I saw Gore Vidal talking about this book a while back and realized a good deal of what he is saying mirrored my own thoughts about our country and its government, in particular. I'd wager a lot of Americans feel the same way but we seem to have lost our voice and our willingness to question our government. A recent interview I saw with Studs Terkel on Phil Donhue's show commented directly on that very subject. He said he felt that until a major voice comes out and addresses an issue, we are prone to sit quietly. Vidal's voice needs to be heard and wouldn't have been if American publishers had any thing to say about it. After this collection of essays became a best seller in Italy, he was then approached about an American publication and voila!---we can read what some might call an unpatriotic and ungrateful voice about America. A fundamental right we have as Americans is the privilege to question our government's decisions yet we seem to sit around quietly and compliantly while our presidents act aggressively toward other nations, deeming our country the international policeman for the world community. These opinions are called unpatriotic especially after the events of 9-11 but there is nothing unpatriotic about what Mr. Vidal is saying. The people who have blinders on and think that we, these United States of America, are never wrong should read this book. We, like any other nation, have flaws. It is time to look at those flaws, address the issues and hold our government responsible for its actions. This government represents the people and we should have our say. Unfortunately, with good ole Dubya and his cowboy mentality, we have four years that should inspire us to speak out against injustice. I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about the direction our nation is taking.

Don't need to read book, just read title.

Witty, brutally honest and confrontational. Vidal proved himself with Perpetual war for perpetual peace to be a great analyst of the global implications of United States foreign policy and the reasoning of non-state terrorists and state-terrorists. He will be greatly missed as a voice against the new imperialism.

The title is not appropriate for the book, which is really just a collection of his essays from Vanity Fair in the late 90's. A lot of time is spent on Timothy McVeigh and his actions in Oklahoma City in '96. This is very engaging subject matter, however, it was the last thing I was expecting with the subtitle "How we got to be so hated". I would not recommend this book to those seeking to find the details of America's foreign policy blunders, of which there are many. Worth the read nonetheless, for those hoping to expand their understanding of the bureaucracy that plagues the United States. Slightly disappointing, Vidal's critique of the US is more often than naught very insightful, the content of this book was just very unexpected.

An excellent examination of how the US Government has alienated a huge swathe of the populace through its undemocratic practices & authoritarian approach. The book goes on to show what led to the carnage at Oklahoma and how Timothy McVeigh was a useful pawn in the process.

An interesting aspect is how the legal process let down McVeigh, highlighting the fact that poor people receive a second class service in the legal system.

Not bad -- for a guy who's so far left; he can kiss his own arse.

As usual, Vidal is pithy, eloquent, persuasive -- and as full of shit as the Porta-Potti at a turnip-eating contest. Like Noam Chomsky, he labors under the curse of building sand castles of pinko bullshit atop profound and often painful truths.

Don't get me wrong -- I like and respect the man, for all that I disagree with him (and have never met him). Although "liberal," he's a stauncher defender of the Old Republic and the principles upon which it was founded than many an ostensible "conservative." Moreover, he's no coward. A "dogface" in WWII, he had his "ass in the grass" while the Krauts did their level best to mow it. However much he despises the military in general, his affection and respect for *soldiers* is undeniable. For all his flaws, Vidal is a warrior. He's been there, done that, got the T-shirt. This sets him head and shoulders above the war-mongering, neocon "Chickenhawks" who've never even participated in a rumble or bar-fight. But it doesn't excuse him. On the contrary; he, of all people, should understand the horrors wrought by even the best-intended lies

The first five chapters are masterpieces, and so well reasoned; one actually suspects him of sincerity. By Chapter Six ("The New Theocrats"), though, one suspects that taking one too many up the tailpipe has somehow cut off the flow of blood to his brain. This is to say that if Vidal is honest, he's too poorly informed to distinguish a genuine Christian fundamentalist from an antinomian, neocon apostate. Somehow, I doubt that.

In the final chapter ("A Letter to Be Delivered"), he reveals himself as an outright liar: "Year after year, the government's official income is inflated by counting as revenue the people's Social Security and Medicare trust funds. These funds are not federal revenue." Love him or hate him, one must concede that Gore Vidal is intellectually brilliant. Moreover, his erudition and literacy render him an atavism -- a throwback to the nineteenth century. This being the case, he can't possibly be ignorant of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Helvering v. Davis.

