by Gore Vidal
Together, Otto and Sylvester lavished their love and their ambition upon the Romans, who hated both of them with a passion. In the year that our common millennium properly began, 1001, the Romans drove emperor and pope out of the city. Otto died at twenty-two near Viterbo, of smallpox. A year later, Sylvester was dead, having first, it is said, invented the organ. Thus, the dream of a European union ended in disaster for the two dreamers.
I will not go so far as to say that the thousand years since Otto’s death have been a total waste of time. Certainly, other dreamers have had similar centripetal dreams. But those centrifugal forces that hold us in permanent thrall invariably undo the various confederacies, leagues, empires, thousand-year-old reichs that the centripetalists would impose upon us from the top down.
Some years ago I had a lively exchange at an Oxford political club. I had remarked that the nation state, as we know it, was the nineteenth-century invention of Bismarck when he united the German tribes in order to beat the Franks, and of Lincoln in North America when he deprived of all significant power our loosely federated states in favor of a mystical highly centralized union. A not so kindly don instructed me that, as everyone knows, the nation state was the result of the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia. I said that I was aware that that was indeed the received opinion, which he had been hired to dispense, but it was plain to me that the forceful bringing together of disparate peoples against their will and imposing on them universal education—to make them like-minded and subservient—as well as military conscription, signified the end of one sort of democratic era, to advert to Vico’s triad, and the beginning of our modern unwieldy and, for their unhappy residents, most onerous nation states.
What is happening today in the old Soviet Union and Yugoslavia—as well as the thousand-and-one rebellions of subject tribes against master tribes—seems to me a very good thing if we are able to draw the right lesson from all this turbulence. Thanks to CNN and other television networks, we follow, day by day, at least one or two of the thousand or so wars for “freedom” that are simultaneously being fought as worn-out centralized political structures collapse. Instead of wringing our hands and dreaming dreams of a peaceful world order centered upon Brussels or Strasburg, why not accept the fact that if people want to separate they should be allowed to? The sky will not fall in. In due course, the Muslim states of the southern tier of the old Soviet Union may want to come together in some sort of loose trade and cultural and, alas, religious federation. Why oppose them? Western Europe has already gone about as far as it needs to go toward unification. A common currency will mean a common tax collector, which will mean a common police force, which will mean tyranny in the long run and a lot of time wasted in the short run. Despite the Norwegians’ insistence on giving peace prizes to the wrong people, they are not entirely stupid when it comes to their common good.
The dream of Otto and Sylvester, if ever made even partial reality, will hasten a new theocratic age, which will promptly become imperial thanks to modern technology. The world could then, most easily, become a prison for us all and with no world elsewhere to escape to.
Great centrifugal forces are at work all around the earth, and why resist them? For the centripetally minded—theocratic or imperial or both—the mosaic of different tribes that will occupy Europe from homely Bantry to glittering Vladivostok are bound to come together in the interest of mundane trade. Is not that quite enough? At least in the absence of a new god.
Certainly, there is greater safety for the individual in a multitude of states where the citizen is computerized, as it were, upon a tape, than there can possibly be in any vast centralized state. Although the United States is only a middling-size country, it is often at the so-called cutting edge when it comes to the very latest technologies of control. Recently a government spokesman noted that by the year 2008 there will be a central computer that will contain every American’s financial dealings, including bank balances, use of credit cards, and so on. At the touch of a button, the Treasury will know who has what money and the Treasury will then be able to deduct what it thinks it may need in the way of tax. “The power to tax; the power to destroy,” as Emerson is said to have said.
Meanwhile, total control over all of the people all of the time is the traditional aim of almost every government. In earlier times, this was only a tyrant’s dream. Now it is technically possible. And has any technology ever not been put to use? We are told that democracy is a safeguard against misuse of power. I wouldn’t know. I have never lived in a democracy. There are several near-democracies in Europe, small countries like Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, small relatively homogeneous—or, like Switzerland, ingeniously balanced heterogeneous—populations that are able to put important issues immediately to the people through referenda. Large states cannot or will not do this. Certainly no serious attempt to create a democracy has ever been made in the United States—and now it is far too late in the day for us.
John Adams proudly proclaimed that Americans would have a government not of men but of laws. We have; but what laws!
As you may gather, I hate the nation state as it has been evolving in my time and now looks to be metastasizing in all of Europe and, perhaps, parts of Asia. I am literally a grandchild of the American Civil War, and I belonged to the losing side. Had the issue of that war been the abolition of slavery, I could not have faulted our defeat—morally at least. But Mr. Lincoln—the first of the modern tyrants—chose to fight the war not on the issue of slavery but on the holiness and indivisibility of a union that he alone had any understanding of. With his centralizing of all power at Washington this “reborn” (sic) union was ready for a world empire that has done us as little good as it has done the world we have made so many messes in.
