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I've put together a few notes to help ex-plain the predicament our country is in. Very wise people, not myself, have seen it coming along the way.
I’d like to start by saying that I belong to a minority that by now is one of the smallest in the United States, and with every day it grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking when I got out of the Army, in 1946, "well, that’s that. We won, and those who come after us will never need to do this again." Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity, Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to men-tion for the so-called “enemy.”
Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed like the enemy of the month club. Remember Noriega? All the drugs in the world went through that man and Bush Sr. went down and killed a lot of Panamanians, arrested him, put him on trial in the United States (which had no jurisdiction) and locked him up for life. We still don’t know quite why. And the drugs are flowing with the same ease as they did before.
Qaddafi, remember him? We did all that to kill his daughter. Somehow his eyeliner had offended us. I mean we pick our enemies shrewdly.
This perpetual war kept major revenues going to military procurement, secret police and the bribing of warlords, while withholding money from us--the taxpayers--with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But no matter how corrupt our system became, over the last century--and I lived through three quarters of it--we still held on to the Constitution and above all to the Bill of Rights. I have been discouraged at times, like all of you, but I always felt the republic was upon a firm foundation and that no one could seriously undermine it. I never once believed that I would ever see a day like this one, when a great part of "We the People"--forget the polls--should be opposed to an arbitrary and secret government preparing wars for us to fight in. Sensibly, they leave the fighting to us.
During Vietnam, Bush fled to the Texas Air Force. Cheney, when asked why he had avoided service in Vietnam, replied: “I had other priorities.” Well, so did thirteen million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that many were never able to fulfill.
How did human events bring us here to this hall? We can certainly blame, obviously, the oil and gas hustlers who have hijacked the gov-ernment from the Presidency to Congress to--most ominously--the Judiciary. The first person I know who sensed what would go wrong, what could go wrong and what did go wrong, believe it or not, it was Benjamin Franklin. Always portrayed as that nice, chubby old man, and of no great interest to so many of our historians until very recently, Franklin foresaw this day most clearly back in 1787 when he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. He was old, he was dying, he was not well enough to speak, but he had prepared a text which a friend read. It is such a dark state-ment, that most school histories (and I’ve been through about a dozen recently to see if the text of what he said is there) only keep a sentence or two. They omit his key words. Franklin urged the Con-vention to accept the Constitution, despite all its faults. “It might,” he said, “provide good govern-ment in the short term and may be a blessing to the People if well administered, and I believe this is likely to be well administered for a course of years. And then it will only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Franklin’s prophecy came true in Decem-ber 2000, when the Supreme Court bulldozed its way through the Constitution in order to select as their President the loser in the election of that year. Despotism is, let us hope temporarily, in the sad-dle. The old republic is a shadow of itself, and we now stand in the glare of a nuclear world empire, with a government that sees as its true enemy--"We the People"--deprived of our electoral fran-chise.
War is the usual aim of despots, as Madi-son was the first to point out, at least in the Feder-alist Papers. And serial warfare is what we’re go-ing to get unless we get help from well-wishers in new old Europe, and from ourselves, awake at last, because in time, we can, we must persuade this most peculiar administration that they are acting essentially on their own and against all of our his-tory.
The other night I looked for help to for-mer President John Quincy Adams who said in the 1820s, when asked if we would join a coalition in Europe to free Greece from Turkey: “The United States goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. If the United States took up all of foreign affairs, she might become the dictatress of the world, but she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit, her own soul."
Should we be allowed--who knows!--in 2004 to hold a presidential election here in “the Homeland” (where do they get these phrases from?)? Old Bush with his “New World Order.” Nobody told him this was a phrase that fell off Hitler’s lips so easily, and their “homeland” is not an expression that we use. We used to say “the country” or maybe “the nation” if we were think-ing of a liberal paper. I suspect if there is such an election we shall realize that the only regime change that need concern our regained spirit or soul is the one passing through Washington.
President Adams is long since dead, and we have now been in the empire business since 1900 when we promised to make the Philippines independent of Spain. But then it looked so desir-able, all that real estate, and so close to China. We changed our mind and over the course of several years we killed 220,000 Phillipinos, mostly civil-ians, “in order to Christianize them,” according to President McKinley. And somebody said, “Mr. President, they are Catholics!” And he said, “that’s what I meant!”
A few years ago there was a significant exchange between "General" Colin Powell and States Person Madeline Albright. Like so many civilians, she was eager to use our troops against one or another of our many, many enemies. So unsafe the world. Powell said, “no.” She said, “what’s the point of having all this military and not using it?” He said, “they are not toy soldiers.”
But in the interest of fighting communism we did spend trillions of dollars until we’re now threatening to sink under the weight of so much weaponry. Therefore I suppose that it was inevita-ble that sooner or later a new generation would get the bright idea, “why not stop fooling around with diplomacy and treaties and coalitions and just use our military power to give orders to the rest of the world?”
