The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

June 5, 2002


save me


furious idiocies among humans and their gatherings: particles are pried
apart and recombined, the world festers. charred remains in the honor of
gods. we shall be no more. i beg you in the name of gods, inscribe my work
in iron, bury it deep, etch it in steel and titanium, coat it against all
possible futures, remove it from the virtual. i beg you: make my work
real::the heat of the near-future melting wires amidst nuclear explosions,
suicide bombers, storms and lightnings, the destructions of languages and
bodies, desert ecologies rampant down to barren aa melt. humans control
humans; chemical catastrophe at the top down through radiations blinding
and charring animals. sun and moon topple with damaged eyes. viral
particles fly apart; bacteria shudder above ground. all is well in the
cracked subterranean rock strata; dull life moves on as the surface rains
down.:yes, the end of the world in every way, shape, and form: every
ideology, object, and structure. it will come imminent and immanent. of
virtuality let it be said, nothing shall survive. incandescent rock and
earth, lavas and obsidians of forgetting, shall glance across barren
plains, uttering their own inscriptive tallies in the violent suns and
nuclear winters. prepare, prepare. save my work, my texts and images, my
video and sound, above all: download, download, before it is too late.::
inscribe.


_

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 11:08:58 +0100
From: John Armitage <john.armitage@UNN.AC.UK>
Reply-To: The Cyber-Society-Live mailing list is a moderated discussion
    list for those interested <CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
To: CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [CSL]: Gore Vidal, The End of Liberty

[Appreciated this piece by Vidal on 9/11. John.]
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.indexonline.org/news/202_20020426_vidal.shtml
Gore Vidal
The end of liberty

