Lobstergirl's Full Review: Gore Vidal - Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: Ho...
Don’t be misled by the teasers on the back cover, which suggest that Osama bin Laden and 9/11 figure prominently in Gore Vidal’s book Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace: “In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed too controversial to be published in America until now), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following both 9/11 and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Okalahoma City [that] these were simply the acts of ‘evil-doers.’” The essays (published previously in Vanity Fair and The Nation) may be both penetrating and alarming, but with the exception of a comparatively brief introduction, they all predate the events of 9/11 and the book’s main subjects by a long shot are McVeigh and the dismantling of the Bill of Rights.. The title, which might lead one to think this is largely a book about the ramifications of our foreign policy, is also somewhat misleading. (The link is that both bin Laden and McVeigh acted out of rage at “our government’s reckless assaults upon other societies as we pursued….’perpetual war for perpetual peace’.”) I have to say that I put the book down feeling a little cheated.
And a little perturbed by sentences like “With both bin Laden and McVeigh, I thought it useful to describe the various provocations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts.” I want to give Vidal every benefit of the doubt here, but language like this comes uncomfortably close to a justification for terrorism.
Vidal is right to poke holes in the Bush administration’s public relations efforts to characterize Osama. We are told by the PR machine that Osama and his ilk acted out of hatred for the freedoms that we enjoy in America, when really it has a lot more to do with the presence of American troops (infidels) in Saudi Arabia (holy ground), and American military support of Israel. But calling either of these a “provocation” sidesteps the fairly critical points that our troops entered Saudi Arabia at the behest of King Fahd, and that without American financial support Israel’s enemies would likely crush it into dust motes. (Vidal brings up the Saudi “provocation”, but doesn’t mention Israel.) And stating that these actions “drove” al-Qaeda to terrorism suggests a certain lack of agency on its part, as if the policies of the United States government, rather than a bunch of hate-filled murderers, sat behind the wheel.
Vidal wraps up the foreign policy chapter with a list of every single U.S. military and anti-drug operation from the Berlin Airlift through Kosovo in order to demonstrate our imperial overreach, noting that we usually struck the first blow. The list certainly demonstrates a kind of Successories hollowness on the part of whatever Pentagon employee names these operations (Provide Promise, Support Justice, Decisive Enhancement, Noble Anvil, Cobalt Flash, Wipeout, Bevel Edge – wait a minute, they sound more like PowerPoint features), but I for one need a lot more evidence before I’m willing to call this “seedy” imperialism as Vidal does.
Vidal is wont to go off on conspiracy tangents. Have you heard about Opus Dei? It’s the secretive, nebulous Roman Catholic order supposedly dedicated to getting its members into high political, corporate and religious offices. Former FBI director Louis Freeh is a member, and none other than FBI agent and convicted mega-spy Robert Hanssen belonged to the same Opus Dei chapter in suburban Virginia. This secret sect “also can now count on the good offices of at least two members of the Supreme Court.” How’s that? Well, Justice Scalia is not a member of Opus Dei, but his wife Maureen has attended some of the order’s spiritual functions, and their son, a priest, helped convert Justice Clarence Thomas to Catholicism. Thomas now gives fiery speeches at the American Enterprise Institute praising the Pope “for taking unpopular stands.” Well, if I wasn’t convinced before that the upper echelons of our government have been completely infiltrated by supersecret Papists, I am now.
There’s also a piece Vidal wrote for The Nation called The New Theocrats stuck in here for some reason. Its ostensible purpose is to attack a peevish Wall Street Journal editorial about the decline of morals, but Vidal uses this as a launching pad for such wacky propositions as revoking the tax exempt status of all religions and such ludicrous religion-bashing as the assertion that Baptists are as absurd and mischievous as Scientologists.
Vidal followed the McVeigh trial in a haphazard fashion until the sentencing phase, when McVeigh quoted from Supreme Court Justice Brandeis’ dissent in Olmstead to the effect that the government is the teacher of the nation; when the government breaks laws it sets an example that teaches lawbreaking and anarchy. In 1998 Vidal wrote a piece for Vanity Fair called “Shredding the Bill of Rights”, which McVeigh read on death row. He wrote Vidal a letter and the two struck up a correspondence. McVeigh invited Vidal to witness his execution (Vidal says he couldn’t make it because the attorney general hadn’t given him enough time to get from his home in Italy to Terre Haute, Indiana).
The piece covers a litany of rights abuses – drug testing, IRS and DEA property seizures, airport body searches. It contains the rather incendiary sentence, “Although our rulers have revived the word [terrorist] to describe violent enemies of the United States, most of today’s actual terrorists can be found within our own governments, federal, state, municipal.” Who are these terrorist bureaucrats? Pick an acronym and you’re sure to unearth some: the ATF, DEA, FBI, and IRS.
We learn some pretty interesting stuff about McVeigh from a secondary source, journalist Richard Serrano’s book One of Ours. Much decorated as an infantryman in Desert Storm, he found the war an eye-opening experience. Saddam, the Iraqis, and Arabs in general had been so demonized in the media that McVeigh was shocked to discover “they are normal like me and you. They hype you to take these people out…..war woke me up.” He wrote to a friend, “We’ve got these starving kids and sometimes adults coming up to us begging for food….It’s really ‘trying’ emotionally…..The sooner we leave here the better.” Serrano wrote that by the end of the war, “McVeigh had learned that he did not like the taste of killing innocent people. He spat into the sand at the thought of being forced to hurt others who did not hate him any more than he them.” The government assault on Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians, formative events for McVeigh, followed. In 1995, the man who found killing innocent people abhorrent went out and killed 168 innocent people.
Vidal’s beef is with the media, who he claims could only sing a one-note song, that McVeigh was a man “of incredible innate evil [who] wanted to destroy innocent lives for no reason other than a spontaneous joy in evildoing…it was ordained that McVeigh was to have no coherent motive for what he had done other than a Shakespearean motiveless malignity.” When Vidal did a remote interview with Charlie Gibson of Good Morning America, the mere mention of Waco caused Gibson to “hyperventilate”, and suddenly he feigned problems with the audio and cut off Vidal. Vidal claims this happened on several occasions with other media outlets; only Greta Van Susteren of CNN responded that two wrongs don’t make a right. Vidal agreed with her, but opined that three wrongs – killing McVeigh – was not an improvement (perhaps true, but missing the larger point).
My sense is that Vidal finds McVeigh noble as he faces death. He achieves a “stoic serenity” that qualifies him as a “Henley-style hero.” (Henley is the 19th century poet whose poem “Invictus” McVeigh used in lieu of a final statement.) He took responsibility for what he had done, but declined to express remorse. “He was a soldier in a war not of his making” – which, really, sounds more like not taking full responsibility. Vidal tells us again and again that McVeigh saw himself at war with the government. It’s a lot more interesting to hear it from the horse’s mouth. The media saw “the events of April 1995” – as McVeigh dispassionately refers to his carnage – as a simple act of revenge for Waco, while McVeigh viewed his act as a counterattack against a series of government raids, assaults, and violence, more Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor. His attack on the Murrah Federal Building was intended as a preemptive strike against the ATF and other forces located there to stave off further violence. The bombing, he tells Vidal,
was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option……The bombing…was not personal no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against (foreign) government installations and their personnel.
He signs off one letter to Vidal:
‘Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.’ – H.L. Mencken.
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