Gore Vidal on faith-based democracy

While surfing the net, I ran into a broadcast message from Gore Vidal, in which he comments on the election, and on the possibility of fraud. These words, it seems, were first heard on a Pacific station. I don't think anyone will be angry if I publish a partial transcript.

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This is Gore Vidal speaking from the Hollywood Hills, recovering, as the country is, from our latest experiment in democracy…

I think the first question that goes through the minds of those of us who are not “faith based”: Did they steal it this time too? Since our media does not report much of anything of general interest to the voting public -- preferring to report many things that are of no interest at all, or perhaps untrue -- not much investigation has been done of the voting patterns in the late election.

I’ve been applying to many sources – journalistic, foreign, national – even to the Gore Vidal Yahoo group, which can be found on the internet at groups.yahoo.com. (By the way, I have nothing to do with this except as an interested observer; I learn quite a lot watching and reading what these people come up with. They’re very intelligent and rather thorough when it comes to investigation.) I suspect that there will be more and more information, as time passes, of a sort which will not be given us by the New York Times.

There are now opinions out that there was something disagreeable in the state of Ohio, and in (I think it was) New Mexico. And until some investigative journalism is done, until people get out there and try to find out what really did happen, we will not really know about the legitimacy of our system.

After the election of four years ago, we’ve been living with an illegitimate president given to illegitimate deeds, like pre-emptively attacking countries innocent of posing any danger to us. Illegitimate presidents are to be watched out for. So whether he is one this time, or is not, is a matter of general interest.

Meanwhile, let us conjure the message that the media wants us to take away: America, after many years of decadence -- of free sex, drugs, slipshod performance in just about everything from the stock market to the battleground -- is now returned to its ancestral roots, which a few publicists working for the Republican party seem to think are Christian. And/or Jewish. And/or – if nothing else – based on faith in God, whoever or wherever He might be.

The United States was founded by people who most definitely were not Christians, or Jewish, or Islamic. They were men of the Enlightenment. And they were dedicated to reason, to the idea that human beings with good will and faith in the honesty of each other could create a nation which would last. They chose not a democracy. They chose a republic as their model, where you would have elections, representative government. And for a long time, in a messy way, our system worked.

We’ve always had problems with groups that wanted to seize control -- wanted to keep us from drinking alcohol, take drugs, have sex, do this, do that. We’ve had many pressure groups. But we’ve never had, until now, a pressure group take over the executive branch of the government, the two branches of congress and the judiciary. That is a clean sweep for what are called neoconservatives, conservatives or reactionaries.

And the message that came out loud and clear from our media, which I don’t believe for one minute: People were saying "Yes, well, you know, I voted for values – moral values." The day that any American votes for moral values will be the day that the Second Coming is about to arrive.

We are not faith-based people. We are practical people who come out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century. We come out of Voltaire. We come out of Jefferson. We come out of some of the wisest men who ever lived on earth, who were trying to counter superstition wherever they saw it, whether it be in the churches or in the folklore of the nation. We were the "show me" generation. And we were also the ones who questioned everything.

The campaign was waged by a "selected" president – who is now officially, at last, the elected president. The selected president and his advisors, who are brilliant public relations men, decided to emphasize God, a figure noticeably absent from the founding fathers, and noticeably absent from most of our elections since then for the past 250 years.

We are not a godly people; we are a practical people. We believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe in equal justice for all, in due process of law. These are the mantras by which our Republic has lived and prospered for so very long.

Now we are told there has been an eruption of faith across the nation. Evangelical Protestant Christians are riding high. The official religions – Catholic, Jewish, Islamic (what else? There are many others) – are all pretty much on board, in the views of the people in the media. How did this happen?

Well, the most wonderful four words in the English language are “I told you so.”

I got the election all wrong, as did a lot of people who thought that this election might bear some relation to reality. So we thought we’d be talking about deficits, we’d be talking about unemployment, we’d be talking about real things.

Instead, they changed the subject to gay marriage. They changed it to abortion (as usual). They changed it to hot issues, sex issues.

We were going to be a godly nation; we were going to reform ourselves. So they turned the whole country into a kind of AA meeting. Faith, faith, faith – your wickedness will be healed, and you will be made whole.

Two days after the election, the Los Angeles Times printed a story: "Some backers of Bush say they anticipate a revolution." That’s the headline. Well, I anticipated this revolution a quarter of a century ago, with some of the same players. I wrote about it in a piece in 1979, published in Playboy (a very highbrow, highly moral place dedicated to Christian values).

In the late '60s and early '70s, the enemies of the Equal Rights Amendment set out to smear the movement as lesbian. All sorts of militant right-wing groups have since got into the act: The Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the Conservative Caucus and dozens of other like-minded groups. Their aim was to deny equal rights to women through scare tactics. If the amendment is accepted, they warned us, lesbians will be able to marry each other. Rape will be common. Men – the horror of this! – men will use women’s toilets.

This nonsense proved to be remarkably effective. But then, as the Conservative Caucus’ Howard Phillips told the New Republic with engaging candor (this was about the time of the 1978 elections): 'We’re going after people on the basis of their hot buttons. In this past year, the two hot buttons have proved to be sexual – the ERA and gay rights legislation.' Save the family! Save our children!

Elsewhere in the badlands of the nation, one Richard Viguerie was now the chief money raiser for the powers of darkness. In 1977, Viguerie told the Congressional Quarterly: "I am willing to compromise to come to power." That’s a bit chilling, isn’t it? "There aren’t 50% of the people that share my view, and I am willing to make concessions to come to power." This had a very familiar "Nuremberg" ring.

Viguerie was said to have at least ten million names and addresses on file. He sent out mailings and raised large sums for all sorts of far right political candidates and organizations.