Shortly before the twin tower disaster, Vanity Fair commissioned a piece
from their favourite author, Gore Vidal. It was returned with a kill fee
sometime after 11 September for 'market reasons'. It had, however, already
been published in a collection of Vidal's essays by Fazi Editore in Italy
under the title La fine della libert�: verso una nuova totalitarianismo.
According to the Qoran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness.
Last 11 September, 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 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.
Also, like so many of those born to wealth, Osama is not one to throw money
about. Apparently, the airline tickets of the 19 known dead hijackers were
paid through a credit card. I suspect that United and American Airlines will
never be reimbursed by American Express whose New York offices Osama -
inadvertently? - hit.
On the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, a passenger telephoned out to say
that he and a dozen or so other men - several of them athletes - were going
to attack the hijackers. 'Let's roll!' he shouted. A scuffle. A scream.
Silence. But the plane, allegedly aimed at the White House, ended up in a
field near Pittsburgh.
We have always had wise and brave civilians. It is the military and the
politicians and the media that one frets about. After all, we have not
encountered suicide bombers since the Kamikazes, as we called them in the
Pacific where I was idly a soldier in World War II. Japan was the enemy
then. Now, bin Laden... The Muslims... The Pakistanis... Step in line.
The telephone rings. A distraught voice from the United States.
'Berry Berenson's dead. She was on Flight...'
The world was getting surreal. Arabs. Plastic knives. The beautiful Berry.
What on earth did any of these elements have in common other than an
unexpected appointment in Samarra with that restless traveller Death?
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 7 December 1941?
No, it's not, I say. As far as we now know, we had no warning of last
Tuesday's attack. Of course, our government has many, many secrets which 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 demonisation 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 other than to accuse others of motiveless
malignity.
'We are good,' announced a deep-thinker on American television. 'They are
evil,' which wraps that one up in a neat package. But it was Bush himself
who 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 all of us somewhere over
the Belt-way - his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: 'They hate
what they see right here in this Chamber.'
A million Americans nodded 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 Americans' gorge did not rise like a Florida
chad to the bait? Should the 44-year-old Saudi-Arabian, bin Laden be the
prime mover, we know surprisingly little about him. We can assume that he
favours the Palestinians in their uprising against the European- and
American-born Israelis, intent, many of them, on establishing a theocratic
state in what was to have been a common holy land for Jews, Muslims and
Christians.
But if Osama ever wept tears for Arafat, they have left little trace. So why
does he and millions of other Muslims hate us?
Let us deal first with the six foot seven inch Osama who 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
is anti-Infidel in the land of the Prophet. 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 specialised in building palaces for the Saudi royal family. That
company is now worth several billion dollars, presumably shared by Osama's
54 brothers and sisters. Although he speaks perfect English, he was entirely
educated at the Saudi capital, Jeddah, he has never travelled outside the
Arabian Peninsula. Several siblings live in the Boston area and give large
sums to Harvard.
We are told that much of his family appears to have disowned him while many
of his assets in the Saudi kingdom have been frozen. Where does Osama's
money now come from? He is a superb fund-raiser for Allah but only within
the Arab world; contrary to legend, he has taken no CIA money. He is also a
superb organiser within Afghanistan.
In 1988, he warned the Saudi king that Saddam Hussein was going to invade
Kuwait. Osama assumed that after his own victories as a guerilla 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 sands 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.
Osama persuaded 4,000 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 12-page 'declaration of war', Osama presented himself as
potential liberator of the Muslim world from the great Satan of modern
corruption, the United States.
When Clinton lobbed a missile at a Sudanese aspirin factory, Osama blew up
two of our embassies in Africa, put a hole in the side of an American
war-ship off Yemen, and so on to the events of Tuesday, 11 September . Now
President George W Bush, in retaliation, has promised us not only a 'new
war' but a secret war.
That is, not secret to Osama but only to us who pay for and fight it.
'This administration will not talk about any plans we may or may not have,'
said Bush. 'We're going to find these evil-doers... and we're going to hold
them accountable' along with the other devils who have given Osama shelter
in order to teach them the one lesson that we ourselves have never been able
to learn: in history, as in physics, there is no action without re-action.
Or, as Edward S Herman puts it, 'One of the most durable features of the
U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognise US crimes.'
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 Hekal,
Nasser's chief adviser. Nasser himself was not to be seen. He was at the
Barricade, his retreat on the Nile. Later, I found out that a plot to murder
him had just failed and he was in well-guarded seclusion.
Heikal spoke perfect English; he was sardonic, cynical. 'We are studying the
Qoran for hints on birth control.' He sighed. '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.'
Hekal was a spiritual son of our Eighteenth Century Enlightenment. I thought
of Hekal on Dark Tuesday when one of his modernised Arab generation had, in
the name of Islam, struck at what had been, 40 years earlier, Nasser's model
for a modern state.
Yet Osama seemed, from all accounts, no more than a practising, 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
Wahhabi 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 give-away. In the eyes of many Muslims, the Christian
West, currently in alliance with Zionism, has for 1,000 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 Iraqi Kurd
[born in Takrit in what is now Iraq]. 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 a vengeance.
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 civilised nations subscribe - like the Kyoto Accords or
the nuclear missile agreement with Russia.
As 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 war, 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.
Latest Bushism to the world, '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% 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
which 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-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act,
a so-called 'conference bill' in which many grubby hands played a part
including the bill's co-sponsor Senate Majority leader Bob 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 Anti-Terrorism legislation which 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-and-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of 'generalists',
trained in law and accounting into a confrontational 'Special Weapons and
Tactics' (aka SWAT) Green Beret style army of warriors who like to dress up
in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, the odd
ski mask.
In the early 80s an FBI super-SWAT team, the Hostage 270 Rescue Team was
formed. As so often happens in United States-speak, this group specialised
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 82 of them, including 25 children.
This was 1993.
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 over-heated Bush post-Tuesday?
Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are
now 'at war' with Osama and that those parts of the Muslim world that
support him, should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps.
Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our
smouldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a phrase? 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 it was the mean-spirited Washington Post
that pointed out, under US case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of
radicals, can commit an 'act of war'. Good try, 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% 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% said they
thought, 'It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their
personal freedoms.' 86% favoured guards and metal detectors at public
buildings and events.
Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfield 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 he 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 US-imposed poverty, to dismiss Castro a
half-century ago, whose only crime is 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 13 September, 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 OK 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 silly-billy 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
favour of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday's
darkness by understanding its origin while ceasing our provocations of
cultures opposed to us and our arrangements. Lewis, unusually, for a New
York Times writer, favours 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
favour of an 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 (17 September 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 civilised 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 US 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 dramatised by Aeschylus in
The 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
smoulder 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
us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knock-out blow to our
vanishing liberties - the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 combined with the
recent request to Congress for additional special powers to wire-tap without
judicial order; to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors and
undocumented immigrants without due process and so on.
Even that loyal company town paper the Washington Post is alarmed: '.Justice
Department is making extraordinary use of its powers to arrest and detain
individuals, taking the unusual step of jailing hundreds of people on minor
... violations. The lawyers and legal scholars... said they could not recall
a time when so many people had been arrested and held without bond on
charges - particularly minor charges - related to the case at hand.'
This is pre-Osama: '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. 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 NYT-CBS poll notes that only 6% now oppose military action
while a substantial majority favour war 'even if many thousands of innocent
civilians are killed'. Most of this majority are far too young to recall
World War II, Korea, even Vietnam. Simultaneously, Bush's approval rating
has soared from the around 50% to 91%.
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 the handsome Barbara Bush's look-alike, George Washington,
by adding two strings of Teclas to his limestone neck, in memoriam, as it
were. Finally, [DQ] 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 VJ Day 1945 ('Victory
over Japan' and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the
great historian Charles A Beard called 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'.
I have occasionally referred to our 'enemy of the month club': each month 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) to
Berlin Airlift (1948-49) <20020502_vidal_table.htm>. 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 which
General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the
Provincetown police department.
In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or
sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001,
we always struck the first blow
Links:
Gore Vidal's scorebook of American military involvement around the world
since 1945 <20020502_vidal_table.htm>.
Vidal's latest book, in which this essay will appear, is The Last Empire.

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