The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (57 page)

Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?). But in the post–Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist co-conspirators who wanted to turn “America into a safe house for terrorists.” If the cool Clinton could so froth, what are we to expect from the overheated post-Tuesday Bush?

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now “at war” with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by “an act of war.” Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited
Washington Post
pointed out that under U.S. case law,
only
a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an “act of war.” Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

Although the American people have no direct means of influencing their government, their “opinions” are occasionally sampled through polls. According to a November 1995 CNN-
Time
poll, 55 percent of the people believe “the federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens.” Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, “It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms.” Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events. Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Cheney and Rumsfeld studying these figures, transfixed with joy. “It's what they always wanted, Dick.”

“And to think we never knew, Don.”

“Thanks to those liberals, Dick.”

“We'll get those bastards now, Don.”

It seems forgotten by our amnesiac media that we once energetically supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran and so Saddam thought, not unnaturally, that we wouldn't mind his taking over Kuwait's filling stations. Overnight our employee became Satan—and so remains, as we torment his people in the hope that they will rise up and overthrow him—as the Cubans were supposed, in their U.S.-imposed poverty, to have dismissed Castro for his ongoing refusal to allow the Kennedy brothers to murder him in their so-called Operation Mongoose. Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians, and by their evolving leader, Osama bin Laden, whose moment came in 2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable circumstances.

The New York Times
is the principal dispenser of opinion received from corporate America. It generally stands tall, or tries to. Even so, as of September 13 the
NYT
's editorial columns were all slightly off-key.

Under the heading “Demands of Leadership” the
NYT
was upbeat, sort of. It's going to be okay if you work hard and keep your eye on the ball, Mr. President. Apparently Bush is “facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leadership.” Thank God. Not only is that
all
it takes, but it's
simple
, too! For a moment…The
NYT
then slips into the way things look as opposed to the way they ought to look. “The Administration spent much of yesterday trying to overcome the impression that Mr. Bush showed weakness when he did not return to Washington after the terrorists struck.” But from what I could tell no one cared, while some of us felt marginally safer, that the national sillybilly was trapped in his Nebraska bunker. Patiently, the
NYT
spells it out for Bush and for us, too. “In the days ahead, Mr. Bush may be asking the nation to support military actions that many citizens, particularly those with relations in the service, will find alarming. He must show that he knows what he is doing.” Well, that's a bull's-eye. If only FDR had got letters like that from Arthur Krock at the old
NYT
.

Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks it wise to eschew Bushite unilateralism in favor of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday's darkness by
understanding its origin
(my emphasis) while ceasing our provocations of cultures opposed to us and our arrangements. Lewis, unusually for a
New York Times
writer, favors peace now. So do I. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.

As usual, the political columnist who has made the most sense of all this is William Pfaff in the international
Herald Tribune
(September 17, 2001). Unlike the provincial war lovers at
The New York Times
, he is appalled by the spectacle of an American president who declined to serve his country in Vietnam, howling for war against not a nation or even a religion but one man and his accomplices, a category that will ever widen.

Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent.

Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results.

A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent.

What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future.

War is the no-win all-lose option. The time has come to put the good Kofi Annan to use. As glorious as total revenge will be for our war lovers, a truce between Saladin and the Crusader-Zionists is in the interest of the entire human race. Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history's neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatized by Aeschylus in
Eumenides
(a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN). Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes. He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN—also known as the citizens' assembly at Athens—which he does and is acquitted on the ground that blood feuds must be ended or they will smolder forever, generation after generation, and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until “the thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood…and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time.” Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage.

The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties—the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 combined with the recent requests to Congress for additional special powers to wiretap without judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors, and undocumented immigrants without due process; and so on. As I write, U.S. “Concentration Camp X-Ray” is filling up at marine base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No one knows whether or not these unhappy residents are prisoners of war or just plain evildoers. In any case, they were kidnapped in Afghanistan by U.S. forces and now appear to be subject to kangaroo courts when let out of their cages.

This is from a pre-Osama text: “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and associations; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” The tone is familiar. Clinton? Bush? Ashcroft? No. It is from Hitler's 1933 speech calling for “an Enabling Act” for “the protection of the People and the State” after the catastrophic Reichstag fire that the Nazis had secretly lit.

Only one congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California, voted against the additional powers granted the president. Meanwhile, a
New York Times
–CBS poll noted that only 6 percent now opposed military action while a substantial majority favored war “even if many thousands of innocent civilians are killed.” Simultaneously, Bush's approval rating has soared, but then, traditionally, in war, the president is totemic like the flag. When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically, “It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.” Bush, father and son, may yet make it to Mount Rushmore though it might be cheaper to redo Barbara Bush's look-alike, George Washington, by adding two strings of Teclas to his limestone neck—in memoriam, as it were.

Finally, the physical damage Osama and friends can do us—terrible as it has been thus far—is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an “unalienable right” is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated.

Since V-J Day 1945 (“Victory over Japan” and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A. Beard called “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” I have occasionally referred to our “enemy of the month club”: each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. I have been accused of exaggeration, so here's the scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) back to Berlin Airlift (1948–49). You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as “ongoing,” even though many of us have forgotten about them. We are given, under “Name,” many fanciful Defense Department titles like
Urgent Fury
, which was Reagan's attack on the island of Grenada, a month-long caper that General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more efficiently by the Provincetown police department. (Question marks are from compilers.)

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
2002

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