[ql06] CONSTITUTION: Each Generation Should Change It
- From: Stephen Kennedy <2srk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ql06@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 20:05:20 -0500
We looked at some of the important arguments surrounding the American
constitution when we read Marbury v. Madison. In the following interview,
Gore Vidal speculates on what some of the framers of the constitution would
have thought of the current US regime.
As always, Vidal is perceptive, entertaining and controversial.
[Warning: Long Article]
Published on Thursday, November 13, 2003 by The LA Weekly
Uncensored Gore
The Take-No-Prisoners Social Critic Skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the Whole Damn
Lot of Us for Letting Despots Rule
by Marc Cooper
It's lucky for George W. Bush that he wasn't born in an earlier time and
somehow stumbled into America's Constitutional Convention. A man with his
views, so depreciative of democratic rule, would have certainly been quickly
exiled from the freshly liberated United States by the gaggle of incensed
Founders. So muses one of our most controversial social critics and prolific
writers, Gore Vidal.
When we last interviewed Vidal just over a year ago, he set off a mighty
chain reaction as he positioned himself as one of the last standing defenders
of the ideal of the American Republic. His acerbic comments to L.A. Weekly
about the Bushies were widely reprinted in publications around the world and
flashed repeatedly over the World Wide Web. Now Vidal is at it again, giving
the Weekly another dose of his dissent, and, with the constant trickle of
casualties mounting in Iraq, his comments are no less explosive than they
were last year.
This time, however, Vidal is speaking to us as a full-time American. After
splitting his time between Los Angeles and Italy for the past several
decades, Vidal has decided to roost in his colonial home in the Hollywood
Hills. Now 77 years old, suffering from a bad knee and still recovering from
the loss earlier this year of his longtime companion, Howard Austen, Vidal is
feistier and more productive than ever.
Vidal undoubtedly had current pols like Bush and Ashcroft in mind when he
wrote his latest book, his third in two years. Inventing a Nation:
Washington, Adams, Jefferson takes us deep into the psyches of the patriotic
trio. And even with all of their human foibles on display - vanity, ambition,
hubris, envy and insecurity - their shared and profoundly rooted commitment
to building the first democratic nation on Earth comes straight to the fore.
The contrast between then and now is hardly implicit. No more than a few
pages into the book, Vidal unveils his dripping disdain for the crew that now
dominates the capital named for our first president.
As we began our dialogue, I asked him to draw out the links between our
revolutionary past and our imperial present.
MARC COOPER: Your new book focuses on Washington, Adams and Jefferson, but it
seems from reading closely that it was actually Ben Franklin who turned out
to be the most prescient regarding the future of the republic.
GORE VIDAL: Franklin understood the American people better than the other
three. Washington and Jefferson were nobles - slaveholders and plantation
owners. Alexander Hamilton married into a rich and powerful family and joined
the upper classes. Benjamin Franklin was pure middle class. In fact, he may
have invented it for Americans. Franklin saw danger everywhere. They all did.
Not one of them liked the Constitution. James Madison, known as the father of
it, was full of complaints about the power of the presidency. But they were
in a hurry to get the country going. Hence the great speech, which I quote at
length in the book, that Franklin, old and dying, had someone read for him.
He said, I am in favor of this Constitution, as flawed as it is, because we
need good government and we need it fast. And this, properly enacted, will
give us, for a space of years, such government.
But then, Franklin said, it will fail, as all such constitutions have in the
past, because of the essential corruption of the people. He pointed his
finger at all the American people. And when the people become so corrupt, he
said, we will find it is not a republic that they want but rather despotism -
the only form of government suitable for such a people.
MC: But Jefferson had the most radical view, didn't he? He argued that the
Constitution should be seen only as a transitional document.
GV: Oh yeah. Jefferson said that once a generation we must have another
Constitutional Convention and revise all that isn't working. Like taking a
car in to get the carburetor checked. He said you cannot expect a man to wear
a boy's jacket. It must be revised, because the Earth belongs to the living.
He was the first that I know who ever said that. And to each generation is
the right to change every law they wish. Or even the form of government. You
know, bring in the Dalai Lama if you want! Jefferson didn't care.
Jefferson was the only pure democrat among the founders, and he thought the
only way his idea of democracy could be achieved would be to give the people
a chance to change the laws. Madison was very eloquent in his answer to
Jefferson. He said you cannot [have] any government of any weight if you
think it is only going to last a year.
This was the quarrel between Madison and Jefferson. And it would probably
still be going on if there were at least one statesman around who said we
have to start changing this damn thing.
MC: Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and
the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young
America's two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any
strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?
GV: Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin
predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale.
Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next
president. This is corruption on a major scale.
Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting
brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the
government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.
Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start
some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is punished for
squandering the people's money and their pension funds and for wrecking the
economy.
