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Must read piece from Gore Vidal for activists!

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Dancing_Dave Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 07:33 PM
Original message
Must read piece from Gore Vidal for activists!
He really goes off like late Mark Twain! At 80's years old he could still win a poetry slam...

"Well, let us say that the old American republic is well and truly dead. The institutions that we thought were eternal proved not to be. And that goes for the three departments of government, and it also goes for the Bill of Rights. So we're in uncharted territory. We're governed by public relations. Very little information gets to the people, thanks to the corruption and/or ineptitude of the media. Just look at this bankruptcy thing that went through--everybody in debt to credit cards, which is apparently 90 percent of the country, is in deep trouble. So the people are uninformed about what's being done in their name.


And that's really why we are in Iraq. Iraq is a symptom, not a cause. It's a symptom of the passion we have for oil, which is a declining resource in the world. Alternatives can be found, but they will not be found as long as there's one drop of oil or natural gas to be extracted from other nations, preferably by force by the current junta in charge of our affairs. Iraq will end with our defeat."

<clip>

"Well, the Congress has ceded--which it cannot do--but it has ceded its power to declare war. That is written in the Constitution. It's the most important thing in the Constitution, ultimately. And having ceded that to the Executive Branch, he can declare war whenever he finds terrorism. Now, terrorism is a wonderful invention because it doesn't mean anything. It's an abstract noun. You can't have a war against an abstract noun; it's like having a war against dandruff. It's meaningless.

But you can terrify people. The art of government now, the art of control as practiced by the current junta, is: Keep the people frightened. It's exactly what Adolf Hitler and his gang did. Keep them frightened: The Russians are coming. The Poles are killing Germans who live within the borders of Poland. The Czechs are doing the same thing in the Sudetenland. These are evil people. We must go after them. We must save our kin.

Keep everybody frightened, tell them lies--and the bigger the lie, the more they'll believe it. There's nothing the average American now believes (because he's been told it 10,000 times a day) that is true. Now how do you undo so much disinformation? Well, you have to have truth squads at work 24 hours a day every day. And we don't have them."

<clip>
I don't blame the public. Bush is not popular. I've just been reading a report on Conyers's trip to Ohio with his subcommittee's experts. Ohio was stolen. The Republican Congress will never have a hearing on it. But I think attempts are being made to publish the details of what was done there, and elsewhere too in America.

In other words, I put the case that Bush was never elected--not in 2000, and not in 2004. This is a new game in the world. Through the magic of electronic voting, particularly through Mr. Diebold and friends, you can take a non-president and make him president. But how to keep the people, including the opposition who should know better, so silent, this introduces us to a vast landscape of corruption which I dare not enter."

<clip>Now we have people who don't know where anything is. I remember a speech Bush gave in which he was reaching out not only to the "Torks" but the "Grecians" at some point. We live in total confusion time.

<clip>I haven't changed my line. We don't have the money for these adventures. We don't even have the money to operate those prisons which are the delight of Iraq. All we were doing at Abu Ghraib was export what we do to our own people in our own prisons, you know. We are sharing with the rest of the world penology-- in every sense. No, there isn't the money to do it. And the few who are making most of the money are probably investing it elsewhere, preparing islands for themselves to escape to. And then their followers, who are not very many, will be experiencing rapture. They won't be here.
</clip>

But there are some words of hope at the very end, including praise for the internet-- Read the whole thing at
http://citypages.com/databank/26/1268/article13085.asp









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ananda Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 08:06 PM
Response to Original message
1. You go guy!
Yes, both elections were stolen.

Just the facts.

Sue
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Dancing_Dave Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 08:32 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. Oh, Gore always knows plenty of facts...
He veers towards the old "laughing to keep from crying" sharp satiracle style of expressing them here...but it's still the cold, hard facts of our situation...we really need to share this all with each other in some authentic way. Real communication is always the begining of positive change. ;-)
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 08:24 PM
Response to Original message
2. Gore Vidal is MY Pope.
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Dancing_Dave Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 08:50 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. Well, now folks feel they need a Pope in This Dark World
And Gore Vidal is the best Pope of Democracy! :)

My grandfather was a Detroit union man who loved to hear Vidal debate Buckly on TV. He said Vidal always came off as the guy who really knew what was going on and wasn't afraid to say it. Buckly was evasive.

It would be a blast to find a DVD of those old debates somewhere! :yourock:
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 09:00 PM
Response to Reply #4
5. I'd love to see them, too. Most of my teachers urged me --
-- to honor Norman Mailer and not Vidal as the better novelist, but I bolted. Vidal's my guy.

As for Buckley, he's such an arrogant puke that I might choke him to death if I ever meet him on the street. I'd really love to hear those old tapes.
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pretzel4gore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 10:07 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. the old punk buckley threatened Noam Chomsky
i saw it and marvelled, as did Noam, that such a creature could pass as an intellectual...he's a thug, like von papen or ribbentrop
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Apr-09-05 11:18 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. Jesus. Buckley threatend Noam Chomsky?!?
He's on thin ice there. My money's on Noam, any day of the week.

You know what? I haven't been this dismissive of Buckley in a long time, and by god, it feels GREAT.
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pretzel4gore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-10-05 10:03 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. yep, quite a famous clip....
i guess it was buckley's show (firing line)...i think buckley's smart enough to realize the enormity of the waste (of his life) he will see his name associated with the same dark nasty brute force as things like the black death or holocaust, the ebola virus, bush family etc
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saltpoint Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-10-05 11:26 AM
Response to Reply #8
9. Loved your post. Especially the association of Buckley --
-- with those particular things.

Nice, nice, nice.
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pretzel4gore Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Apr-10-05 11:44 AM
Response to Reply #9
10. poor buckley, what a maroon!
imagine, being blessed like buckley was in life, then to be a comforter of the big fat pig, and a torment to the desperate and poor...
:eyes: :freak:
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