• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Gore Vidal

Rioting in Understatement

22 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American History, Gore Vidal, Government, Henry Clay, Isolationism, politics, Speeches, State of the Union

“The two parties, which are really one party, cannot be put to use. They are the country’s ownership made carnival. Can the united action of individual citizens regain some control over government? I think so. But it won’t be easy, to riot in understatement. Attempts to cut back the war budget — whether the war be against communism or drugs or us — will be fought with great resourcefulness. When challenged with the billions of dollars wasted or stolen from the Pentagon, the establishment politician’s answer is clear: Abortion is against God’s law. He promptly changes the subject, the way a magician does when he catches your attention with one hand while the other picks your pocket…

Our political debate — what little there is — can never speak of the future except in terms of the past. I shall, therefore, present a formula to restore the Republic by moving boldly forward into the past. I wish to invoke the spirit of Henry Clay. Thanks to our educational system, no one knows who he is, but for political purposes he can be first explained, then trotted out as a true America Firster who felt that it was the task of government to make internal improvements, to spend money on education and on the enlargement of the nation’s economic plant… This does not seem to me to be too ambitious a program.”

__________

Pulled from Gore Vidal’s classic “Notes on Our Patriarchal State,” which is taken from his “State of the Union” speech from 1990 (embedded below). To get the full effect, flash forward to minute twenty-six and listen to this section. The text can be found in his collection Gore Vidal’s State of the Union.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Russia’s Hero-less History

09 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Russia’s Hero-less History

Tags

Anatoly Zhigulin, Anne Applebaum, British Spectator, Checka, Cold War, Gore Vidal, Gulag, Gulag: A History, Hannah Arendt, Soviet Union, Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, Vladimir Putin

Russian flag world war two

“[H]alf a century after the end of World War II, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims’ compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia because the memory of the past was not a living part of the public discourse.

Years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families.

But there are reasons for the profound silence. Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel — but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad…

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively — the students like Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, and Anatoly Zhigulin; the leaders of the Gulag rebellions and uprisings; the dissidents, from Sakharov to Bukovsky to Orlov — ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ literature — tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps — should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

But in the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Thus we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long; we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is…

Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy,’ as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why — and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”

Anne Applebaum

__________

Excerpted from Anne Applebaum’s powerful, seminal work Gulag: A History.

These reflections, pulled from the book’s final chapter, clearly have broad political implications right now, 12 years after Gulag was first published. During last year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, I was struck by how little reference was made to the Soviet Union in general and its cultural history in particular, as well as by how much of that scant attention was mere metaphor — an animated hammer and sickle or War and Peace reference whizzing by on the jumbotron.

There was during the closing ceremony a tribute to Russia’s writers, a lineup, perhaps the strongest of any modern country, which was paraded out as if each had been lionized by the state all along. Thirteen total were honored, including Dostoevsky (censored; forced into hard labor in Siberia), Pushkin (exiled), Gogol (exiled), Turgenev (exiled), Vladimir Mayakovsky (repression; suicide), Anna Akhmatova (censored), Marina Tsvetaeva (exiled; suicide), Joseph Brodsky (exiled), Mikhail Bulgakov (censored), and Solzhenitsyn (Gulag). Only two of them — Tolstoy and Chekhov — were able to live in their home country and use a pen without state retribution.

Go deeper into Russia:

  • Applebaum reveals the sentence Putin said that horrified her
  • How nice of a father was Stalin? (hint: not very)
  • Go inside Vladimir Lenin’s surreal last days

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Gore Vidal: I Always Thought Lincoln Was Wrong

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: I Always Thought Lincoln Was Wrong

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, C-Span, Gore Vidal, interview, speech, State of the Union, William H. Seward

Abraham Lincoln color

“I always thought Lincoln was wrong. I always thought the South had every right to go. If Lincoln had a high moral purpose — which has now been invented for him, posthumously, the abolition of slavery — I’d say, well it’s illegal but it’s morally worthy.

