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The Undoing of America
Gore Vidal on war for oil, politics-free
elections, and the late, great U.S. Constitution
by Steve Perry
"City
Pages" - - For the past 40 years or so of Gore
Vidal's prolific 59-year literary career, his great project has
been the telling of the American story from the country's
inception to the present day, unencumbered by the court
historian's task of making America's leaders look like good guys
at every turn. The saga has unfolded in two ways: through Vidal's
series of seven historical novels, beginning with Washington DC
in 1967 and concluding with The Golden Age in 2000; and
through his ceaseless essay writing and public appearances across
the years. Starting around 1970, Vidal began to offer up his own
annual State of the Union message, in magazines and on the talk
circuit. His words were always well-chosen, provocative, and
contentious: "There is not one human problem that could not
be solved," he told an interviewer in 1972, "if people
would simply do as I advise."
Though it's a dim memory now, Vidal and commentators of a
similarly outspoken bent used to be regulars on television news
shows. Vidal's most famous TV moment came during the 1968
Democratic Convention, when ABC paired him with William F. Buckley
on live television. On the next to last night of the convention,
the dialogue turned to the question of some student war protesters
raising a Vietcong flag. The following exchange ensued:
Vidal: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of
proto- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that,
I'll only say that we can't have--"
Buckley: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a
crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay
plastered."
That was TV in the pre-Information Age for you. These days
Vidal, who put his Italian villa on the market a few months ago
and moved full-time to his home in Los Angeles, speaks mostly
through his essay writing about the foreign and stateside
adventures of the Bush administration. In the past five years he
has published one major nonfiction collection, The Last Empire,
and a book about the founding fathers called Inventing a Nation:
Washington, Adams, Jefferson. But mainly he has stayed busy
producing what he calls his "political pamphlets," a
series of short essay collections called Perpetual War for
Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming
War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2003), and Imperial
America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004).
Last month at Duke University, he produced a short run of On
the March to the Sea, an older play about the Civil War that
he has rewritten entirely.
I spoke to Vidal, who will turn 80 this October, by phone from
his home in Los Angeles on March 9.
City Pages: I'll start with the broadest of questions:
Why are we in Iraq, and what are our prospects there at this
point?
Continued http://citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp
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