The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  It is true that we are a less homogeneous and less educated people than the three million original inhabitants of the thirteen colonies. But I cannot believe that our convention would do away with our liberties while granting more power, say, to the Executive to fight wars that in the end harm only us. I am aware that the people at large have been kept ignorant by bad schools and by the dispensers of false Opinion. That is true. That is a problem. But ignorance is not stupidity. And self-interest, as both Hamilton and Madison agreed, is a great motor to the state, properly checked and balanced.

  In any case, we are now faced with the fury of those who have been deprived for too long of decent lives. It takes no unusual power of prophecy to remark that they will not be apathetic forever. “If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” Rather than be unready for anarchy, I submit that we must sit down and in an orderly way rethink our entire government as well as our place in the world.

  The founders’ last gift to us is the machinery to set things right. Article Five. Let us use it.

  Thus, I ended my speech to the National Press Club—outrageously, of course.

  The Nation

  27 January 1992

  * THE UNION OF THE STATE

  Over the years I have written quite a lot about the state of the Union. Now, in the interest of novelty, I’d like to discuss the Union of the State. I have always tried to say something so obvious that no one else has noticed it. For instance, I once suggested that we criminalize most firearms, and legalize most drugs. This would put an end to the now eternal War on Crime that, we are told, is devastating our alabaster cities and not doing the amber waves of marijuana much good either. I realize, of course, that vested interests are now too great for us to do anything of an intelligent nature in this—or almost any—regard. The National Rifle Association will never wither away as long as there is a single Congressman left to be paid off or a child unarmed.

  Our violence and murder rate are unique in the First World. This may be a negative uniqueness but it is all our own, and to be cherished; at least we are number one at something other than indebtedness. We now have over a million people in prison* and another couple of million on probation or parole; why not just lock up half the population and force the other half to guard them? That would solve crime; it might also entice Amnesty International to start whining here at home. After all, 58 percent of those in our federal prisons are there for drug offenses. Most are not dangerous to the public, and even though our overkindly government thinks they are dangerous to themselves, they should still be allowed to pursue their constitutional, if unhealthful, happiness in freedom. Certainly they do not deserve to be confined to a prison system that a Scandinavian commission recently reported to be barbarous for a supposedly First World country.

  Unfortunately, the rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the right to imprison—or otherwise intimidate—anyone who violates any of the state’s often new-minted crimes. Without communism—once monolithic and on the march—our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be—who else? the people of the United States. In the name of correctness, of good health, or even of God—a great harassment of the people-at-large is now going on. Although our state has not the power to intimidate any but small, weak countries, we can certainly throw most Americans in prison for violating the ever-increasing list of prohibitions. Will this change for the better with a change of Congress or President? No. Things are going to get a lot worse until we apply the state’s new white hope to the state itself: Three strikes, you’re out. How then to “strike out” the state? I have an idea.

  Kevin Phillips recently attacked—in Time—Washington, D.C., a beautiful city, built, if not on a hill, at least on what, in 1800, was a quite attractive swamp. He quoted Jefferson’s warning that when every aspect of government is drawn to Washington—he meant the city, not the general—Washington, in his words, would become “as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” (This was England, by the way, not the Disney studio so recently and bloodily thrown back at Bull Run.)

  Phillips tacitly acknowledges that the people have no representation within the Beltway, unlike the banks or insurance companies. Consequently, officeholders and their shadow, the media, are equally disliked by a vast majority. Unfortunately, the people are without alternative. That is what makes the situation so volatile and potentially dangerous. Think what might have happened had Ross Perot possessed the oily charm of Charlton Heston. Certainly, it is plain that when a people comes to detest the political system in which it is entrapped, that system will not endure for long.

  I’ve always been mystified at how obtuse politicians and the media are. Every politician of consequence, for the last quarter-century, has run against Washington, against lobbyists, against insiders, against Jefferson’s “venal and oppressive” ruling class—or, to be precise, the representatives of our actual rulers, who circle the globe like Puck with all the swift anonymous speed of a fax laden with campaign money. It is very hard, one would think, to live with so total a contradiction. For instance, both Carter and Reagan campaigned against Washington, and both won. Neither understood why people voted for him. Neither made the slightest attempt, even cosmetically, to curb Jefferson’s tyrannous capital. The two new employees forgot their speeches and went right on doing business as instructed by those huge economic forces that govern earth.

  Can someone like Clinton make a change? I don’t see how. We would like health care of the sort every civilized nation has but we can never have a rational system as long as insurance companies are allowed to benefit. The people may want affordable health care, but they are not going to get it in the United States of America as now constituted.

  Phillips has come up with an old notion of mine: devolution, the dictionary word for breaking up the Union into smaller, more manageable units. He would move much of the government away from Washington, I suppose to inconvenience the 800,000 lawyers who will then be able to deduct as legitimate travel expense the weary weekly journey from cozy Montgomery County to sky-topped Denver. He would move various departments permanently to other states and rotate the capital from this to that city. He would like an amendment to the Constitution “setting up a mechanism for holding nationwide referendums to permit the citizenry to supplant Congress and the President in making certain categories of national decisions.” Like declarations of war? Could he be that radical? Along with this bit of major surgery on the body politic, he has some useful Band-Aids. But no more. Nevertheless, I am well pleased that what I’ve been proposing for so long has now gone mainline. So let me go a bit further out.

  In 1992 I switched on CNN and heard Jerry Brown—in New Hampshire—giving pretty much a speech that I had given for the National Press Club [see “Time for a People’s Convention”] on how to restore power to its only legitimate source, We the People. As Jerry and I had not spoken since I ran against him in the California Senate primary in 1982, I was pleasantly surprised and praised him publicly for his wisdom, while blessing him for his plagiarism, no matter how belated. He rang me in Italy. Yes, it was my speech. Unlike Joe Biden, he is an honest man. And did I have anything more? And would I come to New Hampshire? I said, yes, I had more, but, no, I would forgo the winter wonderland of New Hampshire, currently known as Dole Land.

  However, thanks to CNN and the fax machine, I could monitor his campaign and send him my thoughts immediately. So a number of suggestions of mine entered the primary campaign. The principal notion was conversion from war to peace. Find a defense plant that’s closing and say that it should be kept open but converted to peacetime, using the same workforce and technology. Brown did just that in Connecticut. He told the soon-to-be-dismissed makers of Seawolf submarines that if he became President, they would be making not submarines but bullet trains. At five in the morning I got a c
all from political operator Pat Caddell. “We won!” he said. “We won Connecticut.” Then they—not we—lost New York.

  Meanwhile, Perot grabbed my We the People as the strange device for his eccentric banner. I felt very odd, watching CNN in Italy, and hearing at least three candidates using my lines.

  Jerry was headed for Pennsylvania after New York and, as the game was up, I said why not propose something really useful: launch a new idea that might take a few years to penetrate but when it does, might save us all.

  Here is the gist of what I wrote him. I started with the eternal problem of what we do about income tax. As the people at large get nothing much back from the money that they give the government—Social Security is not federal income—why not just eliminate the federal income tax? How? Eliminate Washington, D.C. Allow the states and municipalities to keep what revenue they can raise. I know that tens if not hundreds of thousands of lobbyist-lawyers and hired media gurus will have a million objections. But let us pursue the notion.

  Why not divide the country into several reasonably homogeneous sections, more or less on the Swiss cantonal system. Each region would tax its citizens and then provide the services those citizens wanted, particularly education and health. Washington would then become a ceremonial capital with certain functions. We shall always need some sort of modest defense system, a common currency, and a Supreme Court to adjudicate between the regions as well as to maintain the Bill of Rights—a novelty for the present Court.

  How to pay for what’s left of Washington? Each region will make its own treaty with the central government and send what it feels should be spent on painting the White House and on our common defense, which will, for lack of money, cease to be what it is now—all-out offense on everyone on earth. The result will be no money to waste either on pork or on those imperial pretensions that have left us $4.7 trillion in debt. Wasteful, venal, tyrannous Washington will be no more than a federal theme park administered by Michael Eisner.

  Will the regions be corrupt, venal, etc.? Of course they will—we are Americans!—but they will be corrupt on an infinitesimal scale. Also, more to the point, in a smaller polity everyone knows who’s up to no good and they can police themselves better than the federal government ever could—even if it had ever wanted to.

  All over the world today centrifugal forces are at work. In a bloody war in the old Yugoslavia and parts of the old Soviet Union, and in a peaceful way in the old Czechoslovakia. Since history is nothing but the story of the migration of tribes, we must now note that the tribes are very much on the move again, and thanks to modern technology we can actually watch Bengals and Indians over-flowing each other’s borders.

  Racially, the composition of Europe has changed more in the past fifty years than in the previous 500. Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It is. Now, here at home, people fret about invasions from the Hispanic world, from Haiti, from the boat people of Asia. But, like it or not, we are changing from a white, Protestant country, governed by males, to a mixed polity, and in this time of change there is bound to be conflict. The fragmentations that we see everywhere are the result of a dislike for the nation-state as we have known it since the bloody nation-building of Bismarck and Lincoln.

  People want to be rid of arbitrary capitals and faraway rulers. So let the people go. If our southern tier is to be Spanish and Catholic, let it be. But also, simultaneously, as we see in Europe, while this centrifugal force is at work—a rushing away from the center—there is also a centripetal one, a coming-together of small polities in order to have better trade, defense, culture—so we are back, if by chance, to our original Articles of Confederation, a group of loosely confederated states rather than a United States, which has proved to be every bit as unwieldy and ultimately tyrannous as Jefferson warned. After all, to make so many of Many into only One of one you must use force, and this is a bad thing, as we experienced in the Civil War. So let us make new arrangements to conform with new realities.

  I will not go so far as to say that we shall ever see anything like democracy at work in our section of North America—traditionally we have always been a republic entirely governed by money, but at least, within the regions, there will be more diversity than there is now and, best of all, the people will at last have the sensation that they are no longer victims of a far-off government but that they—and their tax money—are home at last.

  The Nation

  26 December 1994

  * MICKEY MOUSE, HISTORIAN

  On June 3, 1996, The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the U.S. media are now owned by a handful of corporations. Several attractive octopi decorated the usually chaste pages of this journal. The most impressive of these cephalopod molluscs was that headed by Disney-ABC, taking precedence over the lesser Time Warner, General Electric–NBC, and Westinghouse Corporation calamari, from which dangle innumerable tentacles representing television (network and cable), weapons factories (GE aircraft engines and nuclear turbines) and, of course, GNA and other insurance firms unfriendly to health care reform.

  As I studied this beast, I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle. When last I nodded off, there was something called the Sherman Antitrust Act. Whatever happened to it? How can any octopus control so much opinion without some objection from . . . from whom? That’s the problem. Most members of Congress represent not states or people but corporations—and octopi. Had I simply dreamed John Sherman? Or had he been devoured by Dragon Synergy? Little did I suspect, as I sighed over this latest demonstration of how tightly censored we are by the few, that, presently, I would be caught in the tentacles of the great molluscs Disney-ABC and General Electric–NBC, as well as the Hearst Corporation, whose jointly owned cable enterprise Arts & Entertainment had spawned, in 1995, something called The History Channel.

  “It all began in the cold,” as Arthur Schlesinger so famously began his romantic historical novel A Thousand Days. Only my cold was London, where, for Channel Four, I wrote and narrated three half-hour programs on the American presidency, emphasizing the imperial aspects latent in the office from the beginning, and ending, currently, with our uneasy boast that we are the last great global power on the . . . well, globe.

  The programs were well received in Britain. The History Channel bought the U.S. rights. In ninety-minute form my view of the imperial presidency was to be shown just before the 1996 political conventions. But then, from the tiny tentacle tip of The History Channel, synergy began to surge up the ownership arm, through NBC to its longtime master General Electric; then ever upward, to, presumably, the supreme mollusc, Mickey Mouse himself, Lord of Anaheim. Great Mouse, this program attacks General Electric by name. Attacks American imperialism, which doesn’t exist. Badmouths all that we hold sacred. Oh, to have been a fly on the castle wall when word arrived! The easy solution, as Anaheim’s hero-President, R. M. Nixon, might have said, would have been to kill the program. But craftier minds were at work. We’ll get some “experts” like we do for those crappy historical movies and let them take care of this Commie.

  So it came to pass that, unknown to me, a GE panel was assembled; it comprised two flyweight journalists from television’s Jurassic Age (Roger Mudd, Sander Vanocur) and two professors, sure to be hostile (one was my old friend Arthur Schlesinger, about whose client, JFK, I am unkind; the other was someone called Richard Slotkin). I was not invited to defend myself, nor was anyone else. As a spokesperson for The History Channel put it, “Vidal is so opinionated that we had to have real experts on.” The Nation’s recent warning about the danger of allowing the corporate few to make and control mass opinion was about to be dramatized at my expense.

  Fade in: Roger Mudd. He is grim. He wears, as it were, not so much the black cap of the hanging judge as the symbol of his awful power, Mickey Mouse ears. He describes my career with distaste. Weirdly, he says I had “social ambitions at the Kennedy White House and [non sequitur] ran for Congress” but lost. Actually, I ran for Congress before Kennedy got to the White House. Also
, in upstate New York, I got some 20,000 more votes than JFK did as head of the ticket. During my campaign, Bobby Kennedy came to see me at Saugerties Landing. It was, appropriately, Hallowe’en. “Why,” he snarled, “don’t you ever mention the ticket?” “Because I want to win,” I said, imitating his awful accent. That started the feud.

  Mudd reports that I am “acerbic, acid-tongued,” don’t live in the United States (except when I do), and the viewer is warned beforehand that this is only my “bilious look” at American history and our presidents, whom Mudd says that I describe variously as incom-petent, avaricious warmongers. This is—warmongering to one side—slanderously untrue. Then, Mickey Mouse ears atremble with righteous indignation, he reassures us that, at program’s end, real historians will set the record straight. And so, muddied but unbowed, I fade in.

  I begin in a sort of mock-up of the White House TV room. I say a few mildly bilious words about current politics.

  He who can raise the most money to buy time on television is apt to be elected president by that half of the electorate that bothers to vote. Since the same corporations pay for our two-party, one-party system, there is little or no actual politics in these elections. But we do get a lot of sex. Also, he who subtly hates the blacks the most will always win a plurality of the lilywhite-hearted. The word “liberal” has been totally demonized, while “conservative,” the condition of most income-challenged Americans, is being tarnished by godly pressure groups whose symbols are the fetus and the flag. As a result, today’s candidates are now rushing toward a meaningless place called “the center,” and he who can get to the center of the center, the dead center, as it were, will have a four-year lease on this studio.

  I then trace the history of our expansionist presidents from Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase to Bush of Mesopotamia’s Gulf War, produced by Ted Turner’s CNN, a sort of in-house TV war. I end the program in front of the Vietnam Memorial. We have come a long way, I say, from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to “the skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.” Then Mudd, more than ever horrified by what he’d seen and heard, introduces a TV journalist called Vanocur, who introduces Professors Schlesinger and Slotkin. It’s very clear, says Vanocur, that Vidal doesn’t like America. Arthur’s response is mild. Well, let’s say he is disappointed in what’s happened.