Bedside Books – Gore Vidal and Chalmers Johnson: Men of Conscience

I found a clean copy of a Modern Library edition of The Complete Works of Tacitus at the Lost Bookstore, picked it up, and put it on top of Gore Vidal’s last three essay collections. In his snappy, trenchant prose, Vidal tells us how the US methodically cast itself as savior and circus-master of the world, while neatly positioning itself to dominate the world economy and thereby emerge as an empire far surpassing Rome but sharing many of the same traits. Our empire truly began in 1949 with the end of WWII. Unfortunately, our course has led to a state of perpetual war, overt and covert, around the world and weakened us morally and economically.

“Vidal’s imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe.” – Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books.

Vidal, citing stats from the American Federation of Scientists, lists more than 200 overt or covert military operations around the world from 1949 until the 2000s, and we’re still at it. The number of US military bases in foreign lands stands somewhere around 730. And now the US and China are in danger of reheating the Cold War.

Empire translates to control of resources in order to sustain itself: read oil, gas, key minerals, water, basic food sources, etc. The thought-processes involved in creating an empire can be benign and enlightened (bringing better days to some client states) but also entail darker deeds (reversing or thwarting the legitimate will of a client state) which build up the very things that lead to an empire’s collapse. The myth sustains the doing, but the darker deeds belie the myth and lead to dysfunction when the citizenry tires, sees through the myth and set out for themselves to go their own way, or to try to change the system through legitimate or illegitimate means.

What I like about Vidal is his Man of Letters approach. His essay collections, spanning 60 years, focus on literature, people, history and politics. He is America’s truest popular historian, constantly debunking myths and pretensions. His historical fiction chronicles key decades and figures in American history. The most bracing wit since Oscar Wilde, his ice-like prose glides over the surface of key events and figures, throwing off dazzling phrases and insights that light up serious, core issues.

On the issue of empire, even deeper and more rigorous – but equally clear and compelling – is the work of Chalmers Johnson of the University of California at San Diego, whose final books in the 2000s established the case for an American foreign policy which has been based too often on means that would not be countenanced by the American people: political assassinations, derailing liberal movements in foreign countries, supporting brutal regimes and on and on…the approach has been patriarchal and condescending, assuming we know better than the people themselves in foreign countries. Doing less would have saved the US from many disgraceful acts and led to more respect in the world, but that has not been the way of the US in this century or the last.

An obituary in The New York Times (Johnson died in 2010), said:

“Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.

“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”

“To maintain its empire, he said, the United States “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”

In a review of “The Sorrows of Empire” in The New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.” He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”

Here are the last books each for Johnson and Vidal, which taken together spell out how the US sank to the current pitiful state of affairs, and, by implication, point to the way out – how things can be reversed and the people can regain control of the political system, taking it away from the wishes of the few – corporate America and secret bureaucracies – who are accountable only to lax, Congressional overseers who essentially ignore the values and conscience of the American people.

Johnson:

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope

Vidal:

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia

Now, I’m ready to return to Tacitus, who, in telling us how the Roman Empire fell, tells our own story. Character and conscience are all. I’ll give Vidal the last word:

“Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic,” he wrote. “They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.”