The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (56 page)

On the other hand, I think Asians and Hispanics are a plus culturally, and their presence tends to refocus, somewhat, the relentless white versus black war. Where I
am
as one with friend Pendulum is that the newcomers must grasp certain principles as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Otherwise, we shall become a racially divided totalitarian state enjoying a Brazilian economy.

To revert to the unmentionable, religion. It should be noted that religion seemed to be losing its hold in the United States in the second quarter of this century. From the Scopes trial in '25 to the repeal of Prohibition in '33, the sky-godders were confined pretty much to the backwoods. Then television was invented and the electronic pulpit was soon occupied by a horde of Elmer Gantrys, who took advantage of the tax exemption for religion. Thus, out of greed, a religious revival has been set in motion and the results are predictably poisonous to the body politic.

It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us together, O Lord, in our common humanity. Well, we have heard these exhortations for a couple of hundred years and we are further apart than ever. So instead of coming together in order that the many might be one, I say let us separate so that each will know where he stands. From the
one, many
, and each of us free of the sky-god as secular lawgiver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation.

Whether Brown and Buchanan knew it or not, they were revealing two basic, opposing political movements. Buchanan speaks for the party of God—the sky-god with his terrible hatred of women, blacks, gays, drugs, abortion, contraception, gambling—you name it, he hates it. Buchanan is a worthy peddler of hate. He is also in harmony not only with the prejudices and superstitions of a good part of the population but, to give him his due, he is a reactionary in the good sense—reacting against the empire in favor of the old Republic, which he mistakenly thinks was Christian.

Brown speaks for the party of man—feminists can find another noun if they like. Thomas Paine, when asked
his
religion, said he subscribed only to the religion of humanity. There now seems to be a polarizing of the country of a sort that has never happened before. The potential fault line has always been there, but whenever a politician got too close to the facts of our case, the famed genius of the system would eliminate him in favor of that mean which is truly golden for the ownership, and no one else. The party of man would like to re-establish a representative government firmly based upon the Bill of Rights. The party of God will have none of this. It wants to establish, through legal prohibitions and enforced taboos, a sky-god totalitarian state. The United States ultimately as prison, with mandatory blood, urine, and lie-detector tests and with the sky-godders as the cops, answerable only to God.

For once, it's all out there, perfectly visible, perfectly plain for those who can see. For the first time in 140 years, we now have the outline of two parties. Each knows the nature of its opposite, and those who are wise will not try to accommodate or compromise the two but will let them, at last, confront each other.

Jefferson's famous tree of liberty is all that we have ever really had. Now, for want of nurture—the blood of tyrants and of patriots—it is dying before our eyes. Of course, the sky-god never liked it. But some of us did—and some of us do. So, perhaps, through facing who and what we are, we may achieve a nation not under God but under man—or should I say our common humanity?

The Nation
July 13, 1992

BLACK TUESDAY

According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. Last September 11, when suicide pilots were crashing commercial airliners into crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since 1950 on what is euphemistically called “defense,” there would have been no advance warning from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency.

While the Bushites have been eagerly preparing for the last war but two—missiles from North Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Oregon, only to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons—the foxy Osama bin Laden knew that all
he
needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened to be aboard hijacked airliners.

The telephone keeps ringing. In summer I live south of Naples, Italy. Italian newspapers, TV, radio want comment. So do I. I have written lately about Pearl Harbor. Now I get the same question over and over: Isn't this exactly like Sunday morning, December 7, 1941? No, it's not, I say. As far as we
now
know, we had no warning of Tuesday's attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets that our enemies always seem to know about in advance but our people are not told of until years later, if at all. President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor. I describe the various steps he took in a book,
The Golden Age
. We now know what was on his mind: coming to England's aid against Japan's ally, Hitler, a virtuous plot that ended triumphantly for the human race. But what was—is—on bin Laden's mind?

