Gore Vidal speaks

Interview in Cuba (excerpt)

RM: What would be necessary to re-establish the Republic?

GV: Listen to the great words of our greatest president, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at his first inauguration. The country was collapsing, economically the banks were coming down, money was short, and he struck a great political note which other presidents have generally imitated until we get down to this junta he said [imitating Roosevelt] "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." That is the basis of the Republic. Don't be taken in by fear. There are people who make money out of fear. That's their job, just to frighten.

I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the opposite of what you want. The French Revolution brought the world Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis XVI after all, was not as bad as that. So you very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution. I think we're going to have one due to economic collapse.

There was a headline in one of the big American papers the other day that the army was begging the administration for money. They don't have the money to make fools of themselves in Baghdad. They've got to raise it somewhere; we have no tax revenues because all the rich people have been exempted from tax as well as corporations. It used to be that 50% of the revenues of the Federal government came from the taxes on corporate profits. Its about 8% now, they've just eliminated it. Corporations don't pay tax and rich people don't either. So they've not only helped all their rich friends who now have enough money to finance the Republican Party with billions of dollars so they can tell lies about anybody in the country and pretend that the patriots of the country are traitors. It's a very good trick both economically for them and it's a bad trick on us real Americans, we don't like it. We've lost the Bill of Rights; we lost the Magna Carta, on which all of our liberties are based for 700 years. No, it's not been an amusing time.

I love reading the intelligent words of men like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. They are truly wise men. I think it is indicative of our culture that we marginalize and ignore the opinions of people who have such an immense historical perspective. They have so much to teach, we just have to be willing to learn.