by Gore Vidal
Needless to say, the press gets it in the chops. If you’re a newspaperman and you refuse to identify your sources for a story, you are Hindering Law Enforcement, for which you can get the usual five and pay the usual quarter. If you receive documentary proof that the government is breaking the law or that its officials are corrupt, you may be guilty of Defrauding the Government, and you can get the old five and pay a quarter. On the other hand, if you are a public servant who blows the whistle on government corruption or criminality, you can get only two and pay a quarter: the Bank has a certain compassion for apostate tellers.
Finally, a judge will have the right to put any person accused of any crime in prison before he has been tried, and that same judge can then deny the accused bail for any reason that appeals to him. This provision means the end of the basis of our legal system: you are innocent until you are proved guilty. According to the Los Angeles Times: “What is contemplated in S. 1722 is a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the people and the government, with the dominant emphasis placed on the power of the government….Under the proposed radical revisions of federal criminal law now before Congress, we would be less free and ultimately less secure.” But (at this writing) this huge, complex assault on our liberties continues to sail through the Congress, guided by Banksman Kennedy and Popesman Drinan, and it looks fairly certain to pass.*2
When I first gave my State of the Union talk in 1975, I said, “In an age of chronic and worsening shortages, I would propose that all natural resources—oil, coal, minerals—be turned over to the people, to the government.” I still think nationalization a good idea. Also, our government should deal directly with the oil-producing states, eliminating, as middleman, the oil companies. A dollar that Mobil Oil does not earn will be a dollar that an American gets to keep. I also proposed that “since none of us trusts our government to do anything right—much less honest—national resources should be a separate branch of the government, co-equal with the other three but interconnected so that Congress can keep a sharp eye on its funding and the courts on its fairness. The president, any president, on principle, should be kept out of anything that has to do with the economy.”
Plainly, there is panic in the boardroom of the Bank. A number of things have started to go wrong all at once. Since energy will soon be in short supply to all the world, the third republic will be particularly hard hit, because the Bank is not capable of creating alternatives to the conventional unrenewable (and so highly profitable) sources of energy, any more than the Bank was able to anticipate the current crisis of small car versus gas-guzzler, something that consumer-depositors had figured out some time ago when they demonstrated a preference for small economic models by buying foreign cars.
The empire is cracking up because the Banksmen have never had a very clear world view. On the one hand, they are superb pragmatists. They will do business with Mao, Stalin, Franco, the Devil, if profits can be made that way. On the other hand, simultaneously, they must continue to milk this great cow of a republic; and the only way they know to get their hands on our tax dollars is to frighten us with the menace of godless communism, not easily done when you’re seen to be doing business quite happily with these godless predators. The final madness occurred when Banksman Nixon went to Peking and Moscow in search of new accounts (which he got on terms unfavorable to us) while continuing to rail against those two ruthless, inexorable enemies of all that we hold dear. This sort of schizophrenia has switched off the public and made our government a source of wonder and despair to its allies.
When Banksman Nixon was audited and found wanting, the Bank itself came under scrutiny of a sort that it is not used to. Lowly consumer-depositors now speak of a national “crisis of confidence.” The ordinarily docile media have even revealed a few tips of the iceberg—no, glacier—that covers with corruption our body politic.
Now the masters of the third republic are striking back. They are loosening the CIA’s leash, which had been momentarily shortened (or so they told us). They have also come up with a new charter for the FBI that is now before the Senate (S. 1612). In testimony before the Judiciary Committee, law professor emeritus T. I. Emerson of Yale was highly critical of the new powers given the FBI. “The natural tendency of any system of law enforcement,” he testified, “is to formulate its doctrines, train its personnel, and utilize its machinery to support social stability and thwart social change.” Among the features of the new charter that Emerson found dangerous was the right to initiate an investigation where there is a suspicion, in the agency’s eyes, that a person “will engage” in illegal activity. This means that anyone is a potential target of the FBI because anyone might somehow, someday, do something illegal. The FBI also wants access to the financial records of political associations—an invasion of political as well as personal freedom. Finally, the new charter will pretty much remove the agency from any outside scrutiny. In so doing, it will create something that our pre-Bank republics refused to countenance: a centralized national police force. Well, as that wily old fox Benjamin Franklin once hinted, sooner or later every republic becomes a tyranny.
For 169 years, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the United States was a military success, able to overlook the odd scalped general or the White House that the British so embarrassingly burned to the ground in 1814. With considerable dash, we tore a chunk of land away from Mexico (which the Mexicans are now, sensibly, filling up again); next, we killed a million or so Filipinos (no one has ever determined just how many) in order to establish ourselves as a regnant Pacific power at the beginning of this century; but then, after we got through two world wars in fine shape, something started to go wrong. In fact, since 1945 nothing has gone right for us. The war in Korea was a draw. The war in Vietnam was a defeat. Our constant meddling in the affairs of other countries has made us not only widely hated but, rather more serious, despised. Not unlike the Soviet Union, our opposite number, we don’t seem able to maintain our helicopters properly or to gauge in advance the world’s reactions to our deeds or to have sufficient intelligence to know when to make a run for it and when to stand still. What’s wrong?
