Gore Vidal and Morris Berman look at the sorry state of today's United States

gore vidal has an excellent, albeit lengthy, post in the weekend edition of alternet... here's a snippet but i do strongly recommend you read the whole thing...

I have read many . . . descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire," by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early '70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!

i have always admired and appreciated gore vidal's wisdom and insight and the fact that he, in turn, admires and appreciates that of morris berman, one of my intellectual heroes, is gratifying... two of mr. berman's previous works, "the reenchantment of the world" and "coming to our senses," have been enormously influential on the formation of my world view and i am glad to hear he is still out there, enriching those of us who care to pay attention...

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