Gore Vidal

Three articles I wrote:

A few links appear embedded in the brief excerpts from Vidal interviews below. However, I recommend you also visit my GORE VIDAL LINKS' page to visit some excellent informative Vidal websites and audio interviews (and transcripts thereof).

Below are quotes from a few of Vidal's books and interviews...With the quotes, and on my Gore Vidal Links' Page, I have listed a number of informative Vidal websites and some excellent interviews with Vidal which are available online to read or listen to.

I first began reading Vidal's essays when I was a teenager, then went on to read his novels and non-fiction books. I appreciate both his fiction and non fiction, as well as the films based on his screenplays and books. (Vidal has also appeared in several films.) I particularly appreciated his participation in the Independent Institute's "Understanding America's Terrorist Crisis:What Should Be done?" (available on videotape).

I also recommend the film, "Vidal in Venice," a fascinating tour of Venice-past and present-with Vidal as your guide...sharing his knowledge (and superb wit) in a most well-made documentary. Vidal wrote it, and the camera follows him as he guides the viewer through Venice, and through his own exploration into the 'Vidal' name of Venice's rich past. For those interested in the remarkable history of Venice, and those seeking to learn history of empire, this is an excellent film.

I also want to point out the beauty of his essays...each collection of his essays provides you with so much information, observation, and truth. From his thoughts and associations on so many writers and high achievers in many fields, I have learned so much. I am also touched by Vidal's appreciation for other's art (as well as his rejection of those who rely upon the lie). At any time, I can sit down and re-read any number of his essays, be they upon Mark Twain, WW II, book reviews, or any number of the wide subjects he has covered for so many years, and I come away each time again learning and again filled with appreciation of the artistry of word Vidal expresses. And, I also recommend for those who have read Vidal's work, that you obtain his memoir Palimpsest...his experiences, observatons and subsequent conclusions most interesting.

His intellectual eloquence, knowledge, as well as his wit, dry humor, and sarcasm, makes his work mentally and emotionally satisfying.

VIDAL QUOTES:

....It was Benjamin Franklin, I think, who said that those who prefer security to liberty deserve neither, which is my view."--Vidal in an interview.

"Then, with the Vietnam War, we not only took the wrong road, we went straight around the bend, fighting the longest war in our history in a region where we had no strategic interest unless we were to openly declare what the management, then and now, does truly believe: the United States is the master of the earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown. We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense." -- from Vidal's essay 'How We Missed The Saturday Dance.'

From his book 'Imperial America - Reflections on the United States of Amnesia," Gore Vidal:

"The tragedy of the United States, thus far in this century, is not the crack-up of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above."

"A state forever at war, hot or cold, is easily controlled by the few; unlike a relatively free society, in which the governors are accountable to the people and to law."

"Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always prey to manipulation by television. This means if you want to demonize drugs or the Arabs or the Japanese, you do so openly in the media...The oligarchy does not care whether the citizens make themselves sick with drugs or not. What government wants is simple: total control. If this can be got by dispensing with the Bill of Rights, then that's a small price to pay."

"It is obvious that if we are to avoid an economic collapse, defense spending must be drastically reduced.."

"Four point four percent own most of the United States...This gilded class owns twenty-seven percent of the country's real estate. Sixty percent of all corporate stock, and so on..."

"...the American government gives back to the citizen-consumer very little of the enormous revenue it extorts from him..."

"Although most industrial Western (as well as Eastern) European countries have national health services, the American taxpayer is not allowed this amenity because it would be socialism, which is right next door to godless communism and free love, followed by suicide in the long white Swedish night."

"...we would retain the office of President, but the president would be a figurehead and not what he is today--a dictator who is elected by half of half the people from a very short list given them by the Banksparty."

"Religion is also the basis of those laws governing personal conduct that keep the prisons overcrowded with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium. The thrust of our laws at the beginning of the country--and even now--is to make what these religions regards as sin secular crimes to be punished with fines and prison terms."

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

On Bush's Inaugural Address (Excerpts from an excellent interview conducted by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! Visit their website to read full text--it is an excellent (Jan. 25, 2005) interview with Vidal, and explore the rest of their website for more insightful writings and ideas.)

Gore Vidal on Bush's 2nd Inaugural Address:

"There's not a word of truth in anything he (Bush) said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate all the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, "all men are created equal, and should be," etc., but it was not the task of the United States to "go abroad to slay dragons," as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty and so on, she could become dictatress of the world, but in the process she would lose her soul. This is what we--the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe."

"It (Bush's inaugural speech) is the most un-American speech I've ever heard a chief executive give to the United States..."

"I don't see much future for the United States, and I put it on economic grounds. Forget moral grounds. We're far beyond any known morality, and we are embarked on a kind of war against the rest of the world...We are going to go broke. We are a declining power economically in the world...So, I put it down to economic collapse may save the United States from its rulers."

In reply to Goodman's question as to whether Vidal can make comparisons to Richard Nixon winning by a landslide, much more than Bush, and yet being ultimately forced to resign?

Vidal: "Well, let us hope history repeats itself, and there's a possibility that the American people will get fed up with endless war, and endless deaths coming out --American deaths. That's all we care about. We don't care about foreigners dying...It's real life. And those are real dead people. And there are more and more of them, and the world won't tolerate it...(he describes Nixon's avoiding domestic affairs and rather his interest in foreign affairs)...That was Nixon's take. And then, of course, once he got in -- into war, he couldn't get out. Didn't try very hard to get out. He wanted to be victorious. Well, he wasn't victorious. Then he lied and cheated. This one lies and cheats, too. So far, he's not had his Watergate. Let us hope there is one looming."

"...an insane government is not one that you can look to with any confidence."

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

From 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace-How We Got To Be So Hated' - Gore Vidal:

"...Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all..."

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

On April 20, 1992, Vidal delivered the annual Lowell Lecture at Harvard University. Below are quotes from that speech. Visit this Harvard link to read entire speech. Gore Vidal:

"I am a radical reformer. The word "radical" derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favorably, much less track any problem to its root. But then a ruling class that was able to demonize the word "liberal" in the last ten years is a master of controlling--indeed stifling--any criticism of itself. Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis which means "pertaining to a free man." In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform."

"For a century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. The lower atmosphere is filled with dust, we have just been told from space. The climate changes; earth and water are poisoned."

"Our prisons are the most terrible in the First World and the most crowded. Our Death Row executions are a source of deep disgust in civilized countries where more and more we are regarded as a primitive, uneducated, and dangerous people."

"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."

"War is all that they know and all that they care about, because through the demonizing of this or that enemy they can keep the money flowing to them--while depriving the people at large of all those things that other First World people possess--from schools to health care."