GORE VIDAL: Thank you. This is probably my first encounter in the United States with democracy. And I?ve lived a long time. Here we are in Chinatown, in the firehouse, and I feel free. But we're supposed to in a democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: Why use the word, ?imperial,? in your title, Imperial America?
GORE VIDAL: Because everyone hates it so much. I remember years ago, Time magazine, in one of its numerous attacks on me, on my first book of essays, which was heaven knows when, 30, 40 years ago, I refer to the American empire and things that we were doing that were not very good across the world, and I referred to the empire. And Time magazine dismissed me. It was an awful review. He's the sort of person that says that the United States has an empire. Well, we?ve got Guam, that's true. That's all we have got. I pointed out that we had troops and so on in over 1,000 other places around the world. That seems imperial to me, but there we are. Ever since then, I have loved the word, because it just drives them crazy. Now everybody uses it. So, I have to think of something new. Perhaps in the course of this program, we'll get a new word. If we don't, you get a new word and tell me so I can change over from empire. But we are a world empire, hated by all, and not to mention the least, our own people, since we don't have any money left for anything. So, you started to go somewhere and I had written about Bush that he's like a kind of crazy kid in a dream, and he thinks
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/04/1353259#transcriptLots more there. It was a 30 minute intervue.
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