Having given away my collection of Gore Vidal’s writings in preparation for the move to the Philippines in 2003, upon hearing of his death last week I reached for the one volume I now possess. Fronted by two new essays, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia consists largely of reprinted pieces, some of which previously appeared in his United States (Essays 1952-92), winner of the 1993 National Book Award.
A scion of the old ruling political elite and chief whistle-blower of the US establishment, Vidal was greatly admired for his effortless ability to turn an elegant phrase, usually loaded with lethal wit. I laughed aloud in the 1970s as he earnestly impressed upon a British television interviewer the sheer folly of allowing Richard Nixon access to anything that wasn’t nailed down. “Today,” he wrote in 1986, “public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them, either.”
In Imperial America, he recalls a “state of the nation” tour he undertook in 1972, telling audiences that “we only have one political party in the US, the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat.” His audience at the Yale Political Union was “packed with hot-eyed Neocons-to-be, though the phrase was not yet in use, as the inventors of Neo-conery were still Trotskyites to a man or woman…”  
On Bush, Vidal is unforgiving, saying that perhaps “the greatest coup of the unelected president and his handlers was, as usual, a dubious metaphor. All on his own he declared a war on terrorism, a nonsensical notion like a war on dandruff.” Why call it a “war” when no nation-state was responsible for 9/11? “Because only in wartime can the executive gain maximum power over the American people by replacing the checks and balances of the Constitution with an emergency apparatus currently called ‘homeland security’…To assume wartime powers without a war is something new under the American sun…”
Thus arose a situation in which “Vice President Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, is grimly pursuing contracts to put up new buildings in place of the ones that his colleague, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, has been busy knocking down in Iraq.”
Vidal was as celebrated for his historical fiction as for his essays. “Of course I like my country,” he wrote in 1986. “After all, I’m its current biographer.” It was the fact that many Americans have forgotten their country’s history, and thus have little comprehension of how they have arrived at their current malaise, that led him to coin the phrase “the United States of Amnesia.”
His historical grasp is demonstrated in a longish 1981 essay entitled The Second American Revolution which, as it deals with constitutional issues with a certain resonance in this country, would be of interest to Filipino readers.
Since 1865, says Vidal, “when the management of the reigning Republican Party became almost totally corrupt,” the USA has effectively been governed under a Second Constitution, “which allows the big property owners to govern pretty much as they please, without accountability to the people or to anyone else since, for at least a century, the Supreme Court was perhaps the most active — even reckless — part of the federal machinery…”
To a large extent, the three branches of government rely on each other to thwart either the popular will or objective necessity. When “a president claims that he is blocked by Congress or Court, this usually means that he does not want to take a stand that might lose him an election.” Similarly, when “the Supreme Court strikes down a popular law which Congress has been obliged to enact against its better judgment, the Supreme Court gets the blame for doing what the Congress wanted to do but dared not.”
But, says Vidal, the Supreme Court was never given the authority to review acts of Congress. The reverse is the case, in fact, as Article III of the Constitution makes it clear that Congress is empowered to regulate the Court. And yet, between 1865 and 1970, the Court held that 90 congressional acts were unconstitutional, in whole or in part, and most of these decisions “involved property and favored large property owners.” Moreover, in the same period the Court “managed to overrule itself 143 times.”
Ironically, Lincoln managed to take certain actions that were not strictly constitutional by relying on the presidential oath: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” While Lincoln, faced with an armed Confederacy, relied on the word “defend” to cover his unauthorized actions, later incumbents chose an expansive interpretation of “execute,” and thus was born the executive order, by which Congress is by-passed and of which, by 1975, there had been 11,893. Then in 1937 the Supreme Court accepted the principle of the executive agreement, where previously a treaty would have been required. But neither the executive order nor the executive agreement is sanctioned by the Constitution itself.
Vidal concluded his essay by arguing that the time had come for a second constitutional convention which would consign the executive order and executive agreement, along with judicial review by the Supreme Court, to history. The House of Representatives, meanwhile, “should be made not only more representative but whoever can control a majority will be the actual chief of government, governing through a cabinet chosen from the House. This might render it possible for the United States to have, for the first time in two centuries, real political parties.”
At home with history, Vidal was sadly less adept when he gazed at the future: over 30 years after he wrote that essay, the second constitutional convention has yet to appear.
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