www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/features-cooper.php
Bush that he wasnt born in an earlier time and somehow stumbled into Americas Constitutional Convention. A man with his views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific writers, Gore Vidal. When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to LA Weekly about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they were last year. This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is feistier and more productive than ever. Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display vanity, ambition, hubris, envy and insecurity their shared and profoundly rooted commitment to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore. No more than a few pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now dominates the capital named for our first president. As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our revolutionary past and our imperial present. MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic. GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles slaveholders and plantation owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined the upper classes. James Madison, known as the father of it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. Hence the great speech, which I quote at length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him. He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will give us, for a space of years, such government. But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the past, because of the essential corruption of the people. And when the people become so corrupt, he said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism the only form of government suitable for such a people. He argued that the Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another Constitutional Convention and revise all that isnt working. And to each generation is the right to change every law they wish. Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people a chance to change the laws. He said you cannot have any government of any weight if you think it is only going to last a year. And it would probably still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we have to start changing this damn thing. Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young Americas two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic? Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn. Bushs friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. No one is punished for squandering the peoples money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace , I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire. In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves comfortable in the current political system of the United States? But what about the radical centralizers, or those like John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy? Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could offer democracy. Hamilton, on the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his own social station. And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very best people, meaning the rich. He was highly moral, and I dont think he could endure the current dishonesty. Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. I think you would find a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted. But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Trumans founding of the national-security state, to LBJs debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration? 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? 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. 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. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders? Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans most Americans would not think of them as citizens. Yet you saw in the 60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under the weight of its own hubris. And now wi...
|
http://csua.com/feed/