It’s time to re-read Gore Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
Dear editor,
I was very surprised by the election result in the US, like everybody else I know. But then it started to make a kind of sense. There are a whole lot of people out there who are angry and resentful. They are angry at the US government, and have had enough very negative dealings with various government agencies to start reiterating Trump’s rhetoric about the ‘deep state’. They don’t see the educated and professional middle classes coming to their aid, so all of Kamala’s promises about being a president ‘for everybody’ would have been met with disbelief or cries of derision.
It’s time to re-read Gore Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press and Nation Books, 2002. In it Gore Vidal recounts his interview with Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, conducted in prison before McVeigh was executed. McVeigh came from a farming family in Iowa, from a family that had been driven into debt and forced off their land by the big agribusiness corpos. Such things have been going on for decades. Multiply this
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