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Following the publication of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and its sequel Dreaming War, Gore Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America's last "small-r" republican. In Imperial America, the conclusion of this landmark trilogy and his most devastating exploration of contemporary America yet, Vidal observes that there's something suspicious about the "ever reckless Cheney-Bush junta." They have created the Department of Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act, and embarked upon a series of wars in pursuit of the world's oil reserves -- to the extent that they seem not to care about "the decent opinion of mankind." Bush's apparent invincibility, and what he might or might now know -- especially about those new "black box" voting machines being installed all over the country which seem to swing votes to the Republicans -- is one of the central themes of Imperial America's opening essay, a mordant, magnificent, and witty "State of the Union" for the election year (and beyond).
Vidal's essay is an Olympian survey of American Empire, where the war on terror is judged as nonsensical as the "war on dandruff," where America is an "Enron-Pentagon prison," a land of ballooning budget deficits thanks to the growth of a garrison state, tax cuts for the privileged, and of course the creeping totalitarianism of the Ashcroft justice department. Continuing a tradition Vidal inaugurated on The David Susskind Show in the early seventies, where Vidal's "real" State of the Union was a counterpoint to "whoever happened to be president," Vidal performs an autopsy on the American republic, where "we have ceased to be a nation under law but a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns" where the American Empire has entered its "Ben-Hur phase." Imperial America includes Vidal's reflections on his past "State of the Union" addresses, identifying certain depressing continuities. This volume includes these previous "State of the Union" addresses. A central thread linking them: "For the busy fanatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."
Vidal's essay is an Olympian survey of American Empire, where the war on terror is judged as nonsensical as the "war on dandruff," where America is an "Enron-Pentagon prison," a land of ballooning budget deficits thanks to the growth of a garrison state, tax cuts for the privileged, and of course the creeping totalitarianism of the Ashcroft justice department. Continuing a tradition Vidal inaugurated on The David Susskind Show in the early seventies, where Vidal's "real" State of the Union was a counterpoint to "whoever happened to be president," Vidal performs an autopsy on the American republic, where "we have ceased to be a nation under law but a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns" where the American Empire has entered its "Ben-Hur phase." Imperial America includes Vidal's reflections on his past "State of the Union" addresses, identifying certain depressing continuities. This volume includes these previous "State of the Union" addresses. A central thread linking them: "For the busy fanatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing."
Used availability for Gore Vidal's Imperial America