No, no, there's no debate going on right now. They are essentially the same on the basic issues. They are both candidates of corporate America. They're paid for. How did George W. Bush, a man who has officially [advocated for] education, but has carefully avoided education for himself, end up where he's at? He's about the most ignorant man who has ever run for president. Apart from his dyslexia, which his father also had, it's bad enough when he can't make a speech that isn't filled with garbled words, but he got $70 million from corporate America, and they expect him to pay them off. He got it because he was the son of a president. Nobody forgets that his dad was a total failure. The Persian Gulf War was essentially a victory for Ted Turner and CNN.

You have two candidates. Gore is by far the better trained and more intelligent and is going to win. It's as simple as that. But I worry because he, too, is funded by corporate America. Luckily he's intelligent and will hopefully turn out pretty well. But what I'm concerned about is how the corruption of the system has become totally accepted. This can be changed by an act of Congress, but no one will be propose it.

Will it happen? No burglar who ever reached the second floor ever kicked the ladder away.

Many people complain that the media doesn't cover Ralph Nader, say, or cover campaign finance reform. But I know, and we can tell, that when I write about campaign finance reform, people don't read it.

Well, I have an observation to make about your sad tale. How could a Ralph Nader story be interesting? He has been turned into the national scold, just as I am referred to as a "gadfly." I assume that's because intellectual is too difficult a word to spell. He has been made the bore of all time. Even I, who quite admire him in some ways, find him very boring. But he's not boring; he's presented as a bore, as a nag. Seat belts! I'm here in New York, and every time I get into a taxicab these voices come on that say "buckle up," I think of Ralph Nader. Now this has destroyed him! You have made him the bore of all time.

It's all about getting rid of anybody who wants change, and you create an aura about him. I've been demonized for 50 years, I'm aware of how it's done.

In your book, the character Caroline bemoans the fact that both Churchill and Mussolini are journalists by trade, thus they "thought in headlines." I hate to keep bringing up your distant cousin, but Al Gore of course also was a journalist by trade, initially.

Well he was filling in. He was running for president, I gather, from the family from the very beginning. From the time he was at St. Albans. A school I attended, some time before him. That's what you do when the family trade is politics. Nobody runs to be a member of the House of Representatives. You run to see how far you can go. I don't think of him as ever being a serious journalist.

You said earlier he had been reaching out to you, and trying to get in touch with you and you are seeing Karenna, his daughter, soon ...

She's coming to the opening of the play on Sunday. I suppose in due course I'll see him, but I'm really interested in the crack-up of a political system. Each year it's worse and worse. Each election gets worse -- and that's what we should be talking about, when a society is totally corrupt, in its political life, and practically everything else, too. How do you rectify it?

How do you rectify it then?

Well, as I described, an act of Congress, you can force the networks, cable, to provide free time.

How do you get Congress to do that? One would think, first of all, that Congress might be interested in taking some of the power away from the corporations and putting it back on Capitol Hill or at the White House as it was in the novel you just wrote.

Woodrow Wilson foresaw this, curiously enough. He was a pretty tiresome, self-righteous man, but he did say that he had wanted to be a great domestic president, and of course he ended up as a war president. And he said we are going to end up, the entire country, in the hands of Wall Street. The very people we Democrats are in politics to curb their excesses. And it happened ... So how could anybody in Congress -- unless he comes from a very small state, it's rather expensive to run for office -- there's nothing they can do, the big players are all there, the Finance Committee, the Senate just exists to make sure that great corporations pay practically no tax on their profits.

So Congress will only act when the American people ...

And the American people are insufficiently informed to be able to get their act together.

And they would become informed by the media ...

But the media won't do it, they're all run by the corporations, so it's all locked up. So that just leaves Noam Chomsky and me.

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