He was not interested in freeing the slaves. He was interested in the preservation of the union and power and centralization. He turned to the Constitution and said I have no right to free the slaves, no constitutional right.

When he finally did get around to a degree of emancipation, he did it entirely under military necessity. I think he made a great mistake.

If I had been around at the time, I think I would have been for [Secretary of State William H.] Seward, who said let the South go. He called them the ‘Mosquito Republics,’ and asked ‘What are they going to do?’. They have two crops: cotton and tobacco. They’ve got no place to go. We’re getting all this immigration. We’re going to seize Canada one day. Let’s take over Mexico and Central America — he was extremely ambitious — and the South will come back. They’ll be knocking on the door. Why kill 600,000 young men for a notion of the union, which nobody had thought much of before then?”

__________

Gore Vidal, responding to a question about whether his favorite theory of government — that of devolution, where power is drawn outward to states and localities — contradicted the principles fought for by our 16th president.

Unsurprisingly, one of Vidal’s most acclaimed books, Lincoln: A Novel, shatters the saintly Lincoln death mask to reveal a man unrelentingly political, beset by personal and marital hang ups, and often unsure of even minor decisions in office. It’s a compelling portraiture, one you won’t find in the National Gallery.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

They’re Supposed to Be Awful

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American History, American Politics, C-Span, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gore Vidal, politicians, Q&A, State of the Union, State of the United States

Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley

Questioner: Was there more civility among politicians in the early years of the Republic?

Gore Vidal: Well that’s not what they’re there for. Civility among politicians is oxymoronic – they’re supposed to be awful. And that’s part of the fun of it; if they’re going to talk about real issues and they care about real issues, then they get to really hate each other and they talk rather savagely.

In past generations, they could actually talk. As opposed to politicians today, they could actually speak without reading – hesitantly – a speech somebody else had written for them.

As I once said of General Eisenhower: he always read his speeches with a sense of real discovery. He was terribly interested in some of things he was reading. There was a great moment during the campaign of ’52, when he said, ‘And, if elected President, I will go to… Korea!’ And he went. Nobody’d told him. And he had to go.

__________

From the question and answer section of Gore Vidal’s “State of the United States” speech, given in November 1994.

More from Vidal…

  • on what ‘pursuit of happiness’ means today
  • on drug legalization
  • on Ayn Rand
  • on Bush’s prophetic Second Inaugural
  • on the surveillance state and imperial presidency

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Gore Vidal Obliterates Ayn Rand

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal Obliterates Ayn Rand

Tags

Ayn Rand, Esquire Magazine, ethics, Gore Vidal, Jesus, Karl Marx, morality, Philosophy, political philosophy

Gore Vidal

“She is fighting two battles: the first, against the idea of the State being anything more than a police force and a judiciary to restrain people from stealing each other’s money openly… But it is Miss Rand’s second battle that is the moral one. She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ… Now I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon ‘I’ is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action.

Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.”

__________

Gore Vidal, writing a comment in Esquire in July 1961. You can check out Vidal’s supremely erudite, always entertaining cuts in United States: Essays 1952-1992.

More Gore:

  • A compelling case for decriminalizing drug use
  • What does ‘pursuit of happiness’ mean today?
  • What ancient Rome tells us about NSA spying

Ayn Rand

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “1 Corinthians 13″ by Spencer Reece

Tags

1 Corinthians 13, First Corinthians, Gore Vidal, Mark Jarman, Paul, Poems, Poet, poetry, Spencer Reece, T.S. Eliot, The Clerk's Tale, The New Yorker, Writing

Irish Coast

How long do we wait for love?
Long ago, we rowed on a pond.
Our oars left the moon broken—
our gestures ruining the surface.
Our parents wanted us to marry.
Beyond the roses where we lay,
men who loved men grew wounds.
When do we start to forget our age?
Your husband and I look the same.
All day, your mother confuses us
as her dementia grows stronger.
Your boys yell: Red Rover!
We whisper your sister’s name
like librarians; at last on the list,
her heart clapping in her rib cage,
having stopped now six times,
the pumps opened by balloons,
we await her new heart cut
out from the chest of a stranger.
Your old house settles in its bones,
pleased by how we are arranged.
Our shadow grows like an obituary.
One of us says: “It is getting so dark.”
Your children end their game.
Trees stiffen into scrapbooks.
The sky’s shelves fill with stars.

