From Complicity to Contempt
An American Writer and Veteran Speaks Out Against American Lies
by Timothy V. Gatto. 338 pages $13.95, ISBN 978-0-9819891-1-2
Tim Gatto is. . . to our American literary population what the spotted owl is to our national wildlife.
He won't offer you anything fancy . . . [but in Gatto] you'll experience the conscience of a true American patriot, writer, and veteran who. . . has insisted all his adult life on actually making use of the freedom to use his own eyes, to use his
own mind and intellect, to read voluminously, and to look through the surfaces of things and down to the reality beneath. When I said "things" just now, I could as well. have said "lies." And when I said "the reality beneath," I could just as well have said "the truth."
I have been following Tim Gatto's work for several years now. And I couldn't hold either him or it in higher esteem than I do.
—From the Introduction by Eric Larsen
From Complicity to Contempt details the changing political views of an Army veteran of 21 years. From the opening of the "Global war on Terror," this writer-patriot saw that his beliefs about his country were no longer based on truth. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were being dismantled in plain sight and the majority of his fellow citizens were either unaware of it or failing to stop it. Gatto's book provides a highly personal but also powerful look into the frustration and anger of an American who came to see that everything he'd stood for throughout his entire life was being turned into a fraud and charade.
Tim Gatto was born in 1950 and grew up in the Cold War era. Idealistically, he enlisted in the Army in 1968, though the Vietnam War soon began shaping and changing his ideas about American foreign policy, much as it did for most of his generation. While still serving, he joined the protest against the war. And later, after witnessing the fraudulent run-up to the Iraq war engineered by the Bush administration, he became politically active all over again—and began writing, prolifically and for an ever-widening audience. He lives in South Carolina , a liberal in one of the reddest states in the country.