So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one
wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have
a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is
business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of
authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is
as despotic as anything Hitler came up with - even using much of the same
language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I
show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into
going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh - how their rights were going to
be suspended only for a brief time - was precisely the language used by
Hitler after the Reichstag fire.
MC: In this context, would any of the Founding Fathers find themselves
comfortable in the current political system of the United States? Certainly
Jefferson wouldn't. But what about the radical centralizers, or those like
John Adams, who had a sneaking sympathy for the monarchy?
GV: Adams thought monarchy, as tamed and balanced by the parliament, could
offer democracy. But he was no totalitarian, not by any means. Hamilton, on
the other hand, might have very well gone along with the Bush people, because
he believed there was an elite who should govern. He nevertheless was a
bastard born in the West Indies, and he was always a little nervous about his
own social station. He, of course, married into wealth and became an aristo.
And it is he who argues that we must have a government made up of the very
best people, meaning the rich.
So you'd find Hamilton pretty much on the Bush side. But I can't think of any
other Founders who would. Adams would surely disapprove of Bush. He was
highly moral, and I don't think he could endure the current dishonesty.
Already they were pretty bugged by a bunch of journalists who came over from
Ireland and such places and were telling Americans how to do things. You
know, like Andrew Sullivan today telling us how to be. I think you would find
a sort of union of discontent with Bush among the Founders. The sort of
despotism that overcomes us now is precisely what Franklin predicted.
MC: But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations
in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to
LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to
tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really
talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt
and foolish Republican administration?
GV: No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first
PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made
public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great
resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what
proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe
the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer,
and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new
wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to
another place not even organized as a country - like Tierra del Fuego or some
rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding
Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have
hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia. Hanged.
MC: So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days
of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the
Founders?
GV: No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft
would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country
at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part
in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel
so much more at home. They would not be called Americans - most Americans
would not think of them as citizens.
MC: Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?
GV: I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over
everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have
despotism. We have no due process.
MC: Yet you saw in the '60s how the Johnson administration collapsed under
the weight of its own hubris. Likewise with Nixon. And now with the
discontent over how the war in Iraq is playing out, don't you get the
impression that Bush is headed for the same fate?
GV: I actually see something smaller tripping him up: this business over
outing the wife of Ambassador Wilson as a CIA agent. It's often these small
things that get you. Something small enough for a court to get its teeth
into. Putting this woman at risk because of anger over what her husband has
done is bitchy, dangerous to the nation, dangerous to other CIA agents. This
resonates more than Iraq. I'm afraid that 90 percent of Americans don't know
where Iraq is and never will know, and they don't care.
But that number of $87 billion is seared into their brains, because there
isn't enough money to go around. The states are broke. Meanwhile, the right
wing has been successful in convincing 99 percent of the people that we are
generously financing every country on Earth, that we are bankrolling welfare
mothers, all those black ladies that the Republicans are always running
against, the ladies they tell us are guzzling down Kristal champagne at the
Ambassador East in Chicago - which of course is ridiculous.
And now the people see another $87 billion going out the window. So long!
People are going to rebel against that one. Congress has gone along with
that, but a lot of congressmen could lose their seats for that.
MC: Speaking of elections, is George W. Bush going to be re-elected next year?
GV: No. At least if there is a fair election, an election that is not
electronic. That would be dangerous. We don't want an election without a
paper trail. The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of
them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job
to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for
cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the
companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is
this not corruption?
So Bush will probably win if the country is covered with these balloting
machines. He can't lose.
MC: But Gore, aren't you still enough of a believer in the democratic
instincts of ordinary people to think that, in the end, those sorts of
conspiracies eventually fall apart?
GV: Oh no! I find they only get stronger, more entrenched. Who would have
thought that Harry Truman's plans to militarize America would have come as
far as we are today? All the money we have wasted on the military, while our
schools are nowhere. There is no health care; we know the litany. We get
nothing back for our taxes. I wouldn't have thought that would have lasted
the last 50 years, which I lived through. But it did last.
But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them
counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office.
He's made every error you can. He's wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up.
People can't find jobs. Poverty is up. It's a total mess. How does he make
such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid. But the people around him are
not. They want to stay in power.
MC: You paint a very dark picture of the current administration and of the
American political system in general. But at a deeper, more societal level,
isn't there still a democratic underpinning?
GV: No. There are some memories of what we once were. There are still a few
old people around who remember the New Deal, which was the last time we had a
government that showed some interest in the welfare of the American people.
Now we have governments, in the last 20 to 30 years, that care only about the
welfare of the rich.
MC: Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?
GV: Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other
presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put
the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And
two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.
MC: How do you think the current war in Iraq is going to play out?
GV: I think we will go down the tubes right with it. With each action Bush
ever more enrages the Muslims. And there are a billion of them. And sooner or
later they will have a Saladin who will pull them together, and they will
come after us. And it won't be pretty.
Copyright 2003 LA Weekly
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