Those born since World War II have been taught to believe that the CIA has always been an integral part of American life. They don’t know that the agency is only thirty-three years old, that it is essentially illegal not only in its activities (overthrowing a Chilean president here, an Iranian prime minister there) but also in its charter. The Constitution requires that “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all Public Money shall be published from time to time.” The CIA does no such thing: it spends billions of dollars a year exactly as it pleases. Although forbidden by law to operate inside the United States, the CIA has spied on American citizens at home, in merry competition with numerous other intelligence agencies whose single interest is the control of the American people in the name of freedom. Most Americans have heard of the FBI and the Treasury men and the Secret Service (though few Americans have a clear idea of what they actually do or of how much money they spend). On the other hand, hardly anyone knows about the National Security Agency, a miniature CIA run by the Defense Department. It has been estimated that in 1975, the NSA employed 20,000 civilians, used between 50,000 and 100,000 military personnel, and had a budget of $1 billion. Needless to say, the NSA is quite as illegal as the CIA—more so, in fact. The CIA was chartered, messily but officially, by Congress; but the NSA was created secretly by presidential directive in 1952, and Congress has never legalized the agency.
All good Americans want the budget balanced, and the liquidation of the CIA and the NSA would probably save anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion a year. For those who are terrified that we won’t have enough information about our relentless and godless enemy, the State Department is a most expensive piece of machinery whose principal purpose is—or was—the gathering of information about all the countries of the world. For underground, Jam
es Bond stuff, we should rely on the organization that was so useful to us when we were successful: army intelligence. Meanwhile, as a free society—the phrase no longer has much humor in it—we ought not to support tens of thousands of spies, secret agents, and dirty-tricksters, on the practical ground that a rich, lawless, and secret agency like the CIA could, with no trouble at all, take over the United States—assuming that it has not already done so.
The Bank hopes to maintain its power through the perpetuation of that garrison state it devised for us after World War II. This can be done only by involving the country in a series of small wars that will keep tax money flowing from the citizens to the Treasury to the Pentagon to the secret agencies and, eventually, to the Bank. Meanwhile, to stifle criticism, the Bank has ordered an all-out attack on the civil liberties of the people. There is little doubt that, from Banksman Kennedy to Banksman Thurmond, the entire political spectrum in the United States (which is always a single shade of green, just like the money) will work to take away as many of our traditional freedoms as it can. Happily, the Bank’s marvelous incompetence, which gave us Nixon and Carter and is now offering (at this writing) Reagan or Bush “versus” Carter or Kennedy, is of a kind that is bound to fail. For one thing, everyone knows that small wars have a way of escalating; and though Banksmen Nixon and Bush view with what looks like equanimity World War III, the rest of the world—including, with luck, an aroused American citizenry—may call a halt to these mindless adventures for private profit. Finally, Anderson’s candidacy could pull the plug on the two-party-system-that-is-really-one-party apparatus that has kept the Bank in power since the 1870s.*3
Meanwhile, a new constitutional convention is in order. The rights guaranteed by the Founders in the old Constitution should be reinforced; the presidential form of government should be exchanged for a more democratic parliamentary system; the secret agencies should be abolished; the revenues of the country should go to create jobs, educational and health systems, alternative forms of energy, and so on. All those things, in fact, that the Bank says we can never afford. But I am sure that what countries less rich than ours can do, we can do.
Where will the money come from? Abolish the secret agencies, and gain at least $20 billion a year. Cut the defense budget by a third, and gain perhaps $50 billion. Tax the thousand and one religions, and get untold billions more. Before you know it, the chief financial support of a government become gross and tyrannous will no longer be the individual taxpayer, that perennial patsy, but the Bank, whose entry into receivership will be the aim of the fourth, the good, the democratic republic that we must start to create sometime between now and 1984.
Esquire
AUGUST 1980
*1 Or did, pre-Reagan.
*2 The bill was defeated in the fall of 1980 by the lame-duck Congress. Like Dracula, it is sure to rise again. Next time it will pass.
*3 “I believe in the two-party system,” said Mr. Anderson in the course of his campaign, nicely pulling the plug on himself.
The Real Two-Party System
In the United States there are two political parties of equal size. One is the party that votes in presidential elections. The other is the party that does not vote in presidential elections. This year the party that votes is divided into four parts: the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Citizens—and a number of fragments, including the independent candidacy of Republican John Anderson. Forty-eight percent of the party that votes are blue-collar or service workers; the rest tend to be white, middle-class and over twenty-one years old. Seventy-five percent of the party that does not vote are blue-collar or service workers in combination with most of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds—whatever their estate.
Presidential elections are a bit like the Grammy Awards, where an industry of real interest to very few people honors itself fulsomely [correct use of this adverb] on prime-time television. Since the party that does not vote will never switch on, as it were, the awards ceremony, the party that does vote has to work twice as hard to attract attention to get a rating.
