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Gore Vidal and the state of the union: Gore Vidal has long prophesied what has become commonplace in US politics.

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Gore Vidal has been a presence in American literary, political and media life for over half a century. He first appeared in a newsreel in 1935 when he briefly piloted a plane as part of his father's promotion of the ease of flight; seventy years later he was giving interviews on American politics. In between he has published at least twenty-five novels and written several hundred essays, a number of political pamphlets, scores of plays, and television and movie scripts. While several of his most important novels are set in the ancient world, his central preoccupation has been the creation and the destruction of the American republic. He can claim to have written both the most substantial fictional history of the United States in his time, and to have interrogated the workings of mass media, religion, gender and ecology in the second half of the twentieth century. His novels The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge made him a pioneering (albeit reluctant) figure in the gay/queer revolution that still reverberates within American political life. Through his writing, his television appearances, his political campaigns, even as the imaginary Senator in the film Bob Roberts or the reactionary Law Professor in With Honors, Vidal has managed to lecture Americans about their nation's failings for half a century.

By the turn of the century, Vidal's political analysis was so critical of mainstream American politics as to place him outside the conventional divide between liberals and conservatives, or, as the current language has it, between 'blue' (Democrat) and 'red' (Republican) America. (I am not sure why American usage has reversed the long established link of 'red' to the parties of the left, which must sound ironic to a generation who grew up in fear of 'the red menace'.) In 2002, Vidal published his pamphlet Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (the title comes from a phrase of Charles Beard's, the radical American historian), but only after sections of the manuscript had been rejected for publication in the United States and had first appeared in France and Italy.

His subsequent pamphlet, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, was listed by Amazon books as particularly popular in Californian college towns, in Jamaica, in New York and in Croatia. The essays have been translated into over half a dozen languages, and attending the Adelaide Festival of Ideas in 2003, I noticed both books selling well to the largely middle-class and middle-aged Australian audience. Yet Todd Gitlin, a former SDS leader and a man still identified with the Left, excoriated Vidal for his views in these pamphlets, referring to him in an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail in September 2002 as a former great wit, now 'a witless crank'.

The lead essay in Dreaming War first appeared as a cover story in the London Observer, whose cover proclaimed a 'shocking new view of 9/11'. While Vidal suggested that warnings of a terror attack had been ignored (a charge subsequently made in Against all Enemies by Richard Clarke, head of counter intelligence within the White House), his main concern was to argue that the Bush Administration used the attacks as a pretext for war with Afghanistan, and then Iraq, because of a desire to control oil resources in...

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