Vidal, Gore

Presents nearly fifty essays by American writer Gore Vidal, spanning 1992-2000 and discussing such topics and people as Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Charles Lindbergh, the CIA, and the national security state.

Returning to America after his long European sojourn, Charlie Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, and Charlie's widowed daughter seek financial and political advancement in the Centennial power centers, as republican idealism is giving way to imperial expediency.

A historical novel recounts the events of Lincoln's presidency after his arrival in Washington, D.C. in 1861.

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." Book jacket.

A collection of essays and editorials in which author Gore Vidal offers an indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration and calls for an investigation of its handling of the September 11 terrorist attacks.