UNITED STATES OF ABSURDITY

THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

www.whatnowtoons.com

Illustration: Again, Kieth has an excellent view of the situation. The U.S. has nothing against socialim -- it is simply focused on who runs the government. The corporate junta that also owns the media, or "We, The People" (remember that phrase?)

Let's start: Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed by the Junta sending them to Iraq at the cost of Three Billion Dollars. There are also over 20,000 injured, and an innumerable quantity of them with PTSD that will act as a time bomb, or time bombs, for decades to come. We are also broke. Bush has show that he can sacrife too, however: HE WILL GIVE UP GOLF WHILE THE WAR IS STILL ON!!!!!

Since we really have nothing about socialism, let it be known that what is really needed is a more vigorous and progressive version of FDR's NEW DEAL. Government payment of all medical services for every citizen, the people, a social safety net, a minimum guaranteed income. To pay for this, the Corporations and wealthy will pay the same rates on taxes as they did in the 40s and 50s. Regulations will return to the 60s. Every reform from Nixon, through Reagen and the Bushes and even Clinton on welfare will be abolished. Then, the United States may have a chance of surviving as a viable entity.

Hillary won West Virginia which Barak did not even contest. John Denver lied about West Virginia as can be seen in the fact that he chose to LIVE in Colorado himself, not far from Hunter Thompson. The victory reminds me of a line from Gene Wilder in BLAZING SADDLES, where he consoles his African American friend by saying "You have to understand: these people are the salt of the earth, the common clay, you know -- morons!" So, Hillary has the double digit IQ constituency plus dried up old ladies on her side. Will they shift to McCain for a third Bush term or vote aginst it -- it will be an IQ test in November. She lost the nomination in February. She and Bill squandered all the good will he left office with -- and even a budget surplus. What's our deficit now?

Another country that used to be Burma was hit by a cyclone and at least 100,000 will be dead by now. As Bush and Brown started to make points about "democracy," China chimed in with its own disaster, an earthquake. It's size was huge. In area, think from Maine to at least Arizona being affected. Now that's a big earthquake. And, the midwest has been seeing tornadoes of tremendous effect and destruction, the kind that say on the ground. If we are to follow the reasoning of Christian Moron Hagee whose endorsement McCain sought, there must be a lot of gay people and Catholics around. (The Catholic Church, according to him, is no longer a whore.)

We can't forget the Mideast: Isreal is celebrating 60 years of occupation of Palestianian land and the Palestians are in a period of mouning for "The Catastrophe". Bush went there. No truth to the rumor that he intends to wear a beenie while playing golf to disguse himself.

Here is some reading material:

Yahoo! Mail

Re: [The Absurd Times] Wright and Obama -- With friends like this...

"hughman@pasty.com" <hughman@pasty.com>
To:
stanford_charles@yahoo.com
Will it solve the problem? No! but..." I think it would be a nice little
vacation for the American people." Mr Rogers/Clint Eastwood morph.
Solutions: Nationalize the multinational oil companies and behead the
smug SOB CEOs as would be done in China.
Make everyone drive only on battery operated golf carts at 15 MPH. Or
more realistically, make everyone drive only light weight, high milage
cars -so no one need worry about being squashed by an SUV or a semi.
Bumper cars!
Everybody get a horse. And wagon. 40 acres and a mule.

And Gore Vidal (I've done my best with this transcription. If the rest is posted and published, I'll forward it separately. At the end, she asks him how he would like to be remembered: "I don't care one Goddamn." or something like that. The links will take you to audio or video links.

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Democracy Now!
Democracy Now!

May 14, 2008

Vidal2web

Legendary Author Gore Vidal on the Bush Presidency, History and the
“United States of Amnesia”

With a career spanning more than six decades, Gore Vidal is one of
America’s most respected writers and thinkers. He’s authored more than
twenty novels and five plays. His latest book is /Point to Point
Navigation: A Memoir/. [includes rush transcript–partial]

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Guest:

*Gore Vidal*, One of America’s most respected writers and thinkers. He’s
authored more than twenty novels and five plays. His recent books
include /Dreaming War/, /Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace/ and
/Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia/. His
latest is /Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir/.

Rush Transcript

*AMY GOODMAN: *With a career spanning more than six decades, Gore Vidal
is one of America’s most respected writers and thinkers, authored more
than twenty novels, five plays. His recent books include /Dreaming War/,
/Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace/ and /Imperial America: Reflections
on the United States of Amnesia/. His latest is a memoir; it’s called
/Point to Point Navigation/.

