Only in America could he be seen as a leftist

Weekend Edition
September 25-7, 2009

Reflections on the Degradation of Politics and the Ecosystem

Is Obama a Socialist?

By ROBERT JENSEN // [print_link]

Corrupt GOP pols like Eric Cantor cynically spread the confusing lies that agitate a clueless population.

For months, leftists have been pointing out the absurdity of the claim that Barack Obama is a socialist. But no matter how laughable, the claim keeps popping up, most recently in the form of the Republican Party chairman’s warning of “a socialist power grab” by Democrats.

Within the past year, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” Conservative economist Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University has acknowledged that Obama isn’t really a socialist, but warns that the “socialism lite” of such politicians “is as specious as is classic socialism.”

Silly as all this may be, it does provide an opportunity to continue talking about the promise and the limits of socialism in a moment when the economic and ecological crises are so serious. So, let’s start with the basics.

Obama has never argued for such principles, and in fact consistently argues against them, as do virtually all politicians who are visible in mainstream U.S. politics. This is hardly surprising, given the degree to which our society is dominated by corporations, the primary institution through which capitalism operates.

Obama is not only not a socialist, he’s not even a particularly progressive capitalist. He is part of the neo-liberal camp that has undermined the limited social-democratic character of the New Deal consensus, which dominated in the United States up until the so-called “Reagan revolution.” While Obama’s stimulus plan was Keynesian in nature, there is nothing in administration policy to suggest he is planning to move to the left in any significant way. The crisis in the financial system provided such an opportunity, but Obama didn’t take it and instead continued the transfer of wealth to banks and other financial institutions begun by Bush. Looking at his economic advisers, this is hardly surprising. Naming neo-liberal Wall Street boys such as Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury and Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council was a clear signal to corporate America that the Democrats would support the existing distribution of power and wealth. And that’s where his loyalty has remained.

In reaction to the issues of the day, a socialist would fight to nationalize the banks, create a national health system, and end imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the right wing can accuse Obama of being a socialist when he does none of those things is one indication of how impoverished and dramatically skewed to the right our politics has become. In most of the civilized world, discussions of policies based in socialist principles are part of the political discourse, while here they are bracketed out of any serious debate. In a recent conversation with an Indonesian journalist, I did my best to explain all this, but she remained perplexed. How can people take seriously the claim that he’s socialist, and why does applying that label to a policy brand it irrelevant? I shrugged. “Welcome to the United States,” I said, “a country that doesn’t know much about the world or its own history.”

Business leaders saw this as a threat and responded with private and state violence. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and ‘20s tried to wipe out these movements, with considerable success. But radical movements rose again during the Great Depression, eventually winning the right to organize. In the boom times after WWII, management was willing to buy off labor (for a short time, it turned out) with a larger slice of the pie in a rapidly expanding economy, and in the midst of Cold War hysteria the radical elements of the mainstream labor movement were purged. But radical ideas remain, nurtured by small groups and individuals around the country.

To demand that we continue on this path is to embrace a kind of collective death wish. So, while I endorse socialist principles, I don’t call myself a socialist, to mark a break with the politics associated with industrial model that shapes our world. I am a radical feminist anti-capitalist who opposes white supremacy and imperialism, with a central commitment to creating a sustainable human presence on the planet. I don’t know any single term to describe those of us with such politics.

I do know that the Republican Party is not interested in this kind of politics, and neither is the Democratic Party. Both are part of a dying politics in a dying culture that, if not radically changed, will result in a dead planet, at least in terms of a human presence.

So, socialism alone isn’t the answer. In addition to telling the truth about the failures of capitalism we have to recognize the failures of the industrial model underlying traditional notions of socialism. We have to take seriously the deep patriarchal roots of all this and the tenacity of white supremacy. We have to condemn imperialism, whether the older colonial style or the contemporary American version, as immoral and criminal. We have to face the chilling facts about the degree to which humans have degraded the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain our own lives.

