The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

Here comes (and there goes) Gene McCarthy. “Are we in the middle of a revolution?” is the title of one of Andy’s pieces from the front. “Those who hold steadfastly to the old values are true conservatives; those who only sense the new are worried liberals; those who see the whole pattern very clearly are radicals, and they don’t know what to do about it.” This is Sartre’s No Exit Americanized. It was also Sartre who once observed that the bourgeois theater will put up with the most harshly accurate depiction of the human case, as long as there is no hint that a solution might exist. What is, is, and must ever be.

  Americans land on the moon and the war goes on. Woodstock . . . and the war goes on. Judge Julie Hoffman versus Abbie Hoffman et al., at Chicago . . . and the war . . . Weathermen . . . Sgt. Pepper . . . Black Panthers murdered by the state. . . . But Andy is tiring now.

  At the beginning of 1970 he withdraws to a sort of commune in Vermont. Where “I was taking a lot of acid.” He also met John Scagliotti and, as they say, “came out,” though I never suspected for a moment that he had ever been in, but then I’ve always been closet-blind. Andy and John remained together until the end. Happily, Andy did not retire, though, for a time, there was a hiatus “when I stopped writing and I stopped doing politics the same day. I couldn’t figure any of this out. I couldn’t figure out who I was, and what I was doing this for and this movement that seemed to have gone completely out of control, disappeared into a million crazy bits.” Gradually, he started to “do” writing and politics again but in a less urgent style since the disparity between what the United States thinks it is and what it actually is is now too great to be reconciled. One can only chip away at the edges. “I was lucky, too: I learned enough to make myself permanently and constitutionally unable to accept America and its internal and external empires.” So, at the end, he was to make not a separate peace with our evil empire but a separate war, the best that any of us can do in what Jack Kennedy used to croon, “this twilight time”—presumably before midnight comes up like thunder over D.C.’s Federal Theme Park.

  In Andy’s last years, he was much involved with sexual politics—as I write these words I cannot believe just how absurd a country has to be to insist on so categorizing its inmates. Cunnilingus over here . . . buggery to the right . . . frottage on the floor . . . keep moving. Bisexuals, stop it! Right now.

  But Andy charges in. Present, as he puts it, “at the creation.” “There were millions of homosexuals before Stonewall, of course, but there was no coherent, self-aware gay community.” This is more or less true, but one wonders what sort of country needs a “gay community”? Although there are prohibited sexual acts (for everyone) in Catholic Mediterranean countries, no one is shocked or even interested in the fact that the shepherd Silvio likes to bugger young Mario (at least, when the ewes are menstruating) nor does Silvio’s pleasure in Arcadia—young Mario’s too—prevent either from being good or bad family men, something that the old culture expected them to be but did not fuss about if they decided not to breed. Anglo-Saxon attitudes were—and are—more crazed and punitive: particularly when sex becomes an exercise in control; hence, sexual politics, alas. Hence, some of Andy’s best writing as he describes the luna-tic bleatings of the Pentagon generals and psychically challenged Congresspersons, most of whom, as kids say nowadays, have “seen Dorothy,” and given her a big kiss—in Oz if not Kansas.

  The last time Andy rang me, officially—that is, as journalistic quarry—it was for a magazine piece that he was doing on Tim Robbins. Tim had produced and directed and starred in the film Bob Roberts, in which I appeared. He had also written the script and the lyrics for the songs and, as I recall, organized the catering for cast and crew. Andy’s usual opening was always reassuring. “Don’t worry. This interview’s absolutely pointless,” my favorite kind. “I’m doing this piece for one of these magazines . . . you know, they pay you all this money for stories about Mike Ovitz and they look like those giveaway magazines you get on airlines.” We both went on journalistic autopilot. But suddenly, trying to explain what made the youthful Robbins tick, I heard myself say, “I suppose it’s just natural wu-wei.” Andy’s voice became alert. “What’s that?” I chided him for having read so little Lao Tzu. I then gave an English approximation: “passive achievement.” The archer who isn’t worried about going for the gold can pick up his bow and hit the bull’s-eye easily. If he strains—is jittery—he will miss. “Tim has natural wu-wei.” And so, I thought, as I hung up, do you. In due course wu-wei appeared, for the first and last time, in an airline-type magazine, two shriveled small words between the Gucci and the Lancôme ads.

