by Gore Vidal
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military. When Clinton tried to live up to his pledge to gay voters that the private life of any military person was no one’s business but his own, the warlords howled that morale would be destroyed. Clinton backed down. When Clinton went aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt to take the salute, sailors pranced around with mop ends on their heads, doing fag imitations while hooting at the president, who just stood there. These successful insults to civilian authority have made the military ever more truculent and insolent. And now they must be brought to heel.
This summer, the warlords of the Pentagon presented the secretary of defense with their Program Objective Memorandum. Usually, this is a polite wish list of things that they would like to see under the Christmas tree. By September, the wish list sounded like a harsh ultimatum. As one dissenting officer put it, “Instead of a budget based on a top-line budget number, the chiefs are demanding a budget based on military strategy.” Although their joint military strategies, as tested in war over the last fifty years, are usually disastrous, military strategy in this context means simply extorting from the government $30 billion a year over and above the 51 percent of the budget that now already goes for war. Mr. President-Elect, I would advise you to move your office from the West Wing of the White House to the Pentagon, across the river. Even though every day that you spend there could prove to be your Ides of March, you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you tried to do something for us, the hitherto unrepresented people.
Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only if he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congresses and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues. We complain of terrorism, yet our empire is now the greatest terrorist of all. We bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine. We the unrepresented People of the United States are as much victims of this militarized government as the Panamanians, Iraqis, or Somalians. We have allowed our institutions to be taken over in the name of a globalized American empire that is totally alien in concept to anything our founders had in mind. I suspect that it is far too late in the day for us to restore the republic that we lost a half-century ago.
Even so, Mr. President-Elect, there is an off chance that you might actually make some difference if you start now to rein in the warlords. Reduce military spending, which will make you popular because you can then legitimately reduce our taxes instead of doing what you have been financed to do, freeing corporate America of its small tax burden. The 1950 taxes on corporate profits accounted for 25 percent of federal revenue; in 1999 only 10.1 percent. Finally, as sure as you were not elected by We the People but by the vast sums of unaccountable corporate money, the day of judgment is approaching. Use your first term to break the Pentagon. Forget about a second term. After all, if you succeed on the other side of the Potomac, you will be a hero to We the People. Should you fail or, worse, do nothing, you may be the last president, by which time history will have ceased to notice the United States and all our proud rhetoric will have been reduced to an ever diminishing echo. Also, brood upon an odd remark made by your canny, if ill-fated, predecessor Clinton. When Gingrich and his Contract on (rather than with) America took control of Congress, Clinton said, “The president is not irrelevant.” This was a startling admission that he could become so. Well, sir, be relevant. Preserve, protect, and defend what is left of our ancient liberties, not to mention our heavily mortgaged fortune.*
Vanity Fair
December 2000
* DEMOCRATIC VISTAS
The Vice President to Richard Nixon and bribe-taker to many, Spiro Agnew, was once inspired to say, “The United States, for all its faults, is still the greatest nation in the country.” Today, even in the wake of the Supreme Court’s purloining of the election for the forty-third President, Spiro must be standing tall among his fellow shades. Have we not come through, yet again? As we did in 1888 when Grover Cleveland’s plurality of the popular vote was canceled by the intricacies of the Electoral College, and as we even more famously did in 1876 when the Democrat Samuel Tilden got 264,000 more votes than the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whose party then challenged the votes in Oregon, South Carolina, Louisiana and—yes, that slattern Florida. An electoral commission chosen by Congress gave the election to the loser, Hayes, by a single vote, the result of chicanery involving a bent Supreme Court Justice appointed by the sainted Lincoln. Revolution was mooted but Tilden retired to private life and to the pleasures of what old-time New Yorkers used to recall, wistfully, as one of the greatest collections of pornography in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan.
Until December 12, we enjoyed a number of quietly corrupt elections, decently kept from public view. But the current Supreme Court, in devil-may-care mood, let all sorts of cats out of its bag—such as a total commitment to what the far right euphemistically calls family values. Justice Antonin Scalia—both name and visage reminiscent of a Puccini villain—affirmed family values by not recusing himself from the Bush–Gore case even though his son works for the same law firm that represented Bush before the Court. Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife works for a far-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, and even as her husband attended gravely to arguments, she was vetting candidates for office in the Bush Administration.
Elsewhere, George W. Bush, son of a failed Republican President, was entrusting his endangered Florida vote to the state’s governor, his brother Jeb.
On the other side of family values, the Gore clan has, at times, controlled as many as a half-dozen Southern legislatures. They are also known for their forensic skill, wit, learning—family characteristics the Vice President modestly kept under wraps for fear of frightening the folks at large.
American politics is essentially a family affair, as are most oligarchies. When the father of the Constitution, James Madison, was asked how on earth any business could get done in Congress when the country contained a hundred million people whose representatives would number half a thousand, Madison took the line that oligarchy’s iron law always obtains: A few people invariably run the show; and keep it, if they can, in the family.
Finally, those founders, to whom we like to advert, had such a fear and loathing of democracy that they invented the Electoral College so that the popular voice of the people could be throttled, much as the Supreme Court throttled the Floridians on December 12. We were to be neither a democracy, subject to majoritarian tyranny, nor a dictatorship, subject to Caesarean folly.
Another cat let out of the bag is the Supreme Court’s dedication to the 1 percent that own the country. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor couldn’t for the life of her see why a
nyone would find the Palm Beach butterfly ballot puzzling. The subtext here was, as it is so often with us, race. More votes were invalidated by aged Votomatic machines in black districts than in white. This made crucial the uncounted 10,000 Miami-Dade ballots that recorded no presidential vote. Hence the speed with which the Bush campaign, loyally aided and abetted by a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court, invented a series of delays to keep those votes from ever being counted because, if they were, Gore would have won the election. Indeed he did win the election until the Court, through ever more brazen stays and remands, with an eye on that clock ever ticking, delayed matters until, practically speaking, in the eyes of the five, if not all of the four, there was no longer time to count, the object of an exercise that had sent trucks filled with a million ballots from one dusty Florida city to the next, to be kept uncounted.
During this slow-paced comedy, there was one riveting moment of truth that will remain with us long after G.W. Bush has joined the lengthening line of twilight Presidents in limbo. On the Wednesday before the Thursday when we gave thanks for being the nation once hailed as the greatest by Agnew, the canvassing board in Dade County was, on the orders of the Florida Supreme Court, again counting ballots when an organized crowd stormed into the county building, intimidating the counters and refusing to give their names to officials. The Miami Herald, a respectable paper, after examining various voting trends, etc., concluded that Gore had actually carried Florida by 23,000 votes. The Herald plans to examine those much-traveled ballots under Florida’s “sunshine” law. I suspect that the ballots and their chads will be found missing.
Thanksgiving came and went. The ballots toured up and down the Florida freeways. Gore was accused of trying to steal an election that he had won. The black population was now aware that, yet again, it had not been taken into account. There had been riots. Under Florida law, anyone with a criminal record—having been convicted of a felony—loses all civil rights. Thousands of blacks were so accused and denied the vote; yet most so listed were not felons or were guilty only of misdemeanors. In any case, the calculated delays persuaded two of the four dissenting judges that there was no time left to count.
Justice John Paul Stevens, a conservative whose principal interest seems to be conserving our constitutional liberties rather than the privileges of corporate America, noted in his dissent: “One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
What will the next four years bring? With luck, total gridlock. The two houses of Congress are evenly split. Presidential adventurism will be at a minimum. With bad luck (and adventures), Chancellor Cheney will rule. A former Secretary of Defense, he has said that too little money now goes to the Pentagon even though last year it received 51 percent of the discretionary budget. Expect a small war or two in order to keep military appropriations flowing. There will also be tax relief for the very rich. But bad scenario or good scenario, we shall see very little of the charmingly simian George W. Bush. The military—Cheney, Powell, et al.—will be calling the tune, and the whole nation will be on constant alert, for, James Baker has already warned us, Terrorism is everywhere on the march. We cannot be too vigilant. Welcome to Asunción. Yes! We have no bananas.
The Nation
8/15 January 2001
* THREE LIES TO RULE BY
In the end, the American presidential campaign of 2000 ostensibly (pre-fraud) came down to a matter of Character. Specifically, to the characters of two male citizens of hitherto no particular interest to the polity. But then personality is about all that our media can cope with, since the American political system, despite ever more expensive elections, sees to it that nothing of an overtly political nature may be discussed. It is true that one candidate, daringly, if briefly, suggested that since 1 percent of the population owns most of the country, as well as quite a bit of the globe elsewhere, perhaps that 1 percent ought not to pay even less tax than it currently does. This tore it. For a moment, the red flag snapped in CNN’s early light, but by twilight’s last gleaming, that banner was struck, and no real issue was touched on again.
What then is a real issue? Currently, the United States spends twenty-two times as much as our potential enemies (the seven designated rogue states of concern) spend combined. It used to be that true politics involved an accounting of where the people’s tax money goes and why. Since the American military currently gets over half of each year’s federal revenue, that should have been the most important subject to chat about. But not this year, and so, dutifully, each candidate pledged himself to ever greater spending for the Great War Machine, as it idly trawls about the globe in search of enemies, leaving us with nothing to chatter about except Character. With moral character. Or, as Dr. Elaine May once put it so well: “I like a moral problem so much better than a real problem.”
Although one candidate was immediately perceived to be something of a dope—and dyslexic to boot (defense: it’s not his fault, so why are you picking on him?), there are, we were sternly told, worse things in a President. Like what? Like lying. When this bunch of garlic was hoisted high, a shudder went through us peasants in our Transylvanian villages as we heard, across haunted moors, the sound of great leathern wings. The undead were aloft.
One candidate was deemed a liar because he exaggerated. He never actually said that he alone had invented the Internet, but he implied that he might have had more to do with its early inception than he had. Worse, he said that his mother-in-law’s medicine cost more than his dog’s identical medicine, when he had—I’ve already forgotten which—either no mother-in-law or no dog. By now the Republic was reeling. The vileness of it all! Could we entrust so false a figure to hold in his hand war’s arrows, peace’s laurel? All in all, the two to three billion dollars that the election cost the generous 1 percent through its corporate paymasters was, by all reckoning, the most profoundly irrelevant in a political history which seems determined to make a monkey of Darwin while exalting the creationist point of view, Manichaean version.
Today’s sermon is from Montaigne: “Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying, we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. . . . Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up.”
But our subject is not the people, those quadrennial spear-carriers, but the two paladins, one of whom will presently be entrusted with the terrible swift nuclear sword, thus becoming the greatest goodest nation that ever was robustly incarnate.
“We are a nation based on Truth,” the Republican managers of the impeachment of sex-fibber President Clinton constantly reminded us, unaware that his constituents were, perversely, rallying round him. Pleased, no doubt, by the metaphysics of his “What is is?” After all, what is truth, as a Roman bureaucrat once rather absently put it. Yet . . .
“Yet” is the nicest of words in English when logically, non-pregnantly used. The American global empire rests on a number of breathtaking presidential lies that our court historians seldom dare question. It would seem that the Hitler team got it about right when it comes to human credulity: the greater the lie, the more apt it is to be believed. The price of the perhaps nonexistent dog’s medicine is not going to go unchallenged, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s deliberate provocation of the Japanese, in order to force them into attacking us and thus bring us into the Second World War, is simply not admissible. Contemporary journalism’s first law, “What ought not to be true is not true,” is swiftly backed up by those who write the “history” stories to be used in schools. Happily, I have lived long enough to indulge in the four most beautiful words in the English language: “I told you so.”
In Burr (1973), I relit, as it were,
the image of that demonized figure, Aaron Burr. In passing, I duly noted that his chief demonizer, the admirable-in-most-things, save a tendency toward hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson, had lived connubially with a slave girl, Sally Hemings, by whom he had a number of children, kept on as slaves. Dumas Malone, the leading Jefferson biographer of the day, denounced my portrait of Jefferson as “subversive,” because, as he put it, no gentleman could have had sexual relations with a slave and, since Mr. Jefferson was the greatest gentleman of that era, he could not have . . . On such false syllogisms are national myths set. Recent testing shows that many of Hemings’s descendants contain the golden DNA of Jefferson himself. Loyalists say that it was an idiot nephew who fathered Sally’s children. How? Since Jefferson and Sally lived pretty much as man and wife at Monticello, the idea of the nephew, banjo in hand, making his way up the hill to the house, time and again, to get laid by Jefferson’s companion boggles the mind. So much for a great lie that court historians and other propagandists insist that Americans believe. Why is it so grimly important? Since the relationship between black and white is still the most delicate of subjects for Americans, Jefferson must be marble-pure and so outside his own great formulation and invitation to the peoples of all the world: the pursuit of happiness.