one of the few americans to have made sense throughout the entire 9/11-afghanistan-iraq fiasco still unfolding is gore vidal. a man with his views, despite his enormous reputation, is not going to get a lot of air time in george bush’s america. but this week the la weekly interviewed him. vidal did not mince words, nor does it look like they edited him down much. run, do not walk, to one of the darkest and most amusing evaluations of the contemporary american and world political situation.
on electronic voting machines:
We don’t want an election without a paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn’t their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption? So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting machines. He can’t lose.
on the iraq war:
I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will come after us. And it won’t be pretty.
on despotism, business and the bush administration:
Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with — even using much of the same language.
finally a comparatively mainstream thinker who is prepared to come out and call a spade, a spade. the laws going on the books in america are very similar to those enacted by the nazis before the second world war. the language used by the president of the united states is as jingoistic and as frightening as that used by hitler.
let’s hope those electronic ballot boxes are banned before 2004.