Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia – Gore Vidal

Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia – Gore Vidal, Nation Books, 2004, 181 pp. (LF) ***

If nothing else, citizens of a country where the trials of O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and more recently, Scott Peterson, became objects of an incessant, bordering on the hysterical, media fixation owe Gore Vidal a great debt of gratitude for introducing to the modern lexicon the expression “the United States of Amnesia”. It says so much, so succinctly, that nothing need follow it. And maybe that’s where he could have best left his latest work, Imperial America: Reflections On The United States of Amnesia, but indeed a * page text follows, and hence so must this review. The bulk of the book was written in the mid to late 1980s (about two-thirds of the text). Apparently this is designed so that the reader is to marvel at Mr. Vidal’s uncanny abilities of prescience, which he aptly demonstrated in 2003’s Dreaming War, and to be reminded that the present Bush administration has an ideological predecessor and model in the Regan years (i.e. distorted, Christian fundamentalist thinking that defines the world in Manichean terms, where policy is tailored to preparation for, rather than prevention of, the final, apocalyptic showdown with the “evil empire” or whatever flavor of the week foe you may wish to substitute – Bin Laden, Hussein, Jong Il, Zarqawi). Missing is follow-up analysis to Vidal’s 2002 book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, in which he dives headlong into the several inconsistencies of the investigation into the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. With the 9/11 attacks, naturally the stakes are much higher, so where’s his critical eye that should be fixed upon this most anomalous, tragic of events and the many documented peculiarities surrounding this singular outrage that has been exploited to no end for policy advancement purposes by the present administration? While he expresses righteous concern regarding electronic, paperless voting and its grave potential implications for the upcoming presidential election (one of the bold few to do so in print), the usually intrepid and courageous Vidal has decided to sit on his hands when it comes to broaching the possibility, as David Ray Griffin has done in his The New Pearl Harbor, of the very real possibility that there was administration complicity in facilitating the attacks – either by turning a blind eye to the many warning signs and “standing down” response forces by bypassing standard operating procedures, or by assuming a much more disturbing, active role. Other than this glaring omission, Mr. Vidal’s concerns about the solvency of American democracy and its uncertain prospects for the future are all valid, and sadly are daily only being more and more vindicated by the increasingly autocratic nature of the “Cheney/Bush regime,” yet another of Vidal’s linguistic bulls-eyes that has become grossly apparent and manifest.