Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002)

At 9:30pm last night I went looking for Jupiter (above). A sudden impulse that came between watching a movie and flossing my teeth. Earlier in the day CBC Radio announced that Jupiter will never be closer to Earth in our lifetime than tonight, and it was the "our" part that caught my attention. "Our" as in all of us.

My bedtime ritual is now up to 45 minutes -- 90 minutes if you include reading. Until my early-fifties, going to bed was a matter of brushing my teeth, taking off my clothes and slipping between the covers. Six years ago, when I returned to school to do a Masters degree, I switched from showering the night off to showering the day off. That's when it started (and when I started remembering my dreams again).

I'm not sure what reminded me of Jupiter. But something I am sure of is that I want to know more about how we are reminded of things, for I am of the belief that this knowledge -- the how -- comes to us only at the time of our deaths. Knowing more about Death (in advance of it) will only add dimension to Life. Fair to say?

The book I am reading is Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta by Gore Vidal. I found it on a blanket with other books, CD and DVDs at a front yard sale near Commercial Drive a couple weeks ago. The person "manning" the blanket looked to be in their twenties and might have read the book, but it was hard to tell, despite our conversation about who the players were at the turn of the last century.

At one point they asked if 2000 Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore was related to the book's author. I didn't know what to say. Being of high emotional intelligence, the vendor seemed to take my incredulity personally and shrugged without bringing down their shoulders, "Well, I wonder because in Scandinavian countries people take a parent's first name as their last name." To which the smart ass crouching next to me said, "If that's the case, wouldn't one of them be a Goreson?" and then leaving us with the open-mouthed duh face that ruins everything.

My introduction to Gore Vidal came in a People magazine article back in the mid-1970s. The article, which was full of dynamic black-and-white pictures of well-dressed socalities at an uptown Manhattan penthouse, focused on a feud between Vidal and Norman Mailer that likely had them invited to every party that was anything. Later I came to understand these two as representative of something we don't have anymore, and that's writers whose public intellectualism extends beyond their social media declarations to include not just essays and novels on contemporary life and its myriad contradictions and hypocrisies, but spontaneous debates where intellectuals hash it out, all the while protected under the once sacred covenant that it is okay to agree to disagree, and that we, the public, are the wiser for it.

Dreaming of War is made up of commissioned essays published both before and after 9/11. The one that most excites me is "Three Lies to Rule By" and was commissioned by the Times Literary Supplement, November 10, 2000. Though I find Vidal's asides annoying (sarcasm is a tendency common to those who are tired of knowing better than everyone else in the room), he has his insights, which I attribute to good research skills (he is an expert on the lifetimes of U.S. presidents), but also his access to Washington D.C's political elite.

This tweet-sized quote is attributed to the amazing Elaine May:

"I like a moral problem so much better than a real problem."

This one to Montaigne (1533-1592):

"Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up."

This one from former POTUS Herbert Hoover:

"What this country needs is a great poem."

(Interestingly, it was Hoover, Vidal notes [after his favourite historian Willam Appleton Williams], who saw his Democratic successor FDR as engaging in his own form of totalitarianism relative to contemporaries Hitler and Stalin.)

This from Vidal:

"... the relationship between [B]lack and white is still the most delicate of subjects for Americans ..."

And my favourite (my italics):

"But I am a fairly experienced narrator, and each character is, painlessly I hope, explained in context. Unfortunately, the new pop wisdom is that you must only write about what the readers already know about, which, in this case at least, would be an untrue story."