  Although the perhaps mythical sage Lao Tzu meant wu-wei as a goal for the individual, he does see its application to the state. In The Way of Acceptance, he observes: “The more the people are forbidden to do this and that, the poorer they will be. The more sharp weapons the people possess, the more will darkness and bewilderment spread through the land. The more craft and cunning men have, the more useless and pernicious contraptions will they invent.” Even using homely fertilizer. “If I work through Non-action the people will transform themselves.” So either Andy Kopkind wu-wei or—Oklahoma OK!

  The Nation

  12 June 1995

  * BAD HISTORY

  Shortly after the publication of David McCullough’s prizewinning biography Truman, an ad hoc committee of concerned historians was formed to ponder how any historian, no matter how amiably “in the grain,” could write at such length about so crucial a President and reveal absolutely nothing of his actual politics, whose effects still resonate in the permanent garrison state and economy he bequeathed us. Since this question has many answers, we continue to meet—in secrecy: Tenure is at stake in some cases, while prizes, grants, fellowships, hang in a balance that can go swiftly crashing if any of us dares question openly the image of America the beauteous on its hill, so envied by all that it is subject to attacks by terrorists who cannot bear so much sheer goodness to triumph in a world that belongs to their master, the son of morning himself, Satan.

  As we discuss in increasing detail the various American history departments, a large portrait of Comer Vann Woodward beams down on us; he is the acknowledged premier conductor of that joyous, glory-bound gravy train. In due course, we plan to give a Vann Woodward Prize to the historian who has shown what biologists term “absolute maze-brightness,” that is, the ability to get ahead of the pack to the scrumptious cheese at a complex labyrinth’s end. Comer’s own Pulitzer Prize (bestowed for his having edited the perhaps questionable diary of Mary Chesnut) was the result of a lifetime of successful maze-threading, which ended with a friend, John Blum, awarding him the prime cheddar for what is hardly history writing in our commitee’s strict sense. To be fair, Comer did deserve an honorable mention back in 1955 for The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Our committee tends to agree that prize-giving is largely a racket in which self-serving schoolteachers look after one another. We shall, in due course, address this interesting if ancillary subject.

  Meanwhile, we debate whether or not to create a vulgar splash and give an annual prize to the worst American historian of the year. But the first nominations are coming in so thick and fast that none of us really can, in a single life, read all the evidence—and graduate students are forbidden to do our work for us. So we have tentatively abandoned that notion. Instead, we have been surveying current publications, applying our strict standards to the works of an eclectic group that has only one thing in common (badness aside): the public approbation of like-minded toilers in the field.

  Our criteria: First, the book must be badly written. Since this is as true, alas, of some of our best historians, we do not dwell too much on aesthetics. Gibbon and Macaulay and Carlyle knew that history was an important aspect of literature and so made literature; but this secret seems to have got lost by the end of the last century. Even our own wise hero, Edmund Wilson, didn’t really write all that good himself. Second, the book in question must be composed in perfect bad f
aith. This is much easier for us to judge than literary value and very satisfying, particularly when one can figure where the writer is, as they say, coming from. Naturally, our own tastes condition our responses. Most of us are not enthusiasts of the National Security State of 1950 et seq. And we suspect that the empire, now spinning out of control, was a bad idea. After all, the federal government must borrow heavily every single day to keep it humming along. But anyone who can make a good case for Truman’s invention of the National Security State does not necessarily, on the ground of our own political incorrectness, earn a place in the crowded galère. Only if he or she denies that there is such a thing as an American empire (an act of bad faith, since that is the line those who endow universities want taken) will inclusion occur.