Europeans think, rather smugly, that they are not given to such primitive Christianity as Americans, but this is wishful thinking. In bad times who knows what terrible gods will emerge from under the flat rocks of this old continent that has given the world so much mindless savagery in the twentieth century alone.
Meanwhile, for better or for worse, and for as long as possible, let pluralism and diversity be our aim. There is already more than enough union, through international cartels, which pay no nation loyalty, much less tax, and through television, which is better off in the hands of numerous minor states that it can ever be as the “public” television of any great united state.
Should a theocratic age be upon us—and certainly fundamentalist Christians, Jews, and Muslims have never been busier—then the larger the political entity, the greater the danger for that administrative unit the citizen. Currently, in the United States, militant Jesus-Christers are organizing in order to take political control not only at the local level but at that of the Congress itself. This is disturbing.
In the last century a Speaker of the American House of Representatives was so reactionary that it was said of him that if God had consulted him about creation, he would have voted for chaos. Considering the alternatives, so would I.
Oxford Amnesty Lecture, 1995
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PART IV
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* SHREDDING THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert Hoover was dead. The heart and mind of a nation stopped. But how many recall when and how they first became aware that one or another of the Bill of Rights had expired? For me, it was sometime in 1960 at a party in Beverly Hills that I got the bad news from the constitutionally cheery actor Cary Grant. He had just flown in from New York. He had, he said, picked up his ticket at an airline counter in that magical old-world airport, Idlewild, whose very name reflected our condition. “There were these lovely girls behind the counter, and they were delighted to help me, or so they said. I signed some autographs. Then I asked one of them for my tickets. Suddenly she was very solemn. ‘Do you have any identification?’ she asked.” (Worldly friends tell me
that the “premise” of this story is now the basis of a series of TV commercials for Visa, unseen by me.) I would be exaggerating if I felt the chill in the air that long-ago Beverly Hills evening. Actually, we simply laughed. But I did, for just an instant, wonder if the future had tapped a dainty foot on our mass grave.
Curiously enough, it was Grant again who bore, as lightly as ever, the news that privacy itself hangs by a gossamer thread. “A friend in London rang me this morning,” he said. This was June 4, 1963. “Usually we have code names, but this time he forgot. So after he asked for me I said into the receiver, ‘All right. St. Louis, off the line. You, too, Milwaukee,’ and so on. The operators love listening in. Anyway, after we talked business, he said, ‘So what’s the latest Hollywood gossip?’ And I said, ‘Well, Lana Turner is still having an affair with that black baseball pitcher.’ One of the operators on the line gave a terrible cry, ‘Oh, no!’ ”
Innocent days. Today, as media and Congress thunder their anthem, “Twinkle, twinkle, little Starr, how we wonder what you are,” the current president is assumed to have no right at all to privacy because, you see, it’s really about sex, not truth, a permanent nonstarter in political life. Where Grant’s name assured him an admiring audience of telephone operators, the rest of us were usually ignored. That was then. Today, in the all-out, never-to-be-won twin wars on Drugs and Terrorism, two million telephone conversations a year are intercepted by law-enforcement officials. As for that famous “workplace” to which so many Americans are assigned by necessity, “the daily abuse of civil liberties . . . is a national disgrace,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1996 report.
Among the report’s findings, between 1990 and 1996, the number of workers under electronic surveillance increased from 8 million per year to more than 30 million. Simultaneously, employers eavesdrop on an estimated 400 million telephone conversations a year—something like 750 a minute. In 1990, major companies subjected 38 percent of their employees to urine tests for drugs. By 1996, more than 70 percent were thus interfered with. Recourse to law has not been encouraging. In fact, the California Supreme Court has upheld the right of public employers to drug-test not only those employees who have been entrusted with flying jet aircraft or protecting our borders from Panamanian imperialism but also those who simply mop the floors. The court also ruled that governments can screen applicants for drugs and alcohol. This was inspired by the actions of the city-state of Glendale, California, which wanted to test all employees due for promotion. Suit was brought against Glendale on the ground that it was violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Glendale’s policy was upheld by the California Supreme Court, but Justice Stanley Mosk wrote a dissent: “Drug testing represents a significant additional invasion of those applicants’ basic rights to privacy and dignity . . . and the city has not carried its considerable burden of showing that such an invasion is justified in the case of all applicants offered employment.”
In the last year or so I have had two Cary Grant–like revelations, considerably grimmer than what went on in the good old days of relative freedom from the state. A well-known acting couple and their two small children came to see me one summer. Photos were taken of their four-year-old and six-year-old cavorting bare in the sea. When the couple got home to Manhattan, the father dropped the negatives off at a drugstore to be printed. Later, a frantic call from his fortunately friendly druggist: “If I print these I’ve got to report you and you could get five years in the slammer for kiddie porn.” The war on kiddie porn is now getting into high gear, though I was once assured by Wardell Pomeroy, Alfred Kinsey’s colleague in sex research, that pedophilia was barely a blip on the statistical screen, somewhere down there with farm lads and their animal friends.