A year or two ago a pair of what they call “neo-conservatives” put forward this exact notion. I responded in print that if we did so, we would have not the world, but simply perpetual war for the perpetual idea of peace, which is not good for business. Then the Cheney-Bush junta came to power. Although primarily interested in oil re-serves, they liked the idea of playing soldiers too.
Last summer Congress received from the administration a document called “The National Security Strategy of the United States.” This must be read to be believed! The doctrine preaches the desirability of the United States becoming, to use Adams’ word, “dictatress of the world.” It also assumes that the President and his lieutenants are morally entitled to govern the planet. It declares that “our best defense is a good offense.” The doc-trine of preemption is next declared. “As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against emerging threats before they are fully formed.” Doubtless Attorney General Ashcroft is now in Utah arresting every Mormon male before he can kidnap eight young girls for potential wives…because he’s going to.
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States says that only Congress can de-clare war. But Congress surrendered that great power after Pearl Harbor and has never taken it back. And we suddenly have the noble but some-what ludicrous display of a bunch of Congress-men, including several very noble ones like Con-yers, having to go not to Congress, to the Legisla-tive branch, but to a federal court to bring action against the Administration for falsely creating a war, when only Congress may do so. Suddenly you begin to feel the game may be up.
But then an ex-Senator, thank God for ex-senator Simpson, you remember him, from Wyo-ming? He said very cheerily on TV the other night, he was condescending to George McGovern who was complaining about what the Administration was doing: “The people of the United States don’t declare war, the Commander-in-Chief does.” Of course he was born in England, but even so, he spent a lot of time in Wyoming. Or at least long enough to spend six years in Washington.
So in great matters we are not guided by law, but by faith in the President whose powerful Christian beliefs preach (some of you may know this line of scripture): “Real faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” What a wonderful banner.
In response to things not seen, the Patriot Act was rushed through Congress 45 days after 9-11. We are expected to believe that its carefully crafted 342 pages were written in this short time. Actually it reads like a continuation of Clinton’s post-Oklahoma City Anti-Terrorist Act.
The Patriot Act makes it possible for gov-ernment agents to break into anyone’s home when they are away, conduct a search and keep the citi-zen indefinitely from finding out that a warrant was issued. They can oblige librarians to tell them what books anyone has withdrawn. If the librarian refuses, he or she can be criminally charged. They can also collect your credit reports and other sensi-tive information without judicial approval or the citizen's consent.
Finally, all this un-Constitutional activity need not have the slightest connection with terror-ism. Early last month the Justice Department leaked Patriot Act II, known as "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act," dated January 9, 2003. A Congress which did not properly debate the first act will now be steamrollered by this law-less expansion. Some provisions: If an American citizen has been accused of supporting an organi-zation labeled “terrorist” by the government, he or she can be deprived of citizenship, even if they had no idea the organization had any link to terrorists. Provisions in Act II are also made for more searches and wiretaps without warrants, as well as--in Section 201--for secret arrests. In case a citizen tries to fight back in order to retain the citizenship he or she was born with, those federal agents who conduct un-Constitutional surveillance with the blessing of high administration officials are im-mune from legal action.
A native-born American deprived of citi-zenship would presumably be deported just like a foreign born person can be deported today. Also according to the recent ruling of the Federal court, this new power of the Attorney General is not sus-ceptible to judicial review. Since the American who has had his citizenship taken away cannot, of course, get a passport, the thoughtful devisors of Domestic Security Enhancement authorizes the Attorney General to deport him “to any country or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government.” Many of us might be grateful if there was such a place…
Difficult cases with no possible place to go can be held indefinitely. Where under Patriot Act I, only foreigners to our shores were denied due process of law as well as arbitrary deportation, Patriot Act II now includes American citizens in the same category, thus eliminating in one great erasure the Bill of Rights.
I have a coda here. Our greatest historian, Charles A. Beard, wrote in 1939 that “the destiny of Europe and Asia has not been committed under God to the keeping of the United States, and only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power or a desire to escape from our domestic perils and obligations (like Enron the way I see it), could possibly make us suppose that providence has appointed us His chosen people for the pacifi-cation of the Earth. Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic and Middle Eastern (I add) politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice; of adult thinking as dis-tinguished from infantilism. They intend to pre-serve and defend the republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.”
Thanks to Charlene Richards, Director of the Water-front Institute for Peace Studies, for her transcription of Gore Vidal's talk. And thanks to Heidi Zeller, Communi-cations Director of the UCLA Hammer Museum, which sponsored it with UCLAlive. This talk was part of a larger conversation with Laura Flanders.
Copyrights © 2003, Amass. All Rights Reserved
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