by Gore Vidal
I don’t think this would get the same gasp today that it did back then. I point out police collusion with gamblers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and, indeed, anyone whose sexual activities have been proscribed by a series of state legal codes that were—are—the scandal of what we like to call a free society. These codes are often defended because they are very old. For instance, the laws against sodomy go back 1,400 years to the Emperor Justinian, who felt that there should be such laws because, “as everyone knows,” he declared, “sodomy is a principal cause of earthquake.”
Sodomy gets the audience’s attention. “Cynically, one might allow the police their kinky pleasures in busting boys and girls who attract them if they showed the slightest interest in the protection of persons and property, which is what we pay them to do.” I then suggested that “we remove from the statute books all penalties that have to do with private morals—what are called ‘victimless crimes.’ If a man or a woman wants to be a prostitute, that is his or her affair. Certainly, it is no business of the state what we do with our bodies sexually. Obviously, laws will remain on the books for the prevention of rape and the abuse of children, while the virtue of our animal friends will continue to be protected by the SPCA.” Relieved laughter at this point. He can’t be serious—or is he?
I speak of legalizing gambling. Bingo players nod. Then: “All drugs should be legalized and sold at cost to anyone with a doctor’s prescription.” Most questions, later, are about this horrific proposal. Brainwashing on the subject begins early, insuring that a large crop of the coming generation will become drug addicts. Prohibition always has that effect, as we should have learned when we prohibited alcohol from 1919 to 1933; but, happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing. The period of Prohibition called the “Noble Experiment” brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order that we have ever endured—until today, of course. Lesson? Do not regulate the private lives of people, because if you do they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals, who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.
What should be done about drug addiction? As of 1970, England was the model for us to emulate. With a population of 55 million people, they had only 1,800 heroin addicts. With our 200 million people we had nearly a half-million addicts. What were they doing right? For one thing, they turned the problem over to the doctors. Instead of treating the addict as a criminal, they required him to register with a physician, who then gives him, at controlled intervals, a prescription so that he can obtain his drug. Needless to say, our society, based as it is on a passion to punish others, could not bear so sensible a solution. We promptly leaned, as they say, on the British to criminalize the sale and consumption of drugs, and now the beautiful city of Edinburgh is one of the most drug-infested places in Europe. Another triumph for the American way.
I start to expand. “From the Drug Enforcement Administration to the FBI, we are afflicted with all sorts of secret police, busily spying on us. The FBI, since its founding, has generally steered clear of major crime like the Mafia. In fact, much of its time and energies have been devoted to spying on those Americans whose political beliefs did not please the late J. Edgar Hoover, a man who hated commies, blacks, and women in, more or less, that order. But then the FBI has always been a collaborating tool of reactionary politicians. The bureau also has had a nasty talent for amusing presidents with lurid dossiers on their political enemies.” Now in the year 2004, when we have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns, Homeland Security appears to be uniting our secret police into a single sort of Gestapo with dossiers on everyone to prevent us, somehow or other, from being terrorized by various implacable Second and Third World enemies. Where there is no known Al Qaeda sort of threat, we create one, as in Iraq, whose leader, Saddam Hussein, had no connection with 9/11 or any other proven terrorism against the United States, making it necessary for a president to invent the lawless as well as evil (to use his Bible-based language) doctrine of pre-emptive war based on a sort of hunch that maybe one day some country might attack us, so, meanwhile, as he and his business associates covet their oil, we go to war, leveling their cities to be rebuilt by other business associates. Thus was our perpetual cold war turned hot.
My father, uncle, and two stepbrothers graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I was born in the cadet hospital. Although I was brought up by a political grandfather in Washington, D.C., I was well immersed in the West Point ethos—Duty, Honor, Country—as was David Eisenhower, the president’s grandson, whom I met years later. We exchanged notes on how difficult it was to free oneself from that world. “They never let go,” I said. “It’s like a family.”
“No,” he said, “it’s a religion.” Although neither of us attended the Point, each was born in the cadet hospital; each went to Exeter; each grew up listening to West Pointers gossip about one another as well as vent their political views, usually to the far right. At the time of the Second World War, many of them thought we were fighting the wrong side. We should be helping Hitler destroy Communism. Later, we could take care of him. In general, they disliked politicians, Franklin Roosevelt most of all. There was also a degree of low-key anti-Semitism, while pre–World War II blacks were Ellisonian invisibles. Even so, in that great war, Duty and Honor served the country surprisingly well. Unfortunately, some served themselves well when Truman militarized the economy, providing all sorts of lucrative civilian employment for high-ranking officers. Yet it was Eisenhower himself who warned us in 1961 of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.” Unfortunately, no one seemed eager to control military spending, particularly after the Korean War, which we notoriously failed to win even though the cry “The Russians are coming!” was heard daily throughout the land. Propaganda necessary for Truman’s military buildup was never questioned…particularly when demagogues like Senator McCarthy were destroying careers with reckless accusations that anyone able to read The New York Times without moving his lips was a Communist. I touched, glancingly, on all this in Nixonian 1972, when the media, Corporate America, and the highly peculiar president were creating as much terror in the populace as they could in order to build up a war machine that they thought would prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression, which had only ended in 1940 when FDR put billions into rearmament and we had full employment and prosperity for the first time in that generation.
