What will the oracle answer?
Frederic Raphael
PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE by Gore Vidal Clairview, £8.99, pp. 176, ISBN 1902636384 THE WEST AND THE REST by Roger Scruton Continuum, £12.99, pp. 196. ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch — alike in deploring The Way We Live Now, different in emphasis and style — jostle for the moral high ground. Gore Vidal's diagnosis of global schism centres on the US and its (mal)administration. Like a liberal, Enlightened mutation of bin Laden, Vidal doubles for Coriolanus and tribune of the put-upon plebs. Exiled from what he takes to be his patrimony — the good, old US, based on the Bill of Rights — he points out that bin Laden was first a CIA protégé (but never the first) in Afghanistan, the recent devastation of which was 'like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia'.
Vidal's blind grandfather, Senator Gore, is once again the paragon; the upstart G. W. Bush but the latest thick-witted, well-heeled hijacker to have bought the White House. Other routine villains make guest appearances: the New York Times, the Trumans (Harry and Capote), Pat Robertson, Gerry Falwell, etc ... Donald Rumsfeld gets sneering credit (a skilled stand-up comic'); William Pfaff the real thing for saying, 'What the United States needs is cold consideration of how it arrived at this pass.'
Thereby hangs a tail which Gore tweaks with his usual zest. Always one for bella figura, he cannot resist substituting `regnurn' [sic] as the last word of Louis XIV's defence of force as 'Ultima ratio regum', before citing at length the eponymous, perpetual, undeclared wars which the US has fought or funded ever since 1949 (oddly not including the CIA coup d'etat in Guatemala which inspired his novel, Dark Green, Bright Red), he switches to concentrate on Timothy McVeigh, the allegedly lone crazy who blew up the Federal Building in Gore's grandfather's one-time fief, Oklahoma City. Gore's indignation is directed at what Tony Blair would call 'the causes of crime', in particular Federal Agencies' literal overkill — including '25' (or later '27') children — at the gung-ho siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in April 1993. Vidal's lament is that the Union itself is now addicted to the systematic abuse of power. It all began with Harry Truman's creation of 'the National Security State'. How can there be due process in a society whose authorities act illegally, in the name of the law?
Vidal's post-conviction relationship with Timothy McVeigh (one of mutual epistolary respect) somewhat echoes Truman Capote's with the Clutters' killers when writing In Cold Blood. Where Truman was cool, Gore is warmly humane: he even accepted McVeigh's invitation to attend his execution, but couldn't get there in time. Vidal sees him as the rational enemy of a Federal government which started the hostilities by employing tanks, unconstitutionally, against its own civilians at Waco.
Vidal's disdain is visited especially on exdirector Freeh of the FBI, a member of Opus Dei, as are, apparently, two members of the Supreme Court. As if he were the Senator Across the Water, Patriotic Gore perceives the secular Republic in danger and issues the senatus consultum ultimum in pamphlet form. The first person pronoun figures frequently in his Taccuse. When he tells us, The media were now gazing at me,' it is as if Narcissus had finally located his pool.
'It is not usual for us,' Vidal says, 'to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of mindless malignity: "We are good," G. W. Bush proclaims, "they are evil." ' As Roger Scruton points out, this is precisely what Khomeini preached to Islam. Scruton is self-effacing where Vidal is sparkily egocentric. The West and the Rest is an unblinking, informative analysis of the rift between us and Islam. Scholarly knowledge of the Koran and pertinent literature cannot conceal Scruton's decisive preference for the nation-state as against theocracy. Yet here too the tocsin tolls: our society is imperilled by moral laxity, fragmented education, multicultural bullshit and rights without duties.
Scruton debunks the Cherie Blair thesis that poverty, injustice or 'despair' account for bin Laden's (or the suicide pilots' and bombers') fury. The West has been greedy and undiplomatic (of course), but Islam — especially in its Wahhabi and Shi'ite forms — is of its essence anti-Western. No matter what we (or the Israelis) do, all conciliation looks like weakness. If we behave well or badly, it is by our standards; by theirs, we are infidels. There is no common ground, just as there are no viable Arab nationstates with whom to 'advance the peace process'.
... the whole idea of Arab nationalism verges on contradiction, being an attempt to shape a local, territorial loyalty from a language that has been spread around the Mediterranean on the wings of a militant religion, and to conscript ... religious Loyalty ... to a secular
cause with which it is profoundly incompatible.
The abiding difference between the West and Islam goes back to the moment when Jesus, pressed by some prototypical John Humphrys, got himself out of a corner by saying, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.' No Muslim could give the same answer. Duties to religion and to state are separate only with us. Hence also the philosophical distinction between what we know and what we believe.
Scruton is probably right to agree with David Fromkin that the break-up of the Ottoman empire was the disastrous consequence of the Versailles 'peace' treaty, but Elie Kedourie's The Chatham House Version said it first. On the other hand, those few of us who have long admired Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred will appreciate the respect given to his concept of 'mimetic desire' and each side's recourse to competitive bloodshed in the effort to gain an unattainable dominance. For its succinct clarity and calm despair, The West and the Rest is a classic which should last as long as civilisation. How long will that be? A Delphic question.
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