For several decades there has been an unrelenting demonization of the Muslim world in the American media. Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you
why
this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why
anything
happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. “We are good,” G.W. proclaims, “They are evil,” which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them—as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway—his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: “They hate what they see right here in this Chamber.” I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. “
Their
leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” At this plangent moment what American's gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?

Should the forty-four-year-old Saudi Arabian bin Laden prove to be the prime mover, we still know surprisingly little about him. The six-foot seven-inch Osama enters history in 1979 as a guerrilla warrior working alongside the CIA to defend Afghanistan against the invading Soviets. Was he anti-Communist? Irrelevant question. He wants no infidels of any sort in the Islamic world. Described as fabulously wealthy, Osama is worth “only” a few million dollars, according to a relative. It was his father who created a fabulous fortune with a construction company that specialized in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama's fifty-four brothers and sisters. Although he speaks perfect English, he was educated entirely at Jiddah. He has never traveled outside the Arabian Peninsula. Several siblings lived in the Boston area and have given large sums to Harvard. We are told that much of his family appears to have disowned him and many of his assets in the Saudi kingdom have been frozen.

Where does Osama's money now come from? He is a superb fundraiser for Allah but only within the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait. Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerrilla against the Russians, he and his organization would be used by the Saudis to stop the Iraqis. To Osama's horror, King Fahd sent for the Americans: thus were infidels established on the sacred soil of Mohammed. “This was,” he said, “the most shocking moment of my life.” “Infidel,” in his sense, does not mean anything of great moral consequence—like cheating sexually on your partner; rather it means lack of faith in Allah—the one God—and in his prophet Mohammed.

Osama persuaded four thousand Saudis to go to Afghanistan for military training by his group. In 1991, Osama moved on to Sudan. In 1994, when the Saudis withdrew his citizenship, Osama was already a legendary figure in the Islamic world and so, like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, he could tell the royal Saudis, “I banish you. There is a world elsewhere.” Unfortunately, that world is us.

In a twelve-page “declaration of war,” Osama presented himself as the potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modern corruption, the United States.

Osama's organization blew up two of our embassies in Africa, and put a hole in the side of an American warship off Yemen, Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, and so on to the events of Black Tuesday. G. W. Bush was then transformed before our eyes into the cheerleader that he had been in prep school. First he promised us not only “a new war” but a “secret war” and, best of all, according to the twinkle in his eye, “a very long war.” Meanwhile, “this administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have…We're going to find these evildoers and we're going to hold them accountable,” along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter.

As of the first month of 2002, the Pentagon Junta pretends that the devastation of Afghanistan by our high-flying air force has been a great victory (no one mentions that the Afghans were not an American enemy—it was like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia). In any case, we may never know what, if anything, was won or lost (other than much of the Bill of Rights).

A member of the Pentagon Junta, Rumsfeld, a skilled stand-up comic, daily made fun of a large group of “journalists” on prime-time TV. At great, and often amusing, length, Rummy tells us nothing about our losses and their losses. He did seem to believe that the sentimental Osama was holed up in a cave on the Pakistan border instead of settled in a palace in Indonesia or Malaysia, two densely populated countries where he is admired and we are not. In any case, never before in our long history of undeclared unconstitutional wars have we, the American people, been treated with such impish disdain—so many irrelevant spear carriers to be highly taxed (those of us who are not rich) and occasionally invited to participate in the odd rigged poll.

When Osama was four years old I arrived in Cairo for a conversation with Nasser, to appear in
Look
magazine. I was received by Mohammed Heikal, Nasser's chief adviser. Nasser himself was not to be seen. He was at the Barricade, his retreat on the Nile; he had just survived an assassination attempt. Heikal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, worldly. “We are studying the Koran for hints on birth control.” A sigh.

“Not helpful?”

“Not very. But we keep looking for a text.” We talked off and on for a week. Nasser wanted to modernize Egypt. But there was a reactionary, religious element…Another sigh. Then a surprise. “We've found something very odd, the young village boys—the bright ones that we are educating to be engineers, chemists, and so on, are turning religious on us.”

“Right wing?”