I end with Scripture not because I think everyone should look to my particular brand of radical, non-orthodox Christianity for inspiration, but because I think the task before us demands more than new policies. To face this moment in history requires a courage that, for me, is bolstered by tapping into the deepest wisdom in our collective history, including that found in various religious traditions. We have to ask ourselves what it means to be human in this moment, a question that is deeply political and at the same time beyond politics.

At the core of these traditions is the call for humility about the limits of human knowledge and a passionate commitment to justice, both central to finding within ourselves the strength to pass through that narrow gate.

My advice to any of you who want to be part of a decent future: Find that strength wherever you find it, and step up to the narrow gate.

rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

THE MYTH OF THE NEUTRAL (MEDIA) PROFESSIONAL

ABSTRACT: All systems of concentrated power, including modern liberal democracies, attempt to control the ideological field. In the contemporary United States, this project relies heavily on the imposition on journalists and academics of a demand for neutrality, which helps entrench the status quo and discourage critical, independent inquiry.

[PDF version] / [print_link] PHOTO: (Below) Not even Walter Cronkite escaped the clutches of the indoctrination system. Here he is lending his talents to Radio Free Europe, a US propaganda tool during the Cold War. Note the mike’s tag inscription: “Crusade for Freedom”.

Robert Jensen

University of Texas at Austin (USA)

Introduction

The Rules for Doing Your Job
The Rules for Keeping Your Job
Not Neutral, but Not Just Politics Either
Endnotes

Author’s Biographical Sketch
Citing this Source in the APA Style

Introduction

I HAVE SPENT MY ADULT LIFE employed as a journalist for newspapers or as a professor of journalism in universities, working in the trenches of two of the key institutions that select, create, shape, and transmit information. This is a report from the ideology assembly line.

2

In modern authoritarian and totalitarian states, the relationship between professional intellectuals and power is relatively clear and straightforward. The state — which represents the interests of a particular set of elites — governs through a combination of coercion and violence that is typically quite brutal and propaganda that is typically heavy-handed. In that formula, intellectuals have a clear role: serve the state by articulating values and describing social, political, and economic forces in a manner that is consistent with state power and its ideology. To the degree one does that, one will be rewarded. The Soviet Union was perhaps the paradigmatic example of this kind of system.

In short, the liberal, pluralist, and democratic features of the system are constantly in tension with capitalism and the state (which typically serves the interests of capital). As Alex Carey (1997) put it, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy” (p. 18).

But propaganda in a liberal, pluralist, and democratic system is not achieved by direct state control of the institutions in which intellectual work is done and through which ideas are transmitted (such as a public university), nor do capitalist institutions (such as media corporations) always directly suppress the professional intellectuals they employ. Intellectuals in the contemporary United States do not face the crude choices (subordinate yourself to the state or risk serious punishment) that intellectuals in more authoritarian states face. While dissident intellectuals in the United States are not always treated well — they may risk not being able to find permanent employment in an officially recognized institution, for example — the vast majority of them are not at this point in history routinely subject to serious consequences such as imprisonment or death. PHOTO (Right) Harry Smith, king of CBS’s Early Show. Well known for his soft-ball interviews.

3)

In a liberal, pluralist, capitalist democracy, the elites in the state and the corporation must adopt a strategy different from authoritarian states to contain the potential threat from intellectuals. Elites need intellectuals in some arenas to innovate, while in other arenas they need intellectuals to articulate values and accounts of reality that will support the system that allows elite to rule. But given the substantial freedoms in place in the society, allowing intellectuals to have the time and resources to pursue the truly independent, critical inquiry needed for innovation poses a risk: what if some of those intellectuals engage in that work and come to a critique of the concentration of power that elites want to maintain? What if, instead of articulating values in support of that power, intellectuals articulate other values? Even worse, what if those intellectuals use their privilege not only to talk about such things but to engage in political activity to change the nature of the system and the distribution of power? What if intellectuals created a culture in which such activities were encouraged and those who engaged in them were supported? In short, in a system in which intellectuals cannot easily be killed or shipped off to the gulag when they get feisty, how can they be kept in line? PHOTO (Above, left) Katie Couric, with a 60-million-contract, America’s Girl Next Door, sexy and coy, was supposed to be ready to fill Ed Murrow’s shoes. Confusing nice with deference to power, she’s come to personalize defanged journalism. Clearly out of her league.

