Imperial America

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.