Let me ask you a more general question pertaining to your views about the legitimate uses of American power. Your general ideological affiliation is clearly a Jeffersonian one. You're wary of entangling alliances and you believe that projections of American power tend to be driven by less than lofty motivations, and tend to often end badly. And I'm wondering if there are cases when American intervention is justified, in your mind. Let's take the example of Rwanda. Would an American military intervention into that horrific situation have been justified?

Certainly not. Minding one's own business is a virtue, and particularly if your business has traditionally been business, at which we were once very good. It is best that we keep our own house in proper order, and put our money into what Henry Clay called internal improvements. We haven't internally improved the United States plant in 50 years, and the place is falling apart.

Did you know that they don't teach geography any more in the public schools? They asked a cross-section of Americans, they showed them a globe of the world with all the continents and islands and oceans, and asked them to identify the United States. Nothing was labeled. And something like 80 percent couldn't find it. And a great many of them had a sense of humor, they picked Panama, because it's a nice little thing with two big globes, one above it, one below it.

Now if you haven't taught the people geography and history, and you're in the global empire business, you are preparing for catastrophe. People don't know where things are. They don't want to go off -- we have never wanted to go off and fight in foreign wars. The foreign wars have always been arranged for us -- now I reveal my populist roots -- but have always been the work of Eastern banks, by and large, or a governing class, which likes the idea of adventure. I specifically refer to Henry Cabot Lodge, to Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Mahon -- these are the four horsemen who gave us our first international empire, which was the Spanish-American War, which got us into the Philippines, which got us into Asia.

It was just a small group. The American people had to be dragged into World War I, and they had to be really tricked into World War II. Now, I think it was a good idea to defeat Hitler. I would have said eventually we would have gone in on England's side. But what Roosevelt faced was the fact that 80 percent of the people then, at the time of Pearl Harbor, refused to go to war. It was as flat as that. And the America First movement was huge, and everybody was in it from right wing to left wing, and so on.

So we are a pacific people, and we have plenty of territory. And yet our bankers and internationalists were very interested in foreign adventures. J.P. Morgan was largely responsible for World War I, when the Brits ran out of money in 1914, and Morgan single-handedly upheld the pound, until finally he said, well, this is absurd, and he persuaded Wilson, he said, you've got to do something. And I'm afraid we must be at war, because only a nation can uphold another nation's currency. Hence that came to pass. That is the background to our adventure.

So should we be in Rwanda, for God's sake? Yes, as a humanitarian, if we can be useful to help keep the peace, yes. But I thought the United Nations was for that.

Yes, but unfortunately the U.N. has proved ineffectual. They generally don't have the will or the muscle.

Well, it might help if we paid our dues.

You know, that piece of rhetoric -- about the U.S. being the only superpower capable of improving the world -- is beginning to sound like an absurdist joke. We have one of the most ill-run countries on earth, from having no educational system for the general public to no national healthcare. We are so far behind the other First World countries, and Americans don't even know it.

I have been reading the American press for 60 or 70 years. I have never read a story favorable to another society. Yes, we are told, Sweden has wonderful healthcare, education, daycare centers for working mothers -- but they're all alcoholics and commit suicide. Do you want to commit suicide because you have healthcare? No, you don't. It's against God's law.

I get the feeling that you would find it difficult to ever accept any American intervention, no matter how clear-cut its morality was. I understand your point that we too often fail to take care of our own business at home, but isn't reaching out to help others a sign of some kind of national maturity, and kind of moving away from a national selfishness?

Well, you describe a world that does not exist. I recommend to you a book by Smedley Butler, a major general in the Marine Corps, a commanding general of the Marine Corps at the first part of the 20th century. Smedley Butler did a memoir. And he said, basically, I was an enforcer for the Chase Manhattan Bank, for Standard Oil. He said Al Capone only operated in four city districts. I operated in four continents.

Then he goes into detail. He was in Shanghai, securing the bank's interests. He was down in Venezuela securing oil interests for Standard Oil. He was a tool of our great capitalist system, which we are told daily is the envy of the earth. The general at the end of his career blew up at the way he felt that he and the Marines had been misused in order to secure profits for these corporations. I've got some footage, I did a documentary on him. And I've got some wonderful footage of American Marines on the Great Wall of China. Americans couldn't believe that we'd ever been there, and there we were, before Nixon. It might have been nice to superimpose Nixon over the Marines, but that would have been cheating.