__________

“1 Corinthians 13” by Spencer Reece.

I can’t understand Spencer Reece. His CV: Born in Hartford, Connecticut; Master of Theology, Harvard; Master of Divinity, Yale; Missionary to the Nuestras Pequenas Rosas orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Missionary to the homeless and ordained priest of the Episcopal Church in Madrid, Spain; Manager of a Brooks Brothers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

It’s that last bit which is, as Gore Vidal would say, the joker in the deck. French cuffs and Windsor knots hardy pair with homeless shelters and Honduran slums. But then again, rarely does religious poetry move with such a frantic, almost manic, energy, so perhaps Reece is capable of registering and giving voice to an usually wide spectrum of human experience. I once wrote, in a stroke of mild hyperbole, that Mark Jarman (a reader of this blog and my favorite living religious poet) wrote like T.S. Eliot in a fever dream. There is certainly something feverish to “1 Corinthians 13” as well, though Reece seems to be less in a reverie and more in a careful though entranced plod through the wilderness of memory.

When I first found it, I was so moved by this poem that I reread it about six times and immediately ordered the containing collection, Reece’s The Road to Emmaus. I think this poem is the strongest in the book, though Emmaus also contains “The Clerk’s Tale”, a poem so intricate and strangely stirring that The New Yorker, in an unprecedented editorial move, devoted a full back page to it. Oh yeah, and, coincidentally, it’s about a guy who works at a men’s clothier at the Mall of America in Minnesota. I suggest you give it a slow and careful read.

By the way, in the 13th chapter of his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul says, among other things:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing…

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

I took the above picture in Ireland.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

Tags

American Founding, American History, Bill of Rights, Conservativism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Freedom, Gore Vidal, Government, Law, liberty, Life, Patriarchy, political philosophy, politics, Pursuit of Happiness, Speeches, State of the Union, The Nation, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny

Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Original Sin and Future War

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Speeches, War

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan war, Andrew Bacevich, army, battle, Breach of Trust, casualties, Chris Hedges, conflict, Dexter Filkins, Gore Vidal, Government, Iraq War, Journalism, Los Angeles Times, Memorial Day, Military, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, politics, War

Andrew Bacevich

Questioner: I have a bumper stick on my car that says, “War is not the answer”… But of course the question is, if war is not the answer, what is the answer?

Andrew Bacevich: I’m actually a conservative. Look… let me cut to the chase: as a Catholic, I believe in original sin. I think that we are, in our nature, fundamentally flawed. And that peace, probably, is beyond our capacity to achieve. Therefore, to my mind, a more modest goal is more realistic: to minimize the occurrence of war, except in those circumstances when the highest values are at risk and there is no alternative but to resort to violence in order to defend those ideals. And even then, always, always, always to be cognizant of the fact that war occurs in the realm of chance, and that the consequences that will stem from war will defy your imagination.

So, therefore, one needs to be extraordinarily cautious, careful, and wary. And… especially since the end of the Cold War, we as a people — and in particular our political leaders in Washington — have entirely lost sight of these historical realities. They’re far too casual about going to war; they’re oblivious to the adverse consequences. They work on the most optimistic assumptions — that it’s going to be easy, that it’s going to be cheap, that once you achieve some goal you set for yourself, all other problems will vanish.

And so, from a conservative’s perspective, I say, “No, there’s no reason to think along those terms.” And therefore, we should be cautious, and again minimize rather than expect to eliminate armed conflict.

__________

West Point graduate, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, speaking during the Q&A portion of a recent panel on how the wounded come back from war. Below, watch a short clip of Bacevich testifying before Congress in 2009.

In 2010, Bacevich wrote a morally flawless piece in the Los Angeles Times that was published on Memorial Day, three years to the month of his son’s death while serving in Afghanistan. Bacevich summoned Americans to regard that day not as a holiday heralding the start of summer, but as a moment in which we solemnly memorialize fellow citizens who have come home draped in American flags. Let the article’s penultimate paragraph detonate in your mind:

How exactly did we get ourselves in such a fix, engaged in never-ending wars that we cannot win and cannot afford? Is the ineptitude of our generals the problem? Or is it the folly of our elected rulers? Or could it perhaps be our own lazy inattention? Rather than contemplating the reality of what American wars, past or present, have wrought, we choose to look away, preferring the beach, the ballgame and the prospect of another summer.

This issue of how our society processes its role in armed conflict, and armed conflict’s role in world affairs, is becoming something of a preoccupation of mine. Now that a half dozen of my friends have seen deployments and my brother-in-law has been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, I have come to see their valor as fundamentally travestied by the quixotic missions for which they bravely sacrificed. More embarrassing, however, is the craven egotism of a society which has sacrificed nothing for the cause, leaving the immediate burden to a mercenary army and the bill to generations who were not alive when the war began.

As someone born the year the Cold War ended, I’ve now lived half my life as a citizen of “a country at war,” and I can remember skimming (when I was thirteen) Gore Vidal’s 2002 anti-imperial polemic Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. I loathed almost every page of Vidal’s cynical, careless screed, but I loved the title. It was so prescient, though the war’s peace would materialize most conspicuously in the minds of a civilian populace of which I am a part.

In the next week, I am going to publish a short reflection on Sebastian Junger’s tour de force WAR. In the meantime, I recommend watching Bacevich on how the wounded come home as well as reading his searing book Breach of Trust. If you are looking for more journalistic takes on our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, check out Dexter Filkin’s The Forever War or Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

Andrew J. Bacevich

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Gore Vidal’s Hilarious, Prophetic Rebuttal to Bush’s Second Inaugural

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics, War

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan war, American History, Amy Goodman, Athens, Babylon, democracy, Democracy Now, DemocracyNow, Dick Cheney, Dreaming War: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, foreign policy, founding fathers, George W. Bush, George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Address, George Washington, Gore Vidal, Imperialism, Iraq War, James Madison, John Quincey Adams, Occupation, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Sparta, The Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny, War

Gore Vidal

President George W. Bush, speaking at his second inauguration: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited; but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause…”

Interviewer: Gore Vidal, your response to these words?

Gore Vidal: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There’s not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be free,” et cetera, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” and in the process “She would lose her soul.” That is the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe.

He doesn’t define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them. That’s the reaction in Europe — and I know we mustn’t mention them because they’re immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese — but, simultaneously, they’re much better educated than we are, and they’re richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won’t be any money left of any kind…

And none of this we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion: two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that…

President George W. Bush

__________

A selection from Gore Vidal’s critiques of President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, which were recorded this week in 2005.

I’ve uploaded a recording of the rest of Vidal’s brilliant, biting response below. It’s relevant and worth a watch even today.

As we now watch President Obama deliver this year’s State of the Union, almost 9 long years to the day since Bush uttered those words, it’s worth reflecting on how little has changed.

The War in Afghanistan, with it’s unprecedented 82% disapproval rate, is almost as unpopular as the Congress which kind of, sort of, almost authorized it. Still, we’re spending about $400 million there each day. Meanwhile, as I walk a block from my downtown apartment in America’s beautiful capital city, I see schools moldering and potholes flecking every street. (That 400,000,000, by the way, does not include the additional $130 million which we are daily funneling into Iraq, nor does it account for the $5.5 to $8.4 billion which we will spend annually to care for our veterans from both wars over the next three, four, five decades.)

Our Constitutional liberties remain largely ignored (much less restored) by a burgeoning surveillance state which, a decade later, is yet to make a single arrest that has prevented a terrorist attack. There are now over a million names on our terrorist watch list: a hay stack that, as it distends, obscures the few needles hiding inside it. Correspondingly, a million people now hold “top secret clearance” to access classified government information — a label fit for the gruesome world of Winston Smith and farcical enough for Peter Sellers or the President of Faber College. It took one in a million — Mr. Edward Snowden — to finally reveal what this unelected, unmonitored, and undomesticated appendage of the federal government was doing with our money and to us and our allies (in Brazil, in Germany, in South Korea), but he, like other whistle-blowers under this administration, was hardly honored for that act of conscience. While his stand has produced some valuable backlash against these security developments, the direction of their momentum remains unchanged; as the surveillance state becomes more opaque to us, we become more transparent to it.

Of course tonight’s pageantry is amounting to little more than a string of platitudes, but nevertheless, it is worth hoping that the coming days will reflect a glimmer of the promise that we are turning away from the imperial and the tyrannical, and turning towards Constitutionality at home and diplomacy abroad.

President Barack Obama

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Eager for Slavery

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Eager for Slavery

Tags

Augustus, Barack Obama, Caligula, Freedom, George W. Bush, Gore Vidal, history, politics, PRISM, Rome, slavery, the Patriot Act, The Roman empire, Tiberius, US-984XN

Tiberius“The only Roman emperor I wholeheartedly admire is Tiberius.

He was a brilliant politician, a brilliant administrator, a man of state and of the people. He was somebody who was meant to govern the Roman Empire. When Augustus died, or was murdered, Tiberius became emperor, as the succession was working then. And immediately the Senate and people of Rome sent him an overall mandate, a carte blanche, saying that to anything he proposed — as the emperor living on the Palatine hill — they would automatically concur and accept. He was already a semi-divinity in their eyes. That had started with the death of Augustus who had been deified…

And I found out what Tiberius’s response had been to the Senate. He sent back a message — because they were very upset that he didn’t respond immediately with a million thanks — that said, ‘I cannot accept this blanket compliance with anything that might come from me on Palatine Hill here. Suppose that I go mad, or mad with power, or corrupt. Suppose there has been a coup in the palace and somebody else is in charge and you don’t know about it. Would you still want the word of the emperor to be automatic law?’

And they sent back word, ‘Yes, Tiberius. You are the law, all power is with you. Everything that you send us will be accepted and then made law.’ Well, he sent it back with the same objections.

They went on and on for about three or four times and he was getting nowhere with the Senate and they were getting above their station which he was quick to remind them: it would be his decision and his decision was no. After all, they lived through despots just before he came to the throne. Did they want that again? And they said, ‘We beg you, great emperor,’ and so on. He realized he was getting nowhere with them and he said, ‘I accept your folly but I can only make one obiter dicta. And that is how eager you are to be slaves.’

That to me is the United States today: eager for slavery.”

Gore Vidal

__________

Gore Vidal, speaking in response to a prompting about the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001.

The recent exposure of the Obama administration’s clandestine data collection apparatus, called US-984XN, or PRISM, would have (I’m sure) inspired Vidal — with his characteristic venom and vitriol — to bring up the case of Tiberius one more time. It was one of the anecdotes he reached for most often, and one which should be on our minds today.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Who Turned the Page?

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Personal, Poetry

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Bible, Biography, College, Emile Zola, Genesis, Gore Vidal, graduation, Ian Hamilton, Old Testament, Poem, poetry, The City and the Pillar, university

Seagull in Ireland

Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?

__________

Biography by Ian Hamilton.

As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.

My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar.  It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.

In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)

And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?

The picture was taken in County Kerry, Ireland.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
    Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
  • Martin Luther King on Conquering Self-Centeredness
    Martin Luther King on Conquering Self-Centeredness
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin
  • The Mountaintop: Martin Luther King's Final Speech
    The Mountaintop: Martin Luther King's Final Speech

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: