Gee, im sorry browneye, i was only trying to point out that Gore...

Gee, im sorry browneye, i was only trying to point out that Gore is a few stubbies short of a sixpack. Didnt know you'd take it personally, ...how was i to know you had the same condition.


Anti-Americanism is an emotion masquerading as an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do. When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives. When complexity of thought devolves into caricature, intellect is close to reconciling itself to mass murder.

One might have thought all this obvious. On the evidence of two of the works under review, it is not. Consider the sad case of Gore Vidal, once "a great wit" (in the words of Norman Mailer, who proceeded to skewer him), now a witless crank. Reposing in Ravello, Italy, Vidal maunders from snippet to snippet. His latest volume of musings manages to be skimpy and redundant at once. Collecting one's Vanity Fair pieces as if they would stand up in book covers is an act of, well, vanity. That such an exercise should be escorted into the world by the Nation's book publishing arm speaks unflatteringly about publishing standards on the left.

Toward the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who would define their atrocities as retaliations against the United States of America and its incidental citizens, Vidal burns with sympathy. Not for him so banal an act as moral condemnation or investigation of what sort of person commits mass murder out of political grievance. Rather, Vidal thinks it is tough-minded to indulge his desire to know "the various preoccupations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts." Note: "drove them." These killers were presumably helpless. All one needs to know about them is "the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world." Curiosity succumbs to the caricaturist's crippled imagination. In a follow-up article published in Britain's Observer (October 27, 2002), Vidal takes up the torch for selective agnosticism with this remark: "We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose."

Not that Vidal is incapable of generosity. At least one American benefits from it: McVeigh, who in a 1999 letter to Vidal complimented him on being the first "to really explore the underlying motivations for such a strike against the U.S. Government [as the Oklahoma City bombing]." Presumably, it takes one perceptive guy to recognize the genius of another: "McVeigh considered himself, rightly or wrongly, at war." Well, which is it? Vidal does not pause to worry the point. When McVeigh writes that "there is no . . . proof that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing" (love that tortured syntax), Vidal claims that McVeigh "denies any foreknowledge of the presence of children in the Murrah building."

In other words, Vidal has a good word for anyone who likes the sound of "a final all-out war against the 'System,' or "deliberately risks-and gives-his life to alert his fellow citizens to an onerous government." In the end, McVeigh and bin Laden are pikers. "Most of today's actual terrorists can be found within our own governments, federal, state, municipal." "Municipal" is a particularly nice touch: perhaps Vidal means police departments, though for all the care he takes he might just as well be alluding to death squads at work under cover of sanitation departments. If you wonder what might be a better society, Vidal helpfully offers up what he calls "Tim's Bill of Rights," which includes (a) no taxes, (b) metal-based currency, and (c) low legislative salaries. So much for political theory.

Instead of ideas about what makes America tick, Vidal dabbles in conspiracy theory. If McVeigh did not act alone-and there is some interesting reportorial speculation to this effect-then, in Vidal's c*ckeyed vision, McVeigh gets off the hook. He offers the notion that if McVeigh had been more thoroughly investigated, the September 11 plot might have been scotched. He blasts the New York Times for ignoring the parallel between the demolition of the Federal Building and the Reichstag fire.

To Vidal and his fellow paranoids, everything makes sense. Sources such as a newsletter called Strategic Investment and the inventor of the neutron bomb are drummed up to convince the reader. Vidal's long crank letter to FBI director-designate Robert Mueller is included not to make an argument-something it fails to do-but to demonstrate his superior knowledge. Vidal seems to think that to make a case he need do no more than append any item to which he has put his hand. His laundry lists would be as useful.


Unsurprisingly, Vidal's America is all of a piece, what sixties' crackpots used to call Amerika. It is "a country evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs. . . .For Americans, morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action . . . Morality is SEX, SEX, SEX."

This is reasoning in the fashion of McVeigh and bin Laden. And it is close to the prosecutorial logic of the British writers Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. The Pakistani-born Sardar is an information scientist, Davies is an anthropologist and former BBC producer. At the outset, they alert their readers that "This is . . . not a book about the positive sides of the United States." Why Do People Hate America? is a book of talking points for what the authors consider the global majority, for "loathing for America is about as close as we can get to a universal sentiment." To them, America "forms an immensely coherent whole." And they have no trouble deciding that they don't like it.

they like mass murderers and paranoid old men much better.