So if General Butler, who was an old-fashioned American, thought that about our adventures, and in retrospect, when it came time to write his memoir, was ashamed of having taken part in them, I would think that he is a knowledgeable witness, better than you and better than I.

In "The Last Empire" you denounce the rise of what you call "the national security state," and Truman's arrogation of an enormous amount of power to fight the Communist menace. But while there were clearly excesses in the fight against Communism, particularly on the Cold War domestic front, the evils of the Soviet empire, detailed for instance in the horrible revelations of the "Black Book of Communism," clearly demonstrate that our own empire was far more benign in comparison, don't you agree?

But it was also far less aggressive than we were. Stalin only made trouble on his borders, with border states. Because after all, the Russians do have a memory of being constantly invaded. We have never been invaded. Well, once we were, by the Brits. But in general, he was paranoid about that, and he was paranoid about the bad faith of the United States. Roosevelt agreed to a number of things at Yalta which really were against Stalin's interests. But he went along with it because he trusted him. Truman comes along, goes to Potsdam, discovers through a telegram from New Mexico that the atom bomb works, and he doesn't need Stalin for the final war against Japan. So he starts to break every agreement that he had made with Stalin, who then gets not only paranoid, but gets hysterical.

Then when we unite the French, the British and the American regions of Germany, leaving Stalin with Prussia, which was the lousiest part, we form another country with a new currency, which is far better than anything the Russians have got. We pretend that Stalin divided Germany. He didn't; we did.

We have absolutely rewritten all of history. It's like the famous Barak plan that Arafat turned down. This is constant rewriting. To make ourselves look quite different from what we really were. The Cold War was on Truman's head, because he thought he didn't need Stalin, he didn't like Stalin. He saw no use for us to even bother in that part of the world, but if we did, we would have the best part of Germany, which he then started to rearm, which put Stalin into great hysterics. And that's when he sealed off Berlin, and we had to do the airlift and so on, and the Cold War really got going.

That's on our head, but you're not going to hear that in the schools, and nobody will write that in the press, or if they do, it'll be in a scholarly paper, unread.

But don't you believe that Stalin would have carried out his ruthless expansionism in Eastern Europe without much provocation?

No. He'd taken just about everything he needed. Poland has always been something that the Russians have grabbed from time to time. And Czechoslovakia, they didn't seem to really want it when they started in, but they just kept on.

Where was he going to go? Some time ago, I had a conversation with a big fat man called General Vernon Walters, remember him? Just died. A great geopolitician. And he was moaning away, we were at the American Embassy in Rome, moaning away about how they're winning, they're winning everywhere. All over the world are communists, the world is going communist, and we do nothing. He said, just look at the map, you'll see what's happened. The Russians are everywhere. Communism is spreading. And we are shrinking.

I said, well, we haven't done too badly since the second war. Well, he said, look at Romania, for instance. Romania -- he started a speech. I said, oh, come off it. Stalin got Romania, and my God, every night I wake up shivering at the thought of those poor Romanians in his clutches. But we got Germany.

Well, he said, that's different. And what about his attempt in Greece? I said, he didn't attempt anything. He let the Greek Communists die. He was not going to interfere in that one.

Well, in Asia, he started. I said, yeah, yeah, he got North Korea, by God. That was shrewd of him, wasn't it. We got Japan, General. And that was the end of him. I could hear him mutter.

Is it really legitimate to compare the hegemonic control of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries with the control that the United States had over its NATO allies?

Well, we have a lighter hand. All NATO was was a means of keeping control over Western Europe. We were not there to save the French from the marching Russians. The Russians weren't marching anywhere. We were there to make sure that Western Europe didn't have Communist governments, that we could control them.

The CIA was formed in order to control public opinion. Its first great coup, and I was in Italy in 1948 at the time of the April elections when it looked like the Communists might well win it, the CIA spent a fortune. They bought newspapers, they bought magazines, they bought politicians, they bought political parties, anything to keep [Palmiro] Togliatti [the founder of the Communist Party of Italy] out of the government. And they kept him out, which I think in the long run was a mistake, as the Italian Communists were somewhat to the right of Senator Taft, a Republican figure of those days.

