Gore Vidals's March 12 Interview On Dateline, SBS TV Australia.

MARK DAVIS: Over the past 40 years or so, you've written about the undermining of the foundations of the constitution -- liberty, human rights, free speech. You've probably damned every administration throughout that period on that score. Is George Bush really any worse?

GORE VIDAL: No, he certainly is worse. We've never had a kind of reckless one who may believe -- and there's a whole theory now that he's inspired by love of Our Lord -- that he is an apocalyptic Christian who'll be going to Heaven while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn't the case. I hope that's exaggeration. The problem began when we got the empire, which was brilliantly done, in the most Machiavellian -- and I mean that in the best sense of the word -- way by Franklin Roosevelt. With the winning of World War II, we were everywhere on Earth our troops and our economy was number one. Europe was ruined. And from that, then in 1950, the great problem began when Harry Truman decided to militarise the economy, maintain a vast military establishment in every corner of the Earth. Meanwhile, denying money to schools but really to the infrastructure of the nation. So we have been at war steadily since 1950.

MARK DAVIS: You charge what you call the 'Cheney-Bush junta' with empire-building but hasn't America always been an empire and isn't this junta just a little bit more honest about it? They aren't shy in proclaiming their belief that America has something worth exporting?

GORE VIDAL: I prefer hypocrisy to honesty any time if hypocrisy will keep the peace. What is going on now is kind of interesting. We've never seen anything like it. There's a group of what they call neo-conservatives. They preach openly and they're all over the war department as we used to call it, the Defence Department. Mr Wolfowitz is one of their brains and they write really extraordinarily frightening overviews of the United States and the rest of the world that we, after all, have all the military power that there is and let's use it. One of them, not long ago, made a public statement -- "It's time we really had regime change in ALL the Arab countries." Well, there are 1 billion Muslims and I don't see them taking this very well.

People ask me, "Are you saying there's a conspiracy?" -- because that's the word where everybody starts laughing. "No," I said, "I'm going to change the word." We won't say it's a conspiracy that all the great offices of state are occupied by gas and oil people -- the President, the Vice-President, National Security Adviser -- it's not a coincidence. "It's a coincidence," and everybody smiles -- that's a nice word -- "Oh, yes, of course, it's a coincidence" that they are running the government and getting us into a war in oil-rich places."

MARK DAVIS: Bush has claimed that the American belief in liberty will deliver a free and peaceful Iraq, even with the stench of oil in the air, George Bush probably can deliver that -- a free and peaceful Iraq that is. Isn't there a legitimate case to be argued that there's a greater good at work here?

GORE VIDAL: There is no greater good at work. We cannot deliver it. You don't go in and smash up a country, which we will do, and gain their love so that they then want to imitate our highly corrupt political system.

MARK DAVIS: Unlike Iraq, Americans can change their government with some drawbacks, they can express their opinions. Whatever Machiavellian benefits might accrue to the US, isn't there still moral weight in the voice of America, given its history as a democratic force over the past century?

GORE VIDAL: I spoke to 100,000 people two weeks ago in Hollywood Boulevard, down the hill from where I'm speaking to you now. There were 100,000, lots of police, many helicopters overhead which, as the speaker got up, would lower themselves to try and drown your voice out. The press did not record that there were 100,000 people. They said, "Oh, 30,000 perhaps. That might be an exaggeration," they said. Unfortunately for them, the 'Los Angeles Times', generally a fairly good paper, had a long shot from La Brea where I was speaking on a stage straight up to Vine Street, which was a mile or two away, and you saw 100,000 people, so their very picture undid them.

The censorship is very tight. Don't think we're a free country to say anything we want. We can say it, but it's not going to be printed and you're not going to get on television. I can't tell you how tightly controlled this place is and it's beginning to show, because talk radio and so on -- I've done a lot of that lately -- the questions you get, the people are so confused. They don't know where Iraq is. They think Saddam Hussein, because he's an evil person, deliberately blew up the twin towers in Manhattan. He didn't. That was Osama bin Laden or somebody else. We still don't know because there has been no investigation of that, as Congress and the constitution require. So we are totally in the dark and we have a president who is even in a greater darkness, who's totally uninformed about the world, leading us into war.

MARK DAVIS: Norman Mailer wrote recently that, after a long life, he's concluded that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state and that America as a nation is in a pre-fascist era, a mega banana republic increasingly dominated by the military.

GORE VIDAL: I have those days, yes, such as Norman is having. But I am more deeply rooted in the old constitution with all of its flaws and in the Bill of Rights with all of its virtues. That was something special on Earth and Jefferson was something special on Earth when he said that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- nobody had ever used that phrase in the constitution before or set that out as a political goal for everyone.

In the 18th century, we had three of the great geniuses of the 18th century all living in this little colonial world of 3 million people. We had Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These were extraordinarily wise men and understood the ways of the world, and they gave us a very good form of government. No, it was not a liberal government. It was a very reactionary one. But it was the 18th century -- 1787 was when the constitution was written. It was as advanced as the human race had ever got at that time in devising a republic.

I do feel an energy across the country -- this may be because I go to energetic groups -- that are fighting their own government, but they're going to lose because the government is now totally militarised and ready for war -- a war they can't really sell to the rest of the world, but they're going to do it anyway. This is something new. We've never had a period like this and it was -- to somebody like me, who is really hooked into constitutional America -- this is incredible. We cannot trust the Supreme Court after their mysterious decisions on the election of 2000. We have no political parties. So in the absence of politics, with a media that is easy to manipulate and, in the hands of very few people with interests in wars and oil and so on, I don't see how you get the word out, but one tries because there is nothing else to be done.
CounterPunch