Sorry, Tinkerbell. Social Security *is* federal revenue. The highest court in the land hath spoken -- in 1937, to boot. (This, incidentally, was a long time ago, boys and girls). And so hast thou -- albeit with forked tongue.

Big Chief Dave say, "Ugh! Gore Vidal heap bad medicine!"

I'm still giving the book four stars. Nobody's perfect, after all.

I was very disappointed in this book. It is not much more than some ramblingly annotated magazine articles, which themselves hardly shed light on anything. Perhaps a good editor could have worked it into something coherent.
There were occasional gems among the gibberish, such as the quoted comment by Bill Clinton that, "There is nothing patriotic about pretending you can love your country but despise your government."
Oh, yeah? I expect that there are millions of Americans of all political stripes who would disagree.
The main objection I have to this book is that I picked it up wanting to learn why Gore Vidal became a champion for Timothy McVeigh, executed with startling speed for the Oklahoma City bombing. But there was very little there about either McVeigh or Vidal's relationship with him or what he thought about him.
I was most intrigued by McVeigh's brief statement before sentencing in which he quoted Brandeis' dissent in Olmstead: "Brandeis was warning government that it was the teacher of the nation and when government broke laws it set an example that could only lead to imitation and anarchy." But that's about the high point of the McVeigh episode.
From that point, Vidal meanders around things like missile defense, the militarization of American society--the whole perpetual war thing, which I kind of agree with, but I swear Vidal must have been deep into the martinis when he wrote, thinking what he was writing was brilliant when it is just random railing.

This book should be required reading for all high school students. Perhaps it will help curb our lust for killing.

Very brave, very unstructured, very eye-opening, extremely passionate perusal of state as it is in the modern times.

Q:
Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on. (c)
Q:
One of the problems of a society as tightly controlled as ours is that we get so little information about what those of our fellow citizens whom we will never know or see are actually thinking and feeling. This seems a paradox when most politics today involves minute-by-minute poll taking on what looks to be every conceivable subject, but, as politicians and pollsters know, it’s how the question is asked that determines the response. Also, there are vast areas, like rural America, that are an unmapped ultima Thule to those who own the corporations that own the media that spend billions of dollars to take polls in order to elect their lawyers to high office. (c)

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, published just after 9/11 but before DC began its decades-long debacle in central Asia, destabilizing the region, creating generations of new terrorists, and enriching the arms dealers who dictate so much of DC's foreign policy, condemns the police state that DC was already building and points to the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden as reactions against a long train of abuses by that state. Vidal does not write in defense of McVeigh and bin Laden: their actions were reprehensible. To dismiss them as crazy, however, or simply Evil -- as though they existed only to be comic book villains, creating chaos and sowing destruction for their own amusement -- is to remain ignorant. Both men were operating from motives that can be understood -- even if not agreed with. Bin Laden opposed DC treating the whole of central Asia as an area to be maneuvered and ordered about in accordance with DC's own desires: McVeigh opposed DC's police state and undeclared war on its own citizens, most dramatically broadcast in the Waco massacre and the murderous farce of a police action that was the assault on Ruby Ridge. Vidal is a potent critic, not simply because of his prescience, passion or prose style, but because he can't be boxed in as an ideologue: he attacks Democrats and Republicans alike, subjects the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal to the same withering rebuke, and would not be embraced by libertarians, either, given his contempt for business mergers and the lack of a National Health Service in the US.

Eye opening.

Published in 2002 -- eight years before Citizens United -- the reader gets the idea very quickly that Gore Vidal was prescient. He connected a lot of dots to draw a very vivid and clear picture of the America we now live in -- eleven years before today. None of what we deal with in terms of eroding civil rights, dominance of the military industrial complex, and the surveillance state that engulfs America today would surprise him if he were still alive.

Vidal saw and wrote about "shredding of the Bill of Rights" years before any of us had heard of Edward Snowden or learned that the NSA was keeping track of every phone call, text and email message sent by every American, every day.

In the book, Vidal also goes inside the mind of Timothy McVeigh, and explores the motivation of Osama bin Laden.

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace is an easy and quick read. Vidal's writing style is eloquent, engaging and thought provoking. The one criticism I have is that I wish the book had footnotes to check on some of the detailed specific claims (statistics or government spending figures, for example). Nevertheless, I found the book to be quite enlightening.