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Gore Vidal interview on DemocracyNow

Amy Goodman recently interviewed Gore Vidal in his L.A. home. The topic: George W. Bush's presidency. More on Vidal here.

Gore Vidal is 82 years old

October 3 is Gore Vidal's birthday. He was born in 1925 in the cadet hospital at the US military academy at West Point, New York.

Vidal's prescient empire thesis

I always enjoy Mr Gary Kamiya's essays (including his recent "I'm Younger...") and reviews on Salon.com, and "Are We Rome?"--a review of Cullen Murphy's book, "Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America"--is no exception. I wish he'd found a way to mention Gore Vidal, however, in his review, since Vidal's career to no small extent has been based--for decades before Cullen Murphy's book--on pointing out America's imperial nature and on finding both echoes of Rome's history and differences from Rome's history in our own.

Vidal's historical novel about the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and newspaper mogul W. R. Hearst (written in 1987) is entitled, Empire. His novel about the last non-Christian emperor, Julian, was written in 1964. It looks at the rise of both supernaturalism/mysticism and Christians' political might in the Romam empire (written in 1964), and his book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got So Hated (written in 2002, before our invasion of Iraq) highlights America's decades of wars of conquest and intervention, and notes our web of military bases, one topic of Chalmers Johnson's history published in 2007, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.

Gore Vidal on Murders, NRA, and Impeachment

Gore Vidal on Murders, NRA, and Impeachment...

More on Vidal here. Excerpts from the audio interview:

"He [President Bush] should have been impeached and thrown out long, long ago. I'm now getting ready with a group and we're going to try to get an amendment to the Constitution that we have the right of recall of an administration that proves to be out of its mind."

"We [Americans] are the most gullible people on Earth, and whatever our masters tell us we believe it."

Independent World Television

An exciting, smart new television experiment out of Canada, Independent World Television (IWT). As excellently examined in the must-see four-part Frontline documentary, "News Wars" true journalism is endangered in the U.S.

Very endangered.

As journalism is waning, so is what's left of our democracy.

Experiments like IWT are going to be attempted in the U.S., too, I hope. In a sense, NPR something similar--not-for-profit and attempting to inform by way the Internet, too. But, most online news comes from newspaper reporters, and newspapers are dying in America.

"Point to Point Navigation" now available

The second of Gore Vidal's memoirs, Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, became available on Election Day. The long-awaited sequel to Palimpsest, Point to Point should be an informative and entertaining work by "America's greatest living man of letters." (Boston Globe)

A patriot's birthday. Gore Vidal is 81.

Today Gore Vidal turns 81. Recently, Gore Vidal was interviewed on C-SPAN on April 29, 2006, relative to his new memoir, Point-to-Point Navigation, which will be out soon and can be ordered now online. In the interview, he described himself very simply as "an ancestral voice prophesying war."

Here's some of what he had to say in the interview about the media, Iran, George W. Bush, and other topics. (The transcription is mine, as are any errors.)

Just because a president gets us into military messes doesn't make him a wartime president, however much he may want to be one, however often he calls himself one.

.....
Anything the administration says--and this is what is so startling having lived in and around politics for 70 years now--I've never seen much an unquestioning media. Whatever the president says, they repeat it because, "You see, he's president." Well, suppose [what he is saying is] a lie, and you know it's a lie. These journalists are not dumb."

.....
[For] us as a polity to the republic, it's going to take tow to three generations to get the Constitution back, to get money power back to Congress, declarations of war back to the House of Representatives. Everything has just been skewed.

.....
Congressman Conyers went up to Ohio.... He did a report on how the election was stolen in 2004.... He wrote a report on it, a very good one....I thought, "Well, something was going to happen. This is devastating: second election stolen in a row, presidential." And no mention in The New York Times of his book; no mention in The Washington Post, which is now a court circular for the emperor at home, and suddenly there were no reviews anywhere, and I thought: "The country's gone." If the people don't care about the republic, there's nothing left to care about, because there is no country. That's all we have.

.....
[Regarding Katrina:] African Americans were abandoned to the waters.

[Vidal offered a proposal that there be a Constitutional amendment for a recall of a President because the founders could not have foreseen gerrymandering and billions of dollars spent in campaigning as two tools basically ensuring the reelection of "the same people over and over again." Currently, there's really "no chance of the peoples' voice being heard."]

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We are on an edge of the abyss.

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These fools are going to go ahead and attack Iran, and with that the Third World War begins, and this country going to be destroyed. We're too small to carry on like this.... We're broke. There is no money. There's going to be trouble servicing the debt--paying the interest on all those treasuries that we have loaned to other counties or let other countries invest in."

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No one rejoices to see his country die.

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Just as you think they can't push it any further they push it a bit further. It's greed. It's to get money for themselves, for friends, jobs, a sense of being somebody. Simultaneously [this] goes along with an ignorance that is just startling. You can't blame most American presidents for not knowing much about economics, but they should know something about history.... These people know nothing about anything. And everybody knows they don't.

.....
He's President Jonah. He jinxed everything he does.

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I quite agree with those blue collar workers who say, "What do you mean, 'Jobs we don't want to do?' We don't want to do [them] for nothing. But as we have no labor unions, and as we have no minimal wage, they are asking us to work for nothing: no health care [and a] God-awful educational system for the general public."

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I've always said, when the bright blue collar workers wake up to the situation in the country, then you have a revolutionary atmosphere in which things will be changed.... The awakening of the American working class is something to be prayed for.