The Neutral Professional

Enter the myth of the neutral professional as a way to neutralize professionals.

In the political and philosophical sense in which I use the term here, neutrality is impossible. In any situation, there exists a distribution of power. To either overtly endorse or reject that distribution is, of course, a political choice; such positions are not neutral. To take no explicit position by claiming to be neutral is also a political choice, particularly when one is given the resources that make it easy to evaluate the consequences of that distribution of power and, at least potentially, affect its distribution. As South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has put it, neutrality typically means choosing the side of the oppressor: “If you are in a situation where an elephant is sitting on the tail of a mouse and you say, ‘Oh no, no, no, I am neutral,’ the mouse is not going to appreciate your neutrality” (Reuters, 2004). PHOTO (Right): The News Hour’s anchor Jim Lehrer is too much a smug establishment player to represent anything like true independent journalism. Liberals still regard the News Hour as the Gold Standard for news coverage.

This same insight lies behind the title of Howard Zinn’s political/intellectual memoir, PHOTO: (Left) Gwen Ifill, also with The News Hour, is supposed to represent excellence but in reality is another centrist with strong ties to the mediacracy and the political crowd.

In the contemporary United States, professionals who want to be taken seriously in the mainstream political/intellectual culture (and have a chance at the status that comes with that) are encouraged to accept and replicate the dominant ideology. Two key tenets of that ideology are the claims of (1) the benevolence of the United States in foreign policy (the notion that the United States, alone among nations in history, pursues a policy rooted in a desire to spread freedom and democracy) and (2) the naturalness of capitalism (the notion that capitalism is not only the most efficient system, but the only sane and moral economic system). At the same time, those same professionals are encouraged to be politically neutral, but within this narrow framework that takes the legitimacy of state power and corporate power as a given. In practice, this means that one is supposed to present material that takes no explicit position on which policies should be implemented in the existing system, but one is not supposed to step back and ask whether that existing system itself is coherent or moral.

I am not arguing that people who work within, and accept, the dominant ideology are by definition wrong or corrupt; reasonable people can disagree about how best to understand and analyze complex systems. My point is simply that it is not a position of neutrality. Those of us who routinely critique the dominant view are political; that is, the politics we have come to hold certainly has an effect on the conclusions we reach — but no more and no less than people who do not critique. That is not to say that journalism or university teaching is nothing but the imposition of one’s political predispositions on reporting/writing or research/teaching, but simply to observe that everyone has a politics that affects their intellectual work. The appropriate question is not “Are you political?” but instead should be “Can you defend the conclusions you reach?” It is interesting that the criticism I have received in my university career for “being biased” or “politicizing the classroom” almost never includes a substantive critique of my ideas or my teaching. Critics appear to think it sufficient to point out that because I deviate from the conventional wisdom, it must be the case that I am unprofessional in the classroom. PHOTO: Like his partner in crime Rush Limbaugh, Fox News political thug and cryptofascist bloviator Bill O’Reilly is not even a journalist. Courtesy of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, he daily deforms countless minds through what passes for informed opinion.

The Rules for Doing Your Job

In journalism, the rules of “objectivity” keep reporters and editors hemmed in and discourage examination of those big-picture questions. Central to that is most journalists’ slavish reliance on “official sources” — those people in positions of some authority within the mainstream institutions. These people from government and the corporate sector are presumed to be credible sources and, hence, have great power to determine what will be a legitimate story and how it will be defined; they are news framers and shapers (Herman, 1999; McChesney, 2004). PHOTO: (Left) MSNBC’s Chris Matthews ego continually pre-empts serious discussion of the day’s issues. Like many of his confreres in the media he looks upon politics as a sport, and his opportunism is by now legendary. For some inscrutable reason, of late he’s been tacking left of center.

The result is that both journalism and universities are, in general, overwhelmingly conservative spaces, in the sense that they function mostly to conserve the existing distribution of power. But because they also are liberal institutions (in the Enlightenment sense of adhering to broad values of free thought), they also allow critical inquiry that takes some people outside the consensus that favors the existing order. In my experience in both kinds of institutions, universities tend to be slightly more open to critique because there is more original work done there, which requires less stringent controls.

