Today Gore Vidal turns 81. 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.”
Below the flip is 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.
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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.”
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[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.
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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.
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[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.
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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.