I strike a few mildly optimistic notes. “We should have a national health service, something every civilized country in the world has. Also, improved public transport (trains!). Also, schools which do more than teach conformity. Also, a cleaning of the air, of the water, of the earth before we all die of the poisons set loose by a society based on greed.” Enron, of course, is decades in the future, as are the American wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the end, we may offer Richard Nixon a debt of gratitude. I’m in a generous mood. “Through Nixon’s awesome ineptitude we have seen revealed the political corruption of our society.” (We had, of course, seen nothing yet!) What to do? I proposed that no candidate for any office be allowed to buy space on television or in any newspaper or other medium: “This will stop cold the present system, where presidents and congressmen are bought by corporations and even by foreign countries. To become president, you will not need thirty, forty, fifty million dollars to smear your opponents and present yourself falsely on TV commercials.” Were the sums ever so tiny?
Instead, television (and the rest of the media) would be required by law to provide prime time (and space) for the various candidates.
“I would also propose a four-week election period as opposed to the current four-year marathon. Four weeks is more than enough time to present the issues. To show us the candidates in interviews, debates, uncontrolled encou
nters, in which we can see who the candidate really is, answering tough questions, his record up there for all to examine. This ought to get a better class into politics.” As I reread this, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I now add: Should the candidate happen to be a professional actor, a scene or two from Shakespeare might be required during the audition…I mean, the primary. Also, as a tribute to Ole Bell Fruit, who favors public executions of drug dealers, these should take place during prime time as the empire gallops into its Ben-Hur phase.
I must say, I am troubled by the way I responded to the audience’s general hatred of government. I say we are the government. But I was being sophistical when I responded to their claims that our government is our enemy with that other cliché, you are the government. Unconsciously, I seem to have been avoiding the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: We hate this system that we are trapped in, but we don’t know who has trapped us or how. We don’t even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside. Now, thirty-two years later, audiences still want to know who will let them out of the Enron-Pentagon prison with its socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. So…welcome to Imperial America.
The Nation
September 13, 2004
GORE VIDAL was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.
JAY PARINI is an American writer and academic. Among his works of fiction and criticism are The Last Station, John Steinbeck, and Benjamin’s Crossing. Parini is Gore Vidal’s literary executor and a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian. In 1976, he cofounded New England Review, and he has taught at Middlebury College since 1982. He lives in Vermont.
Also by Gore Vidal
NOVELS
Williwaw
In a Yellow Wood
The City and the Pillar
The Season of Comfort
A Search for the King
Dark Green, Bright Red
The Judgment of Paris
Messiah
Julian
Washington, D.C.
Myra Breckinridge
Two Sisters
Burr
Myron
1876
Kalki
Creation
Duluth
Lincoln
Empire
Hollywood
Live from Golgotha
The Smithsonian Institution
The Golden Age
NONFICTION
Inventing a Nation
SHORT STORIES
A Thirsty Evil
Clouds and Eclipses
PLAYS
An Evening with Richard Nixon
Weekend
Romulus
On the March to the Sea
The Best Man
Visit to a Small Planet
ESSAYS
Rocking the Boat
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship
Homage to Daniel Shays
Matters of Fact and of Fiction
The Second American Revolution
At Home
Screening History
United States
The Last Empire
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
Imperial America
MEMOIRS
Palimpsest
Point to Point Navigation
FOOTNOTES
*1I have not read La speculazione edilizia (1957). From the description of it in Dizionario della letteratura italiana contemporanea, it is a general indictment of Italy’s postwar building boom and of the helplessness of the intellectual Quinto Anfossi to come to terms with “cement fever.”
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*2I have omitted an interesting short novel because it is not part of the New York cycle. Powell made one trip to Europe after the war. Although Paris was no match for the Village, Powell, ever thrifty, uses the city as a background for a young man and woman trapped in A Cage for Lovers (published the year that Dawn roared at me in the Booth Theatre). The girl is a secretary-companion to a monster-lady, and the young man her chauffeur. The writing is austere; there are few characters; the old lady, Lesley Patterson, keeper of the cage, is truly dreadful in her loving kindness. In a rather nice if perhaps too neat ending, they cage her through her need to dominate. Thus, the weak sometimes prevail.
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*3David Ignatius Walsh (Dem., Mass.).
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*4Foreign Affairs, Fall 1980.
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*5“Constitutional Roulette: The Dimensions of the Risk” in The Constitution and the Budget, edited by W. S. Moore and Rudolph G. Penner (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington and London, 1980).
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*6For those interested in the details, I recommend H. R. Shapiro’s Democracy in America, the only political history of the United States from British shires to present deficits. Needless to say, this masterly work, fourteen years in the making, is published privately by Manhattan Communication, 496 LaGuardia Place, Suite 406, New York, NY 10012. The present volume is only half the whole and lacks scholarly apparatus (index, bibliography) but not scholarship.
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Copyright © 2008 by Gore Vidal
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark and the DD colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
“Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” “Tarzan Revisited,” “The Top Ten Best-Sellers,” “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” “American Plastic,” “Calvino’s Novels,” “The Hacks of Academe,” “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” “Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes,” “William Dean Howells,” “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” “Montaigne,” “Passage to Egypt” (originally published as “Nassar’s Egypt”), “Pornography,” “The Holy Family,” “Homage to Daniel Shays,” “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,” “The Second American Revolution,” “The National Security State,” and “Monotheism and Its Discontents” were published in United States: Essays 1952–1992 by Gore Vidal (Random House: New York), 1993
“Rabbit’s Own Burrow” was published in The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000 by Gore Vidal (Doubleday: New York), 2001.
“Black Tuesday” was originally published as “September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday)” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Nation Books: New York), 2002.
“State of the Union, 2004” was originally published in the September 13, 2004, issue of The Nation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vidal, Gore, 1925–
[Essays. Selections]
The selected essays of Gore Vidal / by Gore Vidal; edited by Jay Parini.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Parini, Jay. II. Title.
PS3543.I26A6 2008
814'.54—dc22
2008013517
eISBN: 978-0-385-52682-1
v3.0_r1