The Rules for Keeping Your Job

Here’s how the system works: A few years ago the dean of my college informed us during a faculty meeting that from that point forward, a record of securing grant funding would be expected for tenure and promotion cases. The ability to raise money, up to that point, had never been explicitly listed as a requirement, and many of us who had been tenured in past years had not been expected to raise money. But as public universities have been increasingly pushed to find more private funding, the pressure to raise money increasingly has filtered down to the faculty level. In some fields, especially the natural sciences, the expectation that faculty members would attract grant funding has long been in place, as have funding agencies for those disciplines, such as the National Science Foundation. And, although there are political forces that shape the funding in the sciences, there is money available for research that is not overtly tied to ideological positions.

When the dean announced this shift, it was put forth as a neutral rule: Everyone who goes up for tenure or promotion faces the same expectations. One might dispute whether or not the change in policy was wise, but on the surface it appeared to be applied fairly across the board. But such an analysis at the surface is predictably superficial. I raised my hand to offer a different perspective.

“Given that the sources of funding for scholars doing critical research are considerably fewer than for those doing research that accepts the existing system, isn’t this kind of demand on faculty, in fact, going to result in less critical research?” I asked. I pointed out that I had pursued such critical work during my own tenure period and had never even applied for a grant. Luckily for me, I had been granted tenure based on my scholarly work, not my contribution to the university balance sheet. Did this new rule mean, in essence, that if I were going up for tenure today I would be denied? If that is the case, it seems likely that faculty members with similar interests can either (1) pursue their critical research interests and take the risk of being denied permanent employment, or (2) abandon such work and take up topics that are safely within the parameters acceptable to the industry. No matter what an individual professor chooses, the result is that there will be fewer professors pursuing critical ideas and, therefore, far less critical research. So, in fact, this allegedly neutral rule could have a dramatic effect on the intellectual content of our program, given that curriculum is largely faculty driven. But such a change would not be based on any decision about the intellectual direction of the program that would be discussed and debated; it would be the decidedly non-neutral effect of an allegedly neutral rule. PHOTO: Meredith Vieira & Matt Lauer on the TODAY show. Perfectly typifying the blending of light journalism with show biz, Vieira has worked by now on all 3 major broadcast networks, and also serves as host and producer for ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

At that point, the dean gave me a look that seemed to contain about equal amounts of amusement and exasperation and said, simply, “I’m just telling you about the policy from the Tower (central administration).” So, the lead administrator from the college, who is in charge of the academic programs of five departments, admitted she would not defend the principle of free and open inquiry and would do what she was told. Perhaps that is not surprising — deans are not known these days for bucking the system; it tends to slow career advancement. What was more disturbing was the reaction of my faculty colleagues, which was no reaction. Not a single faculty member joined my critique, nor offered any comment. I can certainly understand why the junior faculty, those still not secure in their positions, might have chosen to remain quiet in front of the administrator who would have considerable power in their tenure case. But even senior faculty — full professors, some with endowed chairs and professorships — chose to remain silent.

That is a well-disciplined intellectual class. The members of it who have risen to administrative positions and are charged with formulating and executing policy know which master they serve. The more secure members keep quiet to make sure their privilege is not disturbed. The less secure members shut up in the hope that they will be allowed to move up a notch. In such a setting, elites cannot guarantee complete conformity from intellectuals, but the system works well enough to keep things running relatively smoothly these days.

Not Neutral, but Not Just Politics Either

Endnotes

1. Because journalists in the United States do not have to complete a specialized course of instruction or be licensed to practice, many would argue the term “professional” is inappropriate. I use it here in a more general sense. See Jensen (1996).

