Gore Vidal is the kind of guy who, in the abstract, could use a beating with a Clue by Four. He's worse than the average teenager who can mouth disorganized platitudes about "Bush ist Hitler!" and "No blood for oil!" while smashing windows in Seattle. Why is that? Because Gore Vidal's smart. I can't deny that the guy's intelligent, but darned if he isn't a waste of good brain cells.

Back in 1968, he had a televised near-dustup with William F. Buckley of National Review fame, as the two were covering the Democratic National Convention in Richard J. Daley's Chicago. Both had been hired by ABC to provide commentary, and suffice it to say that the two of them didn't get along, to the point of WFB threatening to punch Vidal's lights out. Luckily, this was caught on camera, and has been preserved for posterity. Click here for some background, along with audio and video of the event.

Comes now Mr. Vidal in the LA Weekly, some sort of rag published ostensibly as a lifestyle magazine for the Los Angeles area. In the course of an interview by Marc Cooper, Mr. Vidal has the following profound thoughts on "the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present":

Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

The Country Pundit has no official position on either of the PATRIOT acts (other than to say that I'm worried about the power of such in the hands of people like Janet Reno and so forth) but I'm pretty darned sure we're not in the hands of a despot. So long as the system of checks and balances survives, with independent coordinate branches of government, I'm not too terribly concerned about the imposition of despotism. Further, I'll leave Judge Kenneth Starr or Theodore Olsen (and throw in Laurence Tribe along with Cass Sunstein for balance) to speculate as to the actions of the Founders in regards to our current executive branch.

Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

What result if I (or anyone else on the right) were to say that "The Clinton Administration was an alien army"? The mocking laughter would echo from one coast to the other, probably. I realize that Mr. Vidal is probably thinking of "alien" in the traditional sense, i.e. a foreign army like the Red Army or something, but I'll also admit to snickering at the possibility that he thinks space aliens inhabit the White House. Admittedly, I was a fan of Kenneth Johnson's V back when it came out, and I really enjoyed watching the original and follow-up miniseries on DVD recently. Bless you, Warner Brothers.

I'm not competent to discuss whether we've due process or not, but I'm pretty darned sure the President isn't deranged, and I once again refute the 'despot' thing. Merriam-Webster considers the definition of despotism as being "a system of government in which the ruler has unlimited power". As I stated earlier, so long as checks and balances (along with the corresponding separations of power) exists, textbook despotism cannot be found in America. Besides, if the President was all-powerful, wouldn't he just override the Democrats in the Senate and appoint judges at whim? Oh well---reality in liberal analysis quite often is a rare thing.

Is Bush the worst president we’ve ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

I'd argue to Mr. Vidal that if you want to discuss 'wrecking' the Bill of Rights, then any list of criminals probably starts not with George W. Bush but rather with Abraham Lincoln or any other President who's gone and put paid to the Tenth Amendment. You want to talk about internments? Three words and one historical example come to mind: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the actions taken by the government in regards to people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. (As an aside, George Takei, who played Captain Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, has a story on CNN.com about his return to an internment camp where he spent about a year as a child during the war.)

As for Mr. Vidal's raving about pre-emption, I would hope that his haughty moral stance and righteous indignation will be sufficient to prevent any future terrorist attacks on the United States. Somehow, I doubt it. Does anyone out there see Osama bin Laden (or one of his henchlings) quivering in their shoes and refraining from attacks because a 77-year-old writer crab says that pre-emption is bad? Let me put it this way, Mr. Vidal: I'd rather for them to live in fear than Americans. If that requires pre-emption, then so be it.

How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?

I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.

With apologies to Hillaire Belloc in regards to a response to Mr. Vidal's tripe, "Whatever happens we have got/the Department of Defense and they have not." Certainly the image of Saladin is a powerful one; he's probably the most-well known Islamic warrior outside of rarified academic circles. I think (off-hand) he's probably one of their most successful military commanders, and probably deserves a level of professional admiration. However, not every Islamic is an Islamist. Not every man and woman who pray to Mecca five times daily is willing to mount up and "make mine Mistel" when they board an airliner.

Mr. Vidal's analysis confuses anger with action. Is there a lot of anger against the United States? This is almost certainly true. The important question is, "How much of that anger translates into action?" Based upon what I've seen, the answer is, "Not much." If, every time an Islamic cursed the name of America, harm was done to us, then yes, we'd be in trouble. But it's not. The relative few among the Islamic world who're stupid enough to march off to arms against America generally don't do so well. In fact, they tend to get slaughtered on the whole.

WFB missed a good opportunity in 1968.

The full article is available (for an unknown duration) by clicking here.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 01:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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