Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’
Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”
His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.” [continued…]
Gore Vidal, I believe, does have an accurate perspective on the United States in many respects, especially the big picture. A dictatorship here seems ridiculous to many, but the foundation for it seems to being laid. Even mentioning or writing about dictatorship here seems to be a taboo.
Gore Vidal’s comments that liars are more prevalent today, undoubtedly beginning with the Vietnam War and progressing uninterrupted to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars rings true!
About two years ago the dozen or more mainstream and alternative publications that received my insignificant article, Is the Presidency Edging Towards Dictatorship? were not interested in publishing it.
Alternative points of view are often marginalized, but the irony is the mainstream view or thinking may well be not only erratic but irrational. There are many examples, but both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and occupations fit that bill, expensive and costly wars in human and financial ways. The ease and speed which these wars were approved by Congress is breathtaking, for it clearly shows panic and missteps in policy that lead to failure in both executive and legislative branches of government.
There is definitely a place for military action and intervention, but used unwisely and precipitously it becomes another quagmire. Unfortunately, for the country, “the best and brightest” are still leading the nation from think tank to government agencies. Without all those trillions of dollars in public money available where would these “best and brightest” actually be doing?