2. As is the case with many left/progressive intellectuals in the United States, my views on these issues have been shaped by the work of Noam Chomsky (2002), particularly the essays “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” “Some Thought on Intellectuals and the Schools,” and “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.s”

3. See http://w3.usf.edu/~uff/AlArian/. Al-Arian was indicted in 2003 by the U.S. government on charges that he used an academic think-tank at USF and an Islamic charity as fronts to raise money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A jury in December 2005 acquitted Al-Arian on eight counts but deadlocked on nine others. To avoid another trial, Al-Arian in April 2006 pleaded guilty to one count of providing services to the group’s members and was sentenced to four years and nine months, with credit for the three years and three months already served. See http://www.sptimes.com/2005/webspecials05/al-arian/

References

Carey, A. (1997). Taking the risk out of democracy: Corporate propaganda versus freedom and liberty. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Chomsky, N. (2002). American power and the new mandarins. New York: New Press.

Herman, E.S. (1999). The myth of the liberal media. New York: Peter Lang.

We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jensen, R. (1996). Journalists and the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 73(2), 417-426.

Koch, S. (1971). Reflections on the state of psychology. Social Research, 38(4), 669-709.

McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the 21^st century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Reuters. (2004, March 17). Tutu chides Bush on oversimplifying U.S. terror war.

Zinn, H. (1990). The politics of history, 2^nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Zinn, H. (1994). You can’t be neutral on a moving train: A personal history of our times. Boston: Beacon Press.

emme@eastern.edu.)

Recommended Citation in the APA Style:

Jensen, R. (2006). The myth of the neutral professional. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 8(2), 1-9. Retrieved your access month date, year, from http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2006fall/jensen.pdf

(Please note that in order to comply with APA style citations of online documents regarding page numbers, only the PDF versions of EMME articles, which are paginated, should be cited.)

Michael Moore's War on Wall Street

Brad Wheeler

From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail

Last updated on Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009

Editor’s Note: It’s interesting to watch how the mainstream (corporate) media—which certainly includes the Globe & Mail— subtly move the pieces on the chessboard to exculpate capitalism from Moore’s frontal critique. In the vast majority of cases the media misleadingly informs the audience that Moore’s film is just a denunciation of something vague, like “greed” or “Wall Street” –which certainly controls the revolutionary infection. Or present Moore as an oddball, an oxymoronic “serious clown” not to be taken too seriously. But Moore–clumsily perhaps–is right, he’s up in arms against the system, not just some bad apples in it. This is not about extirpating a cancer from an otherwise healthy body. The body itself is a walking, breathing cancer, and cannot be made right.

“It’s absolutely important to question what’s going on,” says the rumpled provocateur Michael Moore, commenting on the fourth estate. “There should be a healthy dose of cynicism amongst reporters, and there isn’t. You’re not allowed to go certain places or ask certain questions. I think that’s wrong.”

On the way into a hotel room to speak to the director about his new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story , which opens Friday, I had brushed shoulders with the elephant exiting the room.

The filmmaker inside makes it his business to air obvious but controversial truths – there are no elephants in the rooms of Michael Moore.

In a sprawling interview the showman-director talked not only about his film (an entertainingly lopsided argument against free enterprise), but about other things that irritate him. “The CBC is a bunch of wimps,” the Michigan-born Moore opines, when told Hockey Night in Canada had some time ago lost the rights to its famous theme music. “They should just play the song and then say, ‘Sue me,’ and then go to court and say, ‘There are some things that are grandfathered in because they’re part of society.”

More soberly, Moore spoke about U.S. President Barack Obama, and the backlash he faced in response to his taped address to American school children in September. “The fact that he won the election was amazing, but I realize that the 46 per cent who didn’t vote for him, many of them are uncomfortable,” he says, referring to racial unrest. “I live in the United States, and I live amongst white people. It’s not only overt racism, it’s a sort of fear of the black planet. But nobody is really saying that, are they?”

With that, the lumpy man in shorts and a T-shirt pops a grape into his mouth and shakes his head. Moore speaks in gentle tones about serious matters – his way is to rouse the rabble wholeheartedly, but softly. It’s in that rhythmically caressing voice that he narrates Capitalism: A Love Story , a film that targets corporate immorality and Wall Street greed.

Twenty years after his prescient film Roger & Me (about the destruction of the U.S. auto industry and the resulting human wreckage), Moore has made what is being hailed as his boldest movie yet. In Capitalism , the dishonourable practice of corporations taking out life insurance policies on its worth-more-dead-than-alive employees is exposed – “dead peasants” is the term used by industry insiders.