  In the matter of race, the opportunities for bad faith are beyond mere counting. Even so, our committee has just voted unanimously that the worst of the books currently in print is America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, Race in America, by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom. The two nervous subtitles betray unease, just as rapid eye-blinking, behaviorists tell us, signifies a liar in full flood. In presenting the Thernstroms’ work as the first of a series of bad histories we do not want to create in them a sense of pride or, indeed, of uniqueness. There are many, many others in their league and, from time to time, they too will be revealed in these pages.

  The Thernstroms are a husband-and-wife team: He is a Harvard professor, she a self-proclaimed liberal because, she said to me, she wrote once for The Economist. The hearty laughter you now hear from across the Atlantic is that of Evelyn Rothschild, that splendid conservative paper’s splendidly conservative proprietor.

  The Thernstroms are crude writers, but then if they were not, they would not be so honored here. What they have perfected—much appreciated by their natural constituency, the anti-blacks—is what we call the Reverse Angle Shot in the matter of race. In the movies a reverse angle is exactly what it sounds like. You shoot a scene one way; then you switch about and shoot it from the exact opposite point of view. In debate, however, the Thernstrom Reverse Angle is supposed to take the place of the master shot: that is, the wide-angle look at the whole scene. Their argument is simple. Affirmative action for minorities is wrong, particularly in the case of African-Americans, because such action takes it for granted that they are by nature inferior to whites and so require more financial aid (and slacker educational standards) than canny whites or those eerily look-alike, overly numerate Asians. This is inspired. Now the Therns can maintain that the true racist is one who believes in affirmative action, because he is anti-black, while Economist-reading Therns believe that blacks can stand on their own two feet alongside the best of whites if only evil liberals, in their condescending racism, would not try to help them out of ghettos of their own feckless making.

  To “prove” this, the Thernstroms have come up with a blizzard of statistics in order to make the case that blacks were really getting their act together from 1945 until the Sixties, when affirmative action, welfare, and other liberal deviltries so spoiled them that they took to drugs and murder while, most tragic of all, not living up to “our” SAT norms.

  One of the hallmarks of the truly bad historian is not so much the routine manipulation of the stats as the glee with which it is done, sad and sober though he tries to appear, crocodile tear forever clinging to nose-tip. The Therns’ Introduction is high comedy. Quotations routinely turn reality upside down. A state court strikes down a blacks-only scholarship program at the University of Maryland: “ ‘Of all the criteria by which men and women can be judged,’ the court intoned, ‘the most pernicious is that of race.’ ” Therefore, special blacks-only scholarships are racist.

  But like so many zealots, the Therns cannot control that Strangelovian arm forever going rigid with a life of its own as it rises in salute. A few lines after establishing the overt racism of affirmative action, they up the rhetoric: “What do we owe those who arrived on our shores in 1619 and remained members of an oppressed caste for more than three centuries?” I like that “our shores.” After three centuries surely these are African-American shores, too, not to mention the shores of the indigenous Mongol population, which needs quite as much affirmative action these days as do “our” involuntary African visitors. Certainly the Therns themselves are hardly in the “our” business; they did not, as idle gossip has it, hit shore with Leif Ericson. Rather, theirs is the disdain, even rage, of recent arrivals against those who preceded them but did less well. Racism, after all, is a complex matter beyond the competence of a pair of publicists for the shrinking white majority and its institutions, among them the Manhattan Institute, where Abigail is “a senior fellow,” as well as the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley, Richardson, Earhart, and Carthage generators of light, fueled by corporate money. Joel Pulliam, one of the Therns’ undergraduate helots, “worked for us part-time throughout his college career.” The Pulliam family are—or were—newspaper proprietors of great malignity. (Our committee is now taking cognizance of these un-American covens and shall, in due course, work to remove their tax exemptions on the ground that they are political activists.)

  Now the argument again: Everything was getting better for the blacks until Brown v. Board of Education, affirmative action, etc. destroyed their moral fiber. Result: “Today’s typical black twelfth-grader scores no better on a reading test than the average white in the eighth grade, and is 5.4 years behind the typical white in science.” Our committee is still examining all Thernstrom figures that “prove” blacks have never been better off than now, or were better off before anyone did anything to be of use to them, or aren’t really worth bothering with as they are demonstrably inferior. After all, “the proportion of blacks in poverty is still triple that of whites. The unemployment rate for black males is double the white rate, the rate of death from homicide . . .” and so on. Then the horror, the horror: “Blacks from families earning over $70,000 a year have lower average SAT scores than whites from families taking in less than $10,000.” So even if they make money (dealing drugs, entertaining, or playing games), they are still awfully dumb. Curiously, no Thern has questioned the value of the SAT score or, indeed, the value of the curriculum that is taught in “our” high schools or available in universities. “G.V.” was so bored at one of the country’s best prep schools (prewar) that he made no effort to do more than pass dull courses. Could it be that African-American culture might not be satisfied with what passes for education today? Even—or especially, when one considers the Therns’ polemics—at Harvard?

  For the Therns, the political activism of the Sixties is the wrong road taken. Apparently, “three of four Southern whites . . . were ready to concede that racial integration was bound to come,” presumably when the bird of dawning singeth all night long. But Americans rightly deplored “brutal tactics”—i.e., demonstrations. The Therns produce an ancient cold war gloss on the matter of race: “Surveys disclosed a pervasive and bizarre skepticism about whether the civil rights movement reflected the true feelings of typical African-Americans.” As of a 1963 poll, a quarter of the white population suspected the Commies of egging on listless African-Americans. The FBI bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the suspicion that he was in with the Commies is justified “in the context of the deadly struggle between the United States and Soviet totalitarianism.” Thus the Great Red Herring once again makes an obligatory appearance, in a footnote.

  “G.V.” must now confess that he met the Therns in 1991. He had come to Harvard to deliver the Massey lectures, which are sponsored by a small, suitably obscure department known, he recalls, as “American Civilization,” then headed by Professor Thern. “G.V.” met them at a dinner, which was, he now realizes, a day of apotheosis, particularly for Mrs. Thern, an adorable elfin minx. The Los Angeles Police Department had just beaten Rodney King to a pulp and a video of cops clobbering his fallen figure had been playing on television all day. Abigail was firmly on the side of the pol
ice. “Their work is so dangerous, so unappreciated.” Her panegyric to the LAPD stunned the dinner party. She speculated on Rodney King’s as yet unrevealed crimes and shuddered at the thought of his ebon-dark associates, lying in wait for pink porker cops. Professor Thern gave a secret smile as his helpmeet’s aria grew more and more rich and strange.

  Now, somewhat sated by numbing stats, the Therns go on attacking blacks in what they appear to think is a sound and sympathetic way. They quote angry citizens like the young black man who says, after King’s attackers were let off by a Simi Valley jury, “Is there a conspiracy to allow and condone the destruction of black people?” Needless to say, there is nothing a Thern likes as much as a conspiracy theory to pooh-pooh. “That these charges have been repeated so often and so vehemently does not make them true. The issue is complicated.” The Therns conclude that blacks are locked up more often than whites because they commit more crimes, and to try to help them is useless, as the Sixties proved.

  As one reads this curiously insistent racist tract, one begins to sense that there is some sort of demonic spirit on the scene, unacknowledged but ever-present, as the Therns make their endless case. Reading Thern-prose, somewhat more demure than Abby’s table-rant, I was put in uneasy mind of kindly old Dr. Maimonides. In Book III, chapter 51 of his Guide for the Perplexed (copyright 1190 C.E.), the revered codifier of the Talmud lists those who cannot begin to acknowledge, much less worship, the true God. Among those nonhumans are “some of the Turks [he means Mongols] and the nomads in the North and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does.” When this celebrated book was translated into English early this century, the translators were embarrassed, as well they should have been, by the racism. So instead of using the word “black” or “Negro,” they went back to the Hebrew word for blacks—Kushim, which they transliterated as Kushites—a previously unknown and unidentifiable tribe for Anglophones and so easily despised.