Vidal

Gore Vidal interviewed by Johann Hari
New Statesman


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 contempt
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 now
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 are 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 corporations. 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 unafraid
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
against 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
understand 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
uneducated 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 cause?
"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 holy 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 instrument 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 workers. 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 of 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 was 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 Castro
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 Kennedy
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 [the
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 US
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
diametrically 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 the 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."