Bigger game, in the form of recession-causers former chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and government economists Robert Rubin and Larry Summers (once acclaimed on the cover of Time as the “committee to save the world”) wear the drooping horns of scapegoats.

By the end of the film, after Moore cordons off Wall Street with yellow crime-scene tape, a call to revolution is made – audiences are asked to put down the popcorn and pick up the pitchforks. “Let’s go,” is what Moore urges. The film against anti-democratic economics has its lighthearted moments – and mawkish moments, including roof-topped Katrina flood victims – so it’s hard to gauge how serious the burly, ball-capped guy with the bullhorn really is.

“I feel we’re at the end game,” answers Moore, who sees capitalism as a system of legalized greed. “We’re hanging on to what’s left of our democracy by threads now.”

Moore deliberated over ending his film with such a blatant rallying call for revolt. His idea was to present evidence on what he sees as the inherent and unavoidable pitfalls of capitalism, and then let the viewers make up their minds. But, in for penny, in for a pound, he made his gung-ho decision.

“I’ve just shown them, for two hours, that it’s an evil system. So, I’m just going to say it, that [capitalism] has to be eliminated.”

Does it though? Is there not a more reasonable version of capitalism out there? “Is there a kindly form of child labour?” Moore replies rhetorically, sitting straighter in his chair now. “Is there a kindly form of slavery? Some institutions are inherently evil,” he continues. “It just takes us a little while to figure it out.”

The film proposes no solutions and Moore offers none in person, except to say that “we’re going to have to invent a different kind of economy based on democratic principles and have an ethical core.”

Why the Current Bills Don't Solve Our Health Care Crisis

By Rose Ann DeMoro & Michael Moore

Huffington Post // September 29, 2009 [print_link]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/why-the-current-bills-don_b_302483.html

Michael Moore's latest film is a direct attack on capitalism itself, as the fount of these endless troubles.

Now we know why they’ve stopped calling this health care reform, and started calling it insurance reform. The current bills advancing in Congress look more like rearranging the deck chairs on the insurance Titanic than actually ending our long health care nightmare.

Some laudable elements are in various versions of the bills, especially expanding Medicaid, cutting the private insurance-padding waste of Medicare Advantage, and limiting the ability of the insurance giants to ban and dump people who have been or who ever will be sick.

Here are 13 problems with the current health care bills (partial list):

1. No cost controls on insurance companies. The coming sharp increases in premiums, deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, etc. will quickly outpace any projected protections from caps on out-of-pocket costs.

2. Insurance companies will continue to be able to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

CYRANO SAYS: Which will happen sooner? Hell freezing over or the Democrats growing some spine (and principle) to use it?

4. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas, where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

5. A massive government bailout for the insurance industry through the combination of the individual mandate requiring everyone not covered to buy insurance, public subsidies which go for buying insurance, no regulation on what insurers can charge, and no restrictions on their ability to decide what claims to pay.

6. No controls on drug prices. The White House deal with Big Pharma, which won bipartisan approval in the Senate Finance Committee, opposes the use of government leverage to negotiate real cost controls on inflated drug prices.

7. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay.

8. Tax on comprehensive insurance plans. That will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of bare-bones, high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies.

9. Not universal. Some people will remain uncovered, including those exempted, and undocumented workers, denying them treatment, exposing everyone to communicable diseases and inflating health care costs.

10. No definition of covered benefits.

Call on your Congress member to support the vote coming up on the House floor on the Anthony Weiner amendment to protect, expand and improve Medicare for All. Senators have the same opportunity in a vote on Senate bill 703, being offered as a floor amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders.

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’

September 30, 2009

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it—Gore Vidal

•

Interviewed by Tim Teeman, The Times of London || [print_link]

Forever a man of contradictions and an intellectual provocateur, Vidal with all his cynicism and political acumen once supported Obama. If he fell for the Great Demagogue, anyone can.