Viguerie was not just a hustler; he was also an ideologue. "I have raised millions of dollars for the conservative movement over the years, and I am not happy with the results. I’ve decided to become more concerned with how the money is spent." He was beginning to discuss the creation of a new political party. Perhaps the "W" Republican party was now a-borning.

Viguerie vowed that the organized conservative community would put it many times more in the way of cash than ever before. "Because I want a massive assault on congress in 1978. I don’t want any token efforts. We now have the talent and the resources to move in a bold, massive way. I think we can move against congress in 1978, in a way that’s never been conceived of."

"Move against congress..." That sounds like revolution.

Now back to today:

"Some backers of Bush say they anticipate a revolution. Exulting in their electoral victory, President Bush’s conservative supporters immediately turned to staking out candidates for an ambitious agenda of long-cherished goals, including privatizing Social Security, banning same-sex marriage, remaking the Supreme Court, and overturning the court’s decisions in support of abortion rights. 'Now comes the revolution,' says Richard Viguerie."

You just heard his voice as of 1978, and here is his voice again, a quarter of a century later, in the year 2004, and he is victorious.

The L.A. Times goes on to describe him as "the dean of conservative direct mail. As he told about a dozen movement conservative stalwarts as they gathered around a television here in Arlington tallying up their senate seats in the earliest hours of the morning, 'If you don’t implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?' By mid-day, however, fights over the spoils have already begun, as conservatives debated the electorate’s verdict on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s spending, and the Bush administration’s embrace of traditional social causes."

This is a strange victory cry which I never thought I’d hear, since he had – I thought – done himself in twenty-odd years ago in that election. And for all of his huffing and puffing about the conservative majority out there, he confesses that not 50% of the people think as he does. Or so he confessed then. I don’t think 50% of the people think as he does now. I don’t think they are informed about the issues. Number 1 (we’re told) on the Bush agenda is privatizing Social Security. I don’t think that’s very popular. But, theoretically, anything can be sold, if misintepreted.

So the great victory has been a long time coming. These people don’t give up. They know what they want. They couldn’t achieve it in any normal electoral way. They don’t have the votes. Most people would like Social Security to be as strong as possible. They don’t want to privatize and hand it over to mutual funds or the stock market.

And yet they control the media. They’re perfectly shameless, whether it’s using Fox News or even poor Wolf Blitzer (who is very much party line most of the time, serving far-off masters). The press takes any hand-out from Washington as the straight news.

So we’re in a curious bind. We’ve been turned into a Christian nation when we’re not one. We’re a diverse nation, not based on any religion at all – some people are religious, some are not. The state is not religious – and this must be emphasized heavily, because any attempt to make it so is an attempt to overthrow the original republic, which is the aim of these people who say they want revolution.

There was about as much revolution in the recent election as I think Americans can bear. Going any further in the in the direction of banning Roe vs. Wade, or whatever it is that they happen to be shooting for, is going to cause great resistance.

And we must guard carefully, as Thomas Jefferson warned us, the tree of liberty. This always offends the right wing, because they don’t like Thomas Jefferson. They don’t like the American republic, and they don’t really like the founding fathers. They are willing to worship them as long as they don’t have to listen to them or be guided by them.

Jefferson warned us early on. As you’ll remember, he wanted to have a constitutional convention every thirty years or so, because, he said, "the earth belongs to the living." We are not to be held by our forefathers; no matter how wise they were, we must design each society for ourselves.

Well, I’ll say they are good Jeffersonians, the faith-based religious right. They are going to base everything on the good book, which they regard as the ultimate good. And those of us who are more skeptical, including the founding fathers of our country, don’t find this to be the case. We find that we are being invited into a prison – which, by the way, is one of the growing activities in the United States, building prisons. And as we’ve seen in Iraq, we are certainly masters at running prisons, and would like to have many more of them all over the earth. And we shall have, if the current Bush/Cheney junta continues to have its way around the world.

Dangerous times – but then, what time is not?

So remember that the tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants – and of patriots. Let us hope that it does not go that far.

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Thus saith Vidal. (This is Cannon speaking again.) A few further observations:

Vidal says "The day that any American votes for moral values will be the day that the Second Coming is about to arrive." But millions of Americans have indeed been brainwashed into the belief that the return of Jesus is nigh. Vidal should know all about this; he was one of the few American intellectuals to appreciate, early on, the cultural impact of the books written by Hal Lindsey and his fellow apocalypticians. Many who consider Bush an incompetent nevertheless voted for him because he is a "Christian," and therefore a fit leader for these Last Days.

Are we, as Vidal asserts, a practical people, not a godly people? That observation is no longer true; as fundamentalism has spread throughout our society, our prosperity has diminished. Vidal's reference to Voltaire struck me as bizarre. Most Americans know nothing of Voltaire, and those few who have heard the name usually learn of it by way of the crankish right-wing conspiracy-peddlers who have always demonized him.

Ever since the first Reagan administration, Vidal has stumped for a constitutional convention. I never agreed with the idea, since the people likely to attend such a convention would no doubt make matters worse. Vidal may have pictured himself among the attendees. I pictured Pat Buchanan -- and the moment that image came to mind, I shook my head and said: "Pass."

Now we face an interesting problem: The far rightists (who, as Vidal correctly notes, despise the very founders they pretend to revere) want the Supreme Court to adhere to a "strict constructionist" standard. Basically, this standard would return us to the legal landscape of the late 18th century: Women would have few rights, income taxes and social programs would end, and slavery would return.

A constitutional convention could remove the straightjacket of strict construction. But who would attend such a convention if it were held tomorrow? I picture Ann Coulter. I picture Dick Cheney. I picture Paul Weyrich. Then I shake my head and say: "Pass."

So what are our alternatives?