“Very.” Heikal was a spiritual son of our eighteenth-century Enlightenment. I thought of Heikal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernized Arab generation had, in the name of Islam, struck at what had been, forty years earlier, Nasser's model for a modern state. Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practicing, as opposed to zealous, Muslim. Ironically, he was trained as an engineer. Understandably, he dislikes the United States as symbol and as fact. But when our clients, the Saudi royal family, allowed American troops to occupy the Prophet's holy land, Osama named the fundamental enemy “the Crusader Zionist Alliance.” Thus, in a phrase, he defined himself and reminded his critics that he is a Wahabi Muslim, a Puritan activist not unlike our Falwell/Robertson zanies, only serious. He would go to war against the United States, “the head of the serpent.” Even more ambitiously, he would rid all the Muslim states of their Western-supported regimes, starting with that of his native land. The word “Crusader” was the giveaway. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian West, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for a thousand years tried to dominate the lands of the Umma—the true believers. That is why Osama is seen by so many simple folk as the true heir to Saladin, the great warrior king who defeated Richard of England and the Western crusaders.

Who was Saladin? Dates 1138–1193. He was an Armenian Kurd. In the century before his birth, Western Christians had established a kingdom at Jerusalem, to the horror of the Islamic Faithful. Much as the United States used the Gulf War as pretext for our current occupation of Saudi Arabia, Saladin raised armies to drive out the Crusaders. He conquered Egypt, annexed Syria, and finally smashed the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a religious war that pitted Mohammedan against Christian. He united and “purified” the Muslim world and though Richard Lion-heart was the better general, in the end he gave up and went home. As one historian put it, Saladin “typified the Mohammedan utter self-surrender to a sacred cause.” But he left no government behind him, no political system because, as he himself said, “My troops will do nothing save when I ride at their head….” Now his spirit has returned with avengeance.

         

The Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its principal task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilized nations subscribe—like the Kyoto Accords or the nuclear missile agreement with Russia. The Bushites go about their relentless plundering of the Treasury and now, thanks to Osama, Social Security (a supposedly untouchable trust fund), which, like Lucky Strike green, has gone to a war currently costing us $3 billion a month. They have also allowed the FBI and CIA either to run amok or not budge at all, leaving us, the very first “indispensable” and—at popular request—last global empire, rather like the Wizard of Oz doing his odd pretend-magic tricks while hoping not to be found out. Meanwhile, G.W. booms, “Either you are with us or you are with the Terrorists.” That's known as asking for it.

To be fair, one cannot entirely blame the current Oval One for our incoherence. Though his predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they, too, assiduously served the 1 percent that owns the country while allowing everyone else to drift. Particularly culpable was Bill Clinton. Although the most able chief executive since FDR, Clinton, in his frantic pursuit of election victories, set in place the trigger for a police state that his successor is now happily squeezing.

Police state? What's that all about? In April 1996, one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a so-called conference bill in which many grubby hands played a part, including the bill's cosponsor, Senate Majority leader Dole. Although Clinton, in order to win elections, did many unwise and opportunistic things, he seldom, like Charles II, ever said an unwise one. But faced with opposition to antiterrorism legislation that not only gives the attorney general the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it also, selectively, suspends habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. Clinton attacked his critics as “unpatriotic.” Then, wrapped in the flag, he spoke from the throne: “There is nothing patriotic about our pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.” This is breathtaking since it includes, at one time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic?

There have been ominous signs that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-shirt-blue-suit-discreet-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of “generalists,” trained in law and accounting, into a confrontational “Special Weapons and Tactics”(a.k.a. SWAT) Green Beret–style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, ski masks. In the early Eighties an FBI super-SWAT team, the
Hostage 270 Rescue Team
, was formed. As so often happens in United States–speak, this group specialized not in freeing hostages or saving lives but in murderous attacks on groups that offended them, like the Branch Davidians—evangelical Christians who were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team, illegally using army tanks, killed eighty-two of them, including twenty-five children. This was 1993.