A CONVERSATION WITH GORE VIDAL UNFOLDS AT HIS PACE. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

‘Reagan is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them’

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

•••••

SELECTED COMMENTS

Hugh Frazier wrote:

Typical Gore Vidal sloppiness: the “call no man happy until he dead” idea was first attributed to Solon (who lived well before Aeschylus) by Herodotus.

“An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off than him… He is the one who deserves to be described as happy. But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.”

Herodotus, The Histories Bk. 1, ch. 32, pp. 15-16.

October 1, 2009 4:41 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

K Burnu wrote:

I enjoyed Mr. Teeman’s interview with Gore Vidal. I’ve read Mr. Vidal’s novels and many of his essays; I have been profoundly moved by his style, his wit, and how he puts a wrap on his stories. Reading his essays, and certainly his memoirs, one has to take some of what he maintains with a grain of salt – – or perhaps a car full of salt. For instance, the errant details he recalls of Joe Kennedy calling the family together after Jack’s election could be the result of the story’s having been embellished over the years. As any one of us orally recalls past events, we embellish and put our own spin on what we remember; and what we remember may not have been exactly as the event recalled actually happened. It’s excusable. Look how often Reagan was excused, while he was president, for some of his exaggeration and hyperbole when recounting the past. This is not to say I put Mr. Vidal in the same category as Mr. Reagan. I don’t, and I share many of Mr. Vidal’s views of the 40th US President.

I disagree little with Mr. Vidal’s observations of current U.S. culture. I share some of his sentiments. I’m in my 50’s and I work with a lot of young people in their 20’s. What amazes me is how little they know of their own country’s history. Is what was taught to me in my public schools not taught to them? It causes me to wonder: how much have they forgotten what they learned? Also, I am amazed at how much I am misinterpreted – – and I speak as clearly as I can. Perhaps our paying too much attention to what television and radio offers us has much to do with that. Even outside of the discussion of gay or straight relationships, Mr. Vidal’s summation of the public in “They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’” could surely extend to the public’s lack of understanding of so many other concerns.

Yes, it could happen that, in a society as much unaware as Mr. Vidal is observing, a military takeover could occur in the US.

October 1, 2009 4:39 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Ramesh Raghuvanshi wrote:

Gore Vidal is very credulous person he did not know bit of the human nature, so lifelong he is grumbling for this or that.Another thing is he constantly running for cheap publicity so he always say pompously anything.Man is irrational animal, his only aim is survive in this world in any condition so you cannot make this earth paradise,If Gore Vidal want understand man he must understand first this irrational tendency.

October 1, 2009 4:15 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

michael carmichael wrote:

Vidal is anything but boring. Sadly, I fear that we shall soon see a military dictatorship in the USA — and the repercussions of that will be global — military dictatorships will become planetary in scope not merely threatening democracy but replacing it with corporate fascism predicated on national security concerns fanned by the omnipresent threat of terrorism.

October 1, 2009 3:36 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Natalie Rosen wrote:

I have ALWAYS loved Gore Vidal. He is BRILLIANT. I agree with most of what he says especially the part of the utter stupidity of too many Americans for my liking. I totally agree about Obama and although I was an ARDENT supporter I am having HUGE doubts now. Health care in the US should be a given. He should have made it happen. He still could but I doubt it. Vidal is so correct and I said it as well, Obama is INEXPERIENCED it is the greatest flaw of his presidency so far or any presidency for that matter.

Power ESPECIALLY in the US in beyond most people’s grasp and understanding. It is HUGE HUGE HUGE monied corporate interests which buy the state and the parties quell the masses by paying lip service to platitudes which they know the people will swallow. It’s the way its always been and the way of the world usually as well.

I do, however disagree with his seeming infatuation of McVeigh without his mentioning the loathsome act he perpetrated killing and maiming so many. No matter who does it its a disgusting act. If Gore is against a fascist state then what did he THINK McVeigh was all about? Still I love Gore’s realism and his curmudgeon personality. I have always loved 99% of what he says. His novels are brilliant.

I fear for my country mainly because of the people’s intellectual deficits. It is sad . I am told the ancient Greeks had a saying:

“The Gods themselves are helpless in the face of stupidity.”