of the 11 September attack: "I am a
gainst the death penalty in general, and I am certainly against privatising it." He
tries to see beyond the sensational pictures, both of the initial attack and the US
retaliation. "My task is to try to get people to unde
rstand why something happens. I live in a country where everyone is trained from birth
never to ask why. 'That man is evil - that's why he did it. That's the answer. He's
evil.' Only with the fundamentally, totally uneduc
ated could you get away with this sort of rationalising. I'm a true protest-ant, so I
do protest at the ignorance. And that's my unpopular role, alas."
Vidal has been a fierce critic of America's support for Israel in the past, leading to
predictable accusations of anti-Semitism. Does he feel that the attacks are the price
the US is paying for supporting the Zionist caus
e? "Partly. But in Bin Laden's case, it's more complex . . . What triggered him was
the Gulf war and the Saudi royal family allowing American troops to set up base . . .
For Bin Laden, this was sacrilege. This was the hol
y land of the Prophet, and under no circumstances should the infidels be there . . .
So I would think that he's far more angry with the royal Saudis than he is with George
W Bush, or any Americans. We're just an outside i
nstrument that is feeding heretical elements in his world."
He does not share the prevailing media depiction of Osama Bin Laden as a fanatic. "He
has shown no sign of fanaticism in any of the stories I've been able to get on him: he
seems rather secular. Which means that maybe he
is part of a group. He seems more like a CEO to me, an organiser who raises money,
does the salesmanship and so on, and then he has the crazies who go up there and run
their aeroplanes into buildings."
Vidal displays a certain amount of detached admiration for Bin Laden's timing when he
speaks of "the brilliance of it, to hit the moment that depression has just hit the
US, and we're letting go hundreds of thousands of w
orkers. Europe is about to experience the euro, which I think will be the biggest mess
we've seen in years. I mean, what a moment of awful confusion that Osama decided to do
his programme over Manhattan and the District o
f Columbia."
There also remains the possibility that Bin Laden was provoked. A Pakistani diplomat
has claimed that the US threatened to enter Afghanistan to seize Bin Laden in July,
which may mean that the World Trade Center attack wa
s in fact a pre-emptive strike. Vidal has dedicated the past few years to showing that
Franklin D Roosevelt knowingly provoked Pearl Harbor. So does he believe that the next
great attack on American soil, 60 years later,
may be similar?
"Well, that's what we went through when Kennedy got shot. Those of us who knew him and
who knew Washington knew that he and Bobby had been trying to kill Castro ever since
the Bay of Pigs. Our first thought was that Castr
o beat them to it - he killed him. And Bobby, who was then attorney general and
remained so for a year, which meant he was in charge of the FBI, never investigated
it. He didn't want to go near it, for fear that the Kenne
dy brothers would be involved. So that murder case was never investigated." So it's
plausible that there was a similar provocation by George W Bush? "Perfectly plausible,
yes."
There is just a hint - although Vidal doesn't state it explicitly - that this makes
the attack much more understandable. "To understand why a man did it is a very
important thing to do. Same thing with Timothy McVeigh [th
e Oklahoma bomber]. And if Castro had been behind the Kennedy killings, which he
wasn't, one would have to say he had a motive. They kept trying to kill him all the
time." So Bin Laden, in Vidal's view, is responding to U
S foreign policy.
The terrorist actions seem to have reinforced Vidal's isolationism. He has
consistently argued that the US should withdraw from its commitments in Nato, Kosovo,
the Middle East and other trouble spots. His vision is diame
trically opposed to Tony Blair's of a "world community". Vidal dismisses Blair's plans
as "positively viceregal", and impractical "unless you're going to work out a kind of
blueprint for world government". He says that th
e Prime Minister thinks "the Brits would like to see themselves as a major player,
with a great empire . . . You know, he's an actor, and that's a very good role. It's
fun to play that and he has no responsibility at all.
Dubbya's going to have to have the bombers go through the White
House. Dubbya is really at risk now."
The best America can do, Vidal believes, is retreat. He believes that
"elements south of the Russian border" are "susceptible to religious
mania", and it "might be just as well that we are forewarned, and
never provocative. Do not provoke. That's the message I really have
to say about US policy. [The problem] is the endless provocation that
the US goes in for - generally out of just sheer ignorance."
His homeland, he reminds me, has no sense of history. This may be
Vidal's tragedy. He now lives in self-imposed exile atop an Italian
mountain. He occasionally lobs intellectual grenades across the
Atlantic: keenly polished ideas that expose the bland dishonesty of
so much American culture. Yet even now, when the US might at last be
forced to re-examine its identity, his countrymen are deaf to his
erudite arguments. Perhaps, on second thoughts, this is America's
tragedy, not Vidal's.
End<{{{
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