Last week at the /Los Angeles Times/ Festival of Books, I heard Gore
Vidal would be there and afterwards went to his home in Hollywood Hills.
We sat down in his living room, and I asked him for his thoughts on this
election year and on the last eight years of George W. Bush in the White
House.

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, it isn’t over yet. You know, he could still
blow up the world. There’s every indication that he’s still
thinking about attacking Iran: ‘And the generals are now reporting
that the Iran are a great danger and their weapons are being used
to kill Americans.’

I mean, you know, I think, quite rightly, the Bushites think that
the American people are idiots. They don’t get the point to
anything. There are two good reasons for this, is the public
educational system for people, kids without money, let’s say, to
put it tactfully, is one of the worst in the first world. It’s
just terrible. And they end by knowing no history, certainly no
American history. I didn’t mean to spend my life writing American
history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw
no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot
of cheerier things I’d rather be doing than analyzing George
Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job,
so I did it.

*AMY GOODMAN: *You wrote /United States of Amnesia/. Why?

*GORE VIDAL: *That’s a good title. You must remember, this is a
people that has no culture, that has never had one. After all, I
was first published when I was nineteen, and the first time I was
a bestseller I was twenty-one, twenty-two. I thought by the time
I’m old, this place is going to be greatly improved, not just
because I was around, but I was going to contribute to it. But
then I saw how the /New York Times/ had blocked in their little
tight world of New York publishing, which they really did to
publish each other’s books. The results have not been very good.

So here we are, cut off from Europe, basically, by the World War
II. Then the post-war period was kind of interesting, because a
lot of us went abroad and stayed there for a time and got to
understand other cultures. And I saw—I saw, with many cases, Jimmy
Baldwin, he became a Frenchman, surprisingly. Surprising accent,
but he was sharp as a tack.

*AMY GOODMAN: *Did you know him?

*GORE VIDAL: *Yes, very well.

*AMY GOODMAN: *What are your memories of him?

*GORE VIDAL: *He had two voices. One, he sounded exactly like
Bette Davis suffering in one of her movies. And the other one was
“Call me Ishmael”—it was the prophet’s voice. So he was a bit of a
contradiction.

*AMY GOODMAN: *What does “amnesia” mean to you? And how can—

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, it means what it literally means: people with
no memory.

*AMY GOODMAN: *How do think that can be defeated, conquered in the
United States?

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, it’s won. I don’t see how you’re going to
defeat it now. People would forget to defeat it.

*AMY GOODMAN: *You write in /Point to Point Navigation/, “I was
born October 3, 1925, on the twenty-fifth birthday of Thomas
Wolfe, the novelist, not the journalist. I’ve lived through
three-quarters of the twentieth century and about one-third of the
history of the United States of America.”

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, I was not counting on them knowing what the
word “amnesia” meant.

*AMY GOODMAN: *You wrote two books during the Bush administration.
Two of the books you’ve written are /Perpetual War for Perpetual
Peace/ and /Dreaming War/. Why these two?

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, /Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace/, that’s my
main book during that period. That was the foreign policy of the
Bush administration: perpetual war. This was also Harry Truman’s
dream. He started the Cold War. If any history had been imparted
to our people, they’d know all this. And if you think I enjoy
having to be the one to tell them about it, I don’t.

*AMY GOODMAN: *And what about /Dreaming War/?

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, same thing. They were dreaming war. You can
see little Bush all along was just dreaming of war, and also
Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country
like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do.
For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad.

*AMY GOODMAN: *Do you believe in the death penalty?

*GORE VIDAL: *No. But in their case, yes.

*AMY GOODMAN: *And so, here we are, moved into the sixth year of
the war with Iraq, longer than the US was involved in World War II.

*GORE VIDAL: *Yes, incredible. That was such a huge operation on
two great continents against two modern enemies. And we’re
fighting little jungle wars for no reason, because we have a
president who knows nothing about anything. He’s just blank. But
he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime
president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And
look where he got us.

I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my
native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so
easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole
went crashing. And when we got rid of—when /they/ got rid of Magna
Carta, I thought, well, really, this wasn’t much of a republic to
begin with.

*AMY GOODMAN: *What do you mean, Magna Carta?

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, you know what Magna Carta means?

*AMY GOODMAN: *Explain it.

*GORE VIDAL: *Tell your readers, your viewers. It’s the basis of
our law. Out of it comes the whole theory, practice, on which
our—certainly judicial system is based: due process of law. You
cannot deprive somebody of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness,
because that is a right, constitutional right. And that is—I mean,
every proper American, that’s graved on his psyche, certainly was
on mine. There wasn’t a day passed—I was brought up by my
grandfather in Washington—hardly a day passed that he didn’t want
to talk about due process. And he was blind from the age of ten.