But just to press the point one more time, there were no tanks in the streets of Paris sent there by the United States. You say we had a lighter hand, implying that it's a matter of degree. But I would say it's a distinction in kind. I'm not arguing with your observations about the American perfidy in many ways in trying to affect the course of post-World War II Europe and suppressing political movements there that were not to our ideological liking, but nonetheless, it seems to me we should draw a shining line between that type of behavior and, you know, jackboots and tanks. It seems to me that's a distinction that we don't want to blur.

Well, I think it's a matter of degree. You have to remember how poor Russia was, and how essentially primitive their system was. When it came time to retreat from Central Europe, they didn't have enough tanks or trucks to drag their artillery out. They used horses.

So they lost, I don't know, 20 million people in the war. They were owed $20 billion in reparations, which they never got, because it was to have come from Germany, and we of course had taken Germany back, away from them. So they surround themselves with states that they don't want any trouble from, and they don't want any foreign armies crossing Poland, Czechoslovakia, whatever.

So I'm not arguing that they were a kindly, well-disposed empire. They were not. They were very clumsy and very crude in the way they did things, which was based largely on terror, what had happened to them because of terror, because of Hitler.

We were not terrified. We were dealing with old allies. We had fought for the French and the Brits before, and we were back in harness. We pretend the Marshall Plan was out of the goodness of our heart. It was to create markets for ourselves. Because the Depression had not ended at the time of Pearl Harbor. It was only when we were fully armed that we had full employment. We were terrified of going back into the Depression. So we had to get markets. And Europe was the richest place on earth, potentially, once it was rebuilt.

We rebuilt it. We can take some credit for that, for intelligence if nothing else.

Let me ask a concluding question that's a little bit more general and forward-looking. Certainly your recent work has had a Jeremiah-like tone about what you see as the collapse of American culture --

I never go on about that.

Well, you have made caustic comments about literature being in decline, being eclipsed by television --

No, readership is in decline. I've always said, we have more good writers than we have good readers.

Well, leaving aside the question of the actual cultural production, to use a Stalinist phrase, do you see any reason for hope in terms of Americans reclaiming the republican spirit that you decry having essentially been taken away from them over the last 50-odd years? Do you see any signs of stirrings against the corporate security state that you've crusaded against?

Well, if you've read my new book, you've read me on Vico. [In "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," Vidal cites the 17th- and 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who posited that human societies go through various organic phases or life cycles: chaos leads to theocracy, which becomes aristocracy, which turns into democracy, which devolves into chaos, which becomes theocracy and so on.]

Well, the theocratic comes next, which may not be much more to your liking.

Yes, brace yourself, that's what I see coming.

Which in this country would mean the ascension of Pat Robertson or John Ashcroft?

Yes, I think the greatest danger would come from the Protestant evangelicals. But there are plenty of other nuts around, as well as brand new religions. I think that the whole world is going to have to face up to the fact that we are in for a kind of religious fundamentalism, whether it's (radical Islam) in the Middle East or Christian fundamentalism in our hemisphere -- for instance, there is a Protestant evangelical movement in Brazil, where my books are quite popular. I have not contributed to the rise.

But I think that probably the next thing we're going to have to face is that religion is not a good thing. Essentially Americans are hypocrites in these matters, and we ought to be -- hypocrisy is nothing but good manners, when dealing with the pretensions of others. But I suspect we're going to have to face head on that the great disaster that befell the West was monotheism -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I think you call them the Sky God religions?

The Sky God, yeah, the children of the book, not a good book. And out of that has come more bloodshed and more terror. And I thought when I was young that we were coming to an end of it. The churches were empty. There was not much going on. And then, who would have dreamed it, out of the blue comes the most brazen calf of them all, the golden calf, television. And overnight, the evangelicals found a pulpit, and they have taken off. And because of a misreading of the First Amendment, they're tax exempt. And the only way we can put them back in a box is to tax all religions. Originally they didn't want to tax the little white church at Elm Street, because religion was a good thing. They didn't mean the portfolio of the Catholic Church or the Protestants or the Jews, or whatever.

So they are exempt from taxation. This is why every old city in the United States is falling down, because there is no money from real estate, because it's all tax exempt, to repair the cities.

So we are in an awful mess, because of monotheism. That's shorthand for the whole caboodle. So we must do something about that, and the practical thing immediately is to tax them all. That will at least raise revenues for the cities, and raise revenues for the treasury, so that we can save Rwanda yet again, because we are good people.

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