As a result, media-men, -women and -persons analyze at length and in bright shallow the three principal candidates of the one party. To read, hear and watch the media-types, one would think that the election really mattered. Grave subjects are raised: Will Ronald Reagan get us into a war with the forests once he has unilaterally zapped the trees in order to stop the pollution of Mount St. Helens? Will Jimmy Carter be able to balance the budget as he keeps, simultaneously, the interest rates high for the bankers and low for the homeowners? Will John Anderson ever again debate anyone on prime-time television, other than Regis Philbin, who is not national? These are the great issues in the year of our Lord 1980.
And it is the year of our Lord, in spades. Once- and twice-born Christians haven’t been on such a rampage since World War I when they managed to add an amendment to the Constitution making it a crime for Americans to drink alcohol. Ironically, the Christers seemed to have turned away from their own twice-born Carter and twice-born Anderson. They prefer once-born Reagan (presumably, the rest of him is with the Lord), because Reagan is against Satan as represented by rights for women and homosexualists—two groups that get a bad press in the Old Testament, and don’t do much better in the New. In fact, every candidate of the party that votes is being forced this year to take a stand on abortion, and if the stand should be taken on law and not on the Good Book, the result can be very ugly indeed for the poor politician because abortion is against God’s law: “Thou shalt not kill.” Since this commandment is absolute, any candidate who favors abortion must be defeated as a Satanist. On the other hand, any candidate who does not favor capital punishment must be defeated as permissive. In the land of the twice-born, the life of the fetus is sacred; the life of the adult is not.
Were the United States in less trouble, this election would be treated the way it deserves to be treated—like the Grammy Awards: those who are amused by such trivia will tune in; the rest will not. But the next president—even though he will simply be a continuation of the previous president (“clones” was the apt word used to describe Reagan and Carter by clone Kennedy) will have to face: 1) A nation whose per-capita income has dropped to ninth in the world; 2) A working population whose real discretionary income (money you get to spend out of what you earn) has declined 18 percent since 1973; 3) An industrial plant with the lowest productivity growth rate in the Western world—yes, we’ve sunk below England; 4) Double-digit inflation and high unemployment that, according to the latest Nobel prize person for economics, will go on into the foreseeable future; 5) A federal budget of some $600 billion, of which 75 percent can never be cut back (service on the national debt, Social Security, congressionally mandated programs, entitlements); 6) A mindlessly wasteful military establishment whose clients in Congress and in the press can always be counted on to yell, “the Russians are coming,” when it is appropriations time on the Hill. And so the military budget grows while our military capacity, by some weird law of inverse ratio, decreases. The national debt increases.
The party that votes (to which I no longer belong) is now offering for our voting pleasure a seventy-year-old clone (if you’re born in 1911, you are now in your seventieth not sixty-ninth year) whose life has been spent doing what a director tells him to do: Hit the mark, Ronnie! He has now played so many parts that his confusions and distortions of fact are even more surrealist than those of Carter, and need not be repeated here. There is no reason to assume that Reagan’s administration would be any different from that of Carter any more than Reagan’s administration as governor of California was much different from that of Brown, Senior—or Junior. The party that votes knows what it is doing when it comes to giving awards on the big night. Also, the magnates who control the party that votes are now acting upon Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince: to gain perfect control over the state, keep the people poor and on a wartime footing. Between the extortion racket of the IRS and th
e bottomless pit of the Pentagon, this is happening.
What to do? A vote for Carter, Reagan or Anderson is a vote against the actual interests of the country. But for those who like to vote against their interests, I would pass over the intelligent but unadventurous Anderson as well as the old actor who knows nothing of economics (“Parity?”), foreign affairs (“Well, I’ve met the King of Siam”), geography (“Pakistan?”), history (“Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal”) and return to office the incoherent incumbent on the ground that he cannot get it together sufficiently to start a war or a Lincoln-Douglas debate. But this is to be negative. To be affirmative—for a compulsive voter, that is: vote for the Citizens or Libertarian parties; each actually means something, like it or not.
Finally, if I may speak ex cathedra, as a leading—which is to say following (we’re all the same)—member of the party that does not vote, I would suggest that those of you who are accustomed to vote join us in the most highly charged political act of all: not voting. When two-thirds—instead of the present half—refuse to acknowledge the presidential candidates, the election will lack all legitimacy. Then we shall be in a position to invoke Article Five of the Constitution and call a new constitutional convention where, together, we can devise new political arrangements suitable for a people who have never, in 193 years, been truly represented.
The Los Angeles Times
OCTOBER 26, 1980
The Second American Revolution
Future generations, if there are any, will date the second American Revolution, if there is one, from the passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978, which obliged the managers of that gilded state to reduce by more than half the tax on real estate. Historically, this revolt was not unlike the Boston Tea Party, which set in train those events that led to the separation of England’s thirteen American colonies from the crown and to the creation, in 1787, of the First Constitution. And in 1793 (after the addition of the Bill of Rights) of the Second Constitution. And in 1865 of the Third Constitution, the result of those radical alterations made by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Thus far we have had three Constitutions for three quite different republics. Now a Fourth Constitution—and republic—is ready to be born.