*AMY GOODMAN: *Who was your grandfather?

*GORE VIDAL: *Senator Thomas Pryor Gore. A Mississippi family. His
father had served in the Civil War, even though the Gores—they
came from Mississippi, they were not secessionists. They regarded
themselves as patriots. And the entire family was against going
into the Civil War, but because their friends and neighbors did
and honor required that they do so too, so they got killed off
quite a bit.

*AMY GOODMAN: *Your grandfather was a senator from Oklahoma?

*GORE VIDAL: *He was the first senator from Oklahoma. Last year
was the hundredth year of his election, 1907. That’s when he was
elected.

*AMY GOODMAN: *You’re also cousins with another Gore: Al Gore.

*GORE VIDAL: *True.

*AMY GOODMAN: *What is your assessment of what happened in 2000?

*GORE VIDAL: *He was robbed. I don’t know him. I never see him.
But within the family, I gather it was a great shock to him. He
did everything right in life. He was the good boy and loved the
Supreme Court and went by the rule of law, due process and
everything. And then the Supreme Court bites him in the throat,
because they have a lot of crooks on it. And I watched the Dred
Scalia the other day on television. Did you see him?

*AMY GOODMAN: *No.

*GORE VIDAL: *Oh, he was saying, “Get over it! Just get over it!”
He was talking to the liberals, and you know what awful people
they are—and about 2000, about the interference of the Court in a
national election, which is unheard of. It’s not their job.
They’re not even supposed to be referees. They’re just—they’re
doing something else. And he was a snarling: “Get over it! Get
over it!” I felt, go back to Little Italy, you know? It’s a type I
know very well from Naples.

*AMY GOODMAN: *That’s where you lived for many years.

*GORE VIDAL: *Mm-hmm.

*AMY GOODMAN: *What do you mean, Gore Vidal, when you say you
think what happened after 9/11 was a coup?

*GORE VIDAL: *Well, it was. The first move they made at the time
when Timothy McVeigh decided to blow up the federal building in
Oklahoma City—he started to write me letters, and I wrote him
back, and he’s a brilliant kid, very interested in law, would have
made a good constitutional lawyer, and a patriot. He’s a
professional soldier. But he has to be depicted as a monster,
because who else would blow up little children?

But he didn’t know he was blowing up any little children. He was
acting out of a fit of rage at what had happened at Waco, when
that whole religious community was set fire to by the Army. And as
a soldier, he thought to himself, you see, the one thing that
divides our country from being another military or militarized
republic, it is not only due process of law, but it is also the
Posse Comitatus Act of 1875, which the Army may not be used in any
action against the citizens of the United States. And they just
wandered—bang! bang!—they set fire to the place, burned down more
children and mothers and so on than ever Mr. McVeigh did.

So, at that time, it happened during the—must have been
what’s-her-name, Janet Reno, when she was Attorney General. It was
during Clinton’s watch, which was a sloppy one. And they got some
panicky legislation, because they thought, and with some reason,
that there was a group of people, many of them ex-soldiers, who
were ready to overthrow the government. And they were
anti-Semites, they were—I mean, anything you can think of, they
were that. They were in rebellion against this country.

And I wrote about it in warning terms. I went so far as to write
Mr. Mueller, who was the new director of the FBI. And I saw he was
never going to follow up. They did all these interviews with
various guys living in the woods around Fort Hood. I said,
“They’re going to be trouble one day, and you don’t even follow up
on them? Yet you go on inventing stuff about McVeigh which isn’t
true.” They tried to pretend he was a crazy and this and that.
Well, he got the Silver Star, I think it was.

*AMY GOODMAN: *Persian Gulf War.

*GORE VIDAL: *Yeah. So the coup d’etat comes out of this. They saw
their chance. They—Cheney, Bush—they wanted the war. They’re
oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also
extraordinarily stupid. These people don’t know anything about
anything. But they have this—there’s a thick piece of—sheet of—a
thick series of actions to be taken, among others—I think one of
them was to lock up every person of color in the United States in
order to protect us from the enemy within. It was evil stuff. So
they latched onto that. I guess Mr. Gonzales was already in place
by then. And that was the coup d’etat. They seized the state. And
from that moment on, they were appointing all the judges, they
were doing this, they were doing that, they got rid of Magna
Carta—I will not explain what that is a second time—and they broke
the republic.

*AMY GOODMAN: *The role of torture?

*GORE VIDAL: *Oh, everything was in there, yes. The USA PATRIOT
Act is just the unnatural child of the Clinton, we've got to
do something about these wild men in Montana