From Democracy Now,
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006
Gore Vidal Delivers State of the Union: “Let the
Powers That Be Know There is Something Called We the People of the U.S.
and all Sovereignty Rests in Us.”
Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Help Printer-friendly version Email to a friend
In advance of President Bush’s state of the union address later
tonight, author Gore Vidal delivers his own traditional state of the
union address. We hear Vidal speak about patriotism, the NSA domestic
surveillance programs, corporate America, Presidential powers and more.
[includes rush transcript]
In Washington, President Bush will deliver the State of the Union
address tonight. In advance of tonight we’d like to bring you a
different take on the annual presidential speech.
Since the early
1970s, author and playwright Gore Vidal has been delivering his own
State of the Union address. The tradition began on the David Susskind
Show. We’re going to continue that tradition by hearing from Gore Vidal
today.
- Gore Vidal, one of America’s most
respected writers and thinkers. He’s authored more than twenty novels
and five plays. His recent national bestsellers are “Dreaming War” and
“Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” His latest book is called
“Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.”
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations
help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on
our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate – $25,
$50, $100,
more…
JUAN GONZALEZ: Here is Gore Vidal in an address he recorded for us on the State of the Union.
GORE VIDAL: Today, the 31st of January, in the
hallowed year, election year, of ’06, could be a memorable day if we
all do our part, which is simply to concentrate, among other things,
and do perhaps what a couple of groups have decided would be useful for
the President, I guess his State of the Union. We might give him some
idea of our state, which is one of great dissatisfaction with him and
his regime. And there’s talk of perhaps demonstrating in front of the
Capitol or here or there around the country to show that the union is
occupied by people who happen to be patriots. And patriots do not like
this government.
This is an unpatriotic government. This is a government that
deals openly in illegalities, whether it is attacking a country which
has done us no harm, two countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — because
we now believe, not in declaring war through Congress as the
Constitution requires, but through the President. âWell, I think there
are some terrorists over there, and I think we got to bomb them, huh?
We’ll bomb them.’ Now, we’ve had idiots as presidents before. He’s not
unique. But he’s certainly the most active idiot that we have ever had.
And now here we are planning new wars, ongoing wars in the
Middle East. And so as he comes with his State of the Union, which he
is going to justify eavesdropping without judicial warrants on anybody
in the United States that he wants to listen in on. This is what we
call dictatorship. Dictatorship. Dictatorship. And it is time that we
objected. Don’t say wait âtil the next election and do it through that.
We can’t trust the elections, thanks to Diebold and S&S and all the
electronic devices which are being flogged across the country to make
sure that elections can be so rigged that the villains will stay in
power.
I think demonstrations across the country could be very useful
on this famous Tuesday. Just say no. We’ve had enough of you. Go home
to Crawford. We’ll help you raise the money for a library, and you
won’t even ever have to read a book. We’re not cruel. We just want to
get rid of you and let you be an ex-president with his own library,
which you can fill up with friends of yours who can neither read nor
write, but they’ll be well served and well paid, we hope, by corporate
America, which will love you forever.
So I think it is really up to us to give some resonance to the
State of the Union, which will be largely babble. He’s not going really
try to do anything about Social Security, we read in the papers. He has
no major moves, other than going on and on about the legality of his
illegal warrantless eavesdroppings and other breakings of the law.
I had a piece on the internet some of you may have seen a few
days ago, and there’s a story about Tiberius, who’s one of my favorite
Roman emperors. He’s had a very bad press, because the wrong people
perhaps have written history. But when he became emperor, the Senate of
Rome sent him congratulations with the comment, ‘Any law that you want
us to pass, we shall do so automatically.’ And he sent a message back.
He said, ‘This is outrageous! Suppose I go mad. Suppose I don’t know
what I’m doing. Suppose I’m dead and somebody is pretending to be me.
Never do that! Never accept something like preemptive war,’ which
luckily the Senate did not propose preemptive wars against places they
didn’t like. But Mr. Bush has done that.
So this is a sort of Tiberius time without, basically, a good
emperor, and he was a good emperor in the sense that he sent back this
legislation, which was to confirm anything he wanted to have done
automatically. And they sent it back to him again. And then he said,
‘How eager you are to be slaves,’ and washed his hands of the Senate
and went to live in Capri, a much wiser choice, just as we can send
this kid back to Crawford, Texas, where he’ll be very, very happy
cutting bushes of the leafy variety.
You know, it’s at a time when people say, âWell, it makes no
difference what we do, you know, if we march and we make speeches, and
this and that.’ It makes a lot of difference if millions of Americans
just say, ‘We are fed up! We don’t like you. We don’t like what you’re
doing to the country and what you have done to the country. We don’t
like to live in a lawless land, where the rule of law has just been
bypassed and hacks are appointed to the federal bench, who will carry
on and carry on and carry on all of the illegalities which are so
desperately needed by our military-industrial corporate masters.’
I think a day dedicated to that and to just showing up here
and there around the country will be a good thing to do. And so, let
the powers that be know that back of them, there’s something called “We
the people of the United States,’ and all sovereignty rests in us, not
in the board rooms of the Republicans.