Dig Director Gore Vidal is an internationally acclaimed novelist, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose historical fiction and collected criticisms have garnered him the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. An outspoken political activist, he ran for the U.S. House...
Photo President Bush is pictured meeting with members of his cabinet at the White House Sept. 6, 2005, in the wake of the Hurrican Katrina disaster.
Related Links World Can't Wait Washington Post: Vacationing Bush Poised to Set a Record IMDb: "The Good Earth" "Dark Ages in America: The Final Phase of Empire" by Morris Berman Wikipedia: "American Century" "The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason" by Charles Freeman National Center for Science Education Time magazine: "Apocalypse Now" Book of Revelation Mother Jones: "One Liberty at a Time" Newsweek: "Election Day Worries" "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" "State of the First Amendment 2003" NYT: "Sobriety Tests Becoming Part of School Day"

Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate -- the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.

Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves." I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or maimed, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course he was: in due course, our befuddled people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana and then the U.S. military itself.

The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be proto-slaves but we are not unreasonable.

Reason requires that we explain to the media and to this self-anointed "war-time president" whose "inherent" powers, to hear him babble, transcend the Constitution itself. But they can't: First, we are not at war with another country; second, presidential powers are enumerated in the constitution, not inherent--despite the weird legal misreadings by ambulance-proud White House lawyers.

Nevertheless, our neo-totalitarians are planning new wars in the Middle East, Far East, Conga Line! while his latest State of the Union speech justifies eavesdropping (without judicial warrants) on anybody in the United States that he wants to listen in on. This is what we call dictatorship. Dictatorship. Dictatorship. And it is time we objected before he shoves us into World War Three.

Can we wait till the next election? Only if the electronic voting machinery has paper trails or, perhaps, honest old-fashioned paper ballots. In any case, with one voice let us say, "We've had enough of you. Go home to Crawford. We'll help you raise the money for a library, and you won't ever have to read a book. We the folks are not cruel even though we must now echo America's spiritual ancestor Oliver Cromwell, in his order to the infamous Long Parliament: 'You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. And so, in the name of that God who created the whale -- Go!'"