It has always been a mark of American freedom that unlike countries under constant Napoleonic surveillance, we are not obliged to carry identification to show to curious officials and pushy police. But now, due to Terrorism, every one of us is stopped at airports and obliged to show an ID which must include a mug shot (something, as Allah knows, no terrorist would ever dare fake). In Chicago after an interview with Studs Terkel, I complained that since I don’t have a driver’s license, I must carry a passport in my own country as if I were a citizen of the old Soviet Union. Terkel has had the same trouble. “I was asked for my ID—with photo—at this southern airport, and I said I didn’t have anything except the local newspaper with a big picture of me on the front page, which I showed them, but they said that that was not an ID. Finally, they got tired of me and let me on the plane.”
Lately, I have been going through statistics about terrorism (usually direct responses to crimes our government has committed against foreigners—although, recently, federal crimes against our own people are increasing). Only twice in twelve years has an American commercial plane been destroyed in flight by terrorists; neither originated in the United States. To prevent, however, a repetition of these two crimes, hundreds of millions of travelers must now be subjected to searches, seizures, delays.
The state of the art of citizen-harassment is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, new devices, at ever greater expense, are coming onto the market—and, soon, to an airport near you—including the dream machine of every horny schoolboy. The “Body Search” Contraband Detection System, created by American Science and Engineering, can “X-ray” through clothing to reveal the naked body, whose enlarged image can then be cast onto a screen for prurient analysis. The proud manufacturer boasts that the picture is so clear that even navels, unless packed with cocaine and taped over, can be seen winking at the voyeurs. The system also has what is called, according to an ACLU report, “a joystick-driven Zoom Option” that allows the operator to enlarge interesting portions of the image. During all this, the victim remains, as AS&E proudly notes, fully clothed. Orders for this machine should be addressed to the Reverend Pat Robertson and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, while the proud new owner of “Body Search” will be automatically included in the FBI’s database of Sexual Degenerates—Class B. Meanwhile, in February 1997, the “Al” Gore Commission called for the acquisition of fifty-four high-tech bomb-detection machines known as the CTX 5000, a baggage scanner that is a bargain at a million dollars and will cost only $100,000 a year to service. Unfortunately, the CTX 5000 scans baggage at the rate of 250 per hour, which would mean perhaps a thousand are needed to “protect” passengers at major airports from those two putative terrorists who might—or might not—strike again in the next twelve years, as they twice did in the last twelve years. Since the present scanning system seems fairly effective, why subject passengers to hours of delay, not to mention more than $54 million worth of equipment?
Presently, somewhat confused guidelines exist so that airline personnel can recognize at a glance someone who fits the “profile” of a potential terrorist. Obviously, anyone of mildly dusky hue who is wearing a fez gets busted on the spot. For those terrorists who do not seem to fit the “profile,” relevant government agencies have come up with the following behavioral tips that should quickly reveal the evildoer. A devious drug smuggler is apt to be the very first person off the plane unless, of course, he is truly devious and chooses to be the last one off. Debonair master criminals often opt for a middle position. Single blond young women are often used, unwittingly, to carry bombs or drugs given them by Omar Sharif look-alikes in sinister Casbahs. Upon arrival in freedom’s land, great drug-sniffing dogs will be turned loose on them; unfortunately, these canine detectives often mistakenly target as drug carriers women that are undergoing their menstrual period: the sort of icebreaker that often leads to merry laughter all around the customs area. Apparently one absolutely sure behavioral giveaway is undue nervousness on the part of a passenger though, again, the master criminal will sometimes appear to be too much at ease. In any case, whatever mad rule of thumb is applied, a customs official has every right to treat anyone as a criminal on no evide
nce at all; to seize and to search without, of course, due process of law.
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. In 1970, I wrote in The New York Times, of all uncongenial places,
It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect—good or bad—the drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don’t say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know—unlike “speed,” which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which can be addictive and difficult to kick. Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbors’ pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor’s idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).
I suspect that what I wrote twenty-eight years ago is every bit as unacceptable now as it was then, with the added problem of irritable ladies who object to my sexism in putting the case solely in masculine terms, as did the sexist founders.
I also noted the failure of the prohibition of alcohol from 1919 to 1933. And the crime wave that Prohibition set in motion so like the one today since “both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be no money in them for anyone.” Will anything sensible be done? I wondered. “The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money—and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse.” I suppose, if nothing else, I was a pretty good prophet.
