Democracy Now! Democracy Now! Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Lyrics

AMY GOODMAN: With a career spanning more than six decades, Gore Vidal is one of America's most respected writers and thinkers, authored more than twenty novels, five plays. His recent books include Dreaming War, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia. His latest is a memoir; it's called Point to Point Navigation.

Last week at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I heard Gore Vidal would be there and afterwards went to his home in Hollywood Hills. We sat down in his living room, and I asked him for his thoughts on this election year and on the last eight years of George W. Bush in the White House.

GORE VIDAL: Well, it isn't over yet. You know, he could still blow up the world. There's every indication that he's still thinking about attacking Iran: 'And the generals are now reporting that the Iran are a great danger and their weapons are being used to kill Americans.'

I mean, you know, I think, quite rightly, the Bushites think that the American people are idiots. They don't get the point to anything. There are two good reasons for this, is the public educational system for people, kids without money, let's say, to put it tactfully, is one of the worst in the first world. It's just terrible. And they end by knowing no history, certainly no American history. I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than a___yzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote United States of Amnesia. Why?

GORE VIDAL: That's a good t__le. You must remember, this is a people that has no culture, that has never had one. After all, I was first published when I was nineteen, and the first time I was a bestseller I was twenty-one, twenty-two. I thought by the time I'm old, this place is going to be greatly improved, not just because I was around, but I was going to contribute to it. But then I saw how the New York Times had blocked in their little tight world of New York publishing, which they really did to publish each other's books. The results have not been very good.

So here we are, cut off from Europe, basically, by the World War II. Then the post-war period was kind of interesting, because a lot of us went abroad and stayed there for a time and got to understand other cultures. And I saw-I saw, with many cases, Jimmy Baldwin, he became a Frenchman, surprisingly. Surprising accent, but he was sharp as a tack.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you know him?

GORE VIDAL: Yes, very well.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your memories of him?

GORE VIDAL: He had two voices. One, he sounded exactly like Bette Davis suffering in one of her movies. And the other one was "Call me Ishmael"-it was the prophet's voice. So he was a bit of a contradiction.

AMY GOODMAN: What does "amnesia" mean to you? And how can-

GORE VIDAL: Well, it means what it literally means: people with no memory.

AMY GOODMAN: How do think that can be defeated, conquered in the United States?

GORE VIDAL: Well, it's won. I don't see how you're going to defeat it now. People would forget to defeat it.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in Point to Point Navigation, "I was born October 3, 1925, on the twenty-fifth birthday of Thomas Wolfe, the novelist, not the journalist. I've lived through three-quarters of the twentieth century and about one-third of the history of the United States of America."

GORE VIDAL: Well, I was not counting on them knowing what the word "amnesia" meant.

AMY GOODMAN: You wrote two books during the Bush administration. Two of the books you've written are Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War. Why these two?

GORE VIDAL: Well, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, that's my main book during that period. That was the foreign policy of the Bush administration: perpetual war. This was also Harry Truman's dream. He started the Cold War. If any history had been imparted to our people, they'd know all this. And if you think I enjoy having to be the one to tell them about it, I don't.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Dreaming War?

GORE VIDAL: Well, same thing. They were dreaming war. You can see little Bush all along was just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe in the death penalty?

GORE VIDAL: No. But in their case, yes.