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

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Tag Archives: tyranny

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

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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

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The Defense of Freedom and Peace

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics, Speeches, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Churchill, conflict, democracy, dictatorship, Freedom, Hitler, Nazis, Nazism, The Defense of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out), tyranny, War, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Winston Churchill

“Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and enforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law.’ Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honor and health upon the State.

People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armory of potent and indestructible knowledge?”

__________

From Winston Churchill’s speech “The Defense of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, delivered on October 16th, 1938. You’ll find it in the essential collection of Winston’s best speeches Churchill: The Power of Words.

Winston Churchill

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