by Gore Vidal
The first American republic began with the revolution in 1776 and ended with the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. The first republic was a loose confederation of thirteen autonomous states. The second republic was also a fairly loose affair until 1861, when the American Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, took the mystical position that no state could ever leave the Union. When the southern states disagreed, a bloody war was fought in order to create “a more perfect [sic] union.” At war’s end, our third and most imperial republic came into existence. This republic was rich, belligerent, hungry for empire. This republic’s master was the Bank. This republic became, in 1945, the world’s master. Militarily and economically, the third American republic dominated the earth. All should then have been serene: the mandate of Heaven was plainly ours. Unfortunately, the Bank made a fatal decision. To keep profits high, it decided to keep the country on a permanent wartime footing. Loyal Banksman Harry S Truman deliberately set out to frighten the American people. He told us that the Soviet Union was on the march while homegrown Reds were under every bed—all this at a time when the United States had atomic weapons and the Russians did not, when the Soviet Union was still in pieces from World War II and we were incredibly prosperous.
Those who questioned the Bank’s official line were called commies or soft on communism. Needless to say, in due course, the Soviet Union did become the powerful enemy that the Bank requires in order to keep its control of the third republic. The business of our third republic is war, or defense, as it’s been euphemistically called since 1949. As a result, of the thirty-five years since the end of World War II, the United States has managed to be at war (hot and cold) for thirty; and if the Bank has its way, we shall soon be at war again, this time on a really large scale. But then, as Banksman Grover Cleveland so presciently observed almost a century ago, “the United States is not a country to which peace is necessary.”
There comes a time, however, when the waging of war is too dangerous even for Banksmen. There also comes a time when the crude politics of getting the people to vote against their own interests by frightening them with the Red Menace simply doesn’t work. We are now in such a time. Clearly, a new sort of social arrangement is necessary.
The fact that half of those qualified to vote don’t vote in presidential elections is proof that the third republic is neither credible nor truly legitimate. The fact that the Bank’s inspired invention, the so-called two-party system (which is really one single Banksparty), is now collapsing is further proof that the fourth republic will require political parties that actually represent the various groups and classes in the country and do not simply serve the Bank. By breaking out of the two-party system this year, Banksman John Anderson has demonstrated in the most striking way that, like the Wizard of Oz, the two-party system never existed.
The time has come to hold another constitutional convention. Those conservatives known as liberals have always found this notion terrifying, because they are convinced that the powers of darkness will see to it that the Bill of Rights is abolished. This is always a possibility, but sometimes it’s best to know the worst all at once rather than to allow those rights to be slowly taken away from us by, let us say, the present majority of the Supreme Court, led by Banksman Burger.
In the development of a new Constitution, serious attention should be paid to the Swiss political arrangement. Its cantonal system is something that might work for us. The United States could be divided into autonomous regions: northern California, Oregon, and Washington would make a fine Social Democratic society, while the combined states of Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma could bring back slavery and the minstrel show. There ought to be something for everybody to choose from in the United States, rather than the current homogenized overcentralized state that the Bank has saddled us with. The Swiss constitution has another attractive feature: the citizens have the right to hold a referendum and rescind, if they choose, a law. No need for a Howard Jarvis to yodel in the wilderness: the Jarvis Effect would be institutionalized.
Ideally, the fourth republic should abandon the presidential system for a parliamentary one. The leader of a majority in Congress would form the government. Out of respect for the rocks at Mount Rushmore, we would retain the office of president, but the president would be a figurehead and not what he is today—a dictator who is elected by half the people from a very short list given them by the Banksparty.
Five years ago I got a good reaction with this: “I propose 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 gangsters….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 one. Four weeks is more than enough time to present the issues. To show us the candidates in interviews, debates, uncontrolled encounters in which we can actually see who the candidate really is, answering tough questions, his record up there for all to examine.”
One aspect of our present patchwork Constitution that should be not only retained but strengthened is that part of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—which, according to Justice Hugo Black, “means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can…pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can [they] force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.” This is clear-cut. This is noble. This has always been ignored—even in the two pre-Bank republics. Religion, particularly the Judaeo-Christian variety, is hugely favored by the federal government. For one thing, the revenues of every religion are effectively tax-exempt. Billions of dollars are taken in by the churches, temples, Scientological basements, and Moonie attics, and no tax need be paid. As a result, various fundamentalist groups spend millions of dollars propagandizing over the airwaves, conducting savage crusades against groups that they don’t like, mixing in politics. Now, a church has as much right as an individual to try to persuade others that its way is the right way, but not even the Bank is allowed to advertise without first doing its duty as a citizen and paying (admittedly too few) taxes.
The time has come to tax the income of the churches. After all, they are essentially money-making corporations that ought to pay tax at the same rate secular corporations do.*1 When some of the Founders proposed that church property be tax-exempt, they meant the little white church house at the corner of Elm and Main—not the $25-billion portfolio of the Roman Catholic Church, nor the even weirder money-producing shenanigans of L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer who is now the head of a wealthy “religion” called Scientology, or of that peculiar Korean gentleman who may or may not be an agent of Korean intelligence but who is certainly the boss of a “religion” that takes in many millions of tax-free dollars a year.
Until the height of the cold war in the 1950s, the American government kept God in his place—in heaven, presumably. But the Bank-created anti-communist hysteria of the era gave the Christers a wonderful opportunity to do such things as get Congress to put “In God We Trust” on the money—a sly gesture, come to think of it: God and the dollar joined, as it were, in holy matrimony, a typical Bank ploy. Needless to say, the Founders would have been horrified. Here are two comments not to be found in any American public-school book. Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” John Adams (in a letter to Jefferson): “Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out. ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds,
if there was no religion in it.’ ” But since the Bank approves of most religions (“Slaves, obey thy masters” is an injunction it finds irresistible), superstition continues to flourish. On the other hand, if we were to tax the various denominations, a good many religions would simply wither away, on the ground that they had ceased to be profitable to their managers.
Five years ago, I was eager to make changes that would benefit society without costing any money. I see now, in a curious way, that most of those changes were tied up with religion. Although our Constitution forbids the government to favor any religion, the government favors all religions by allowing them to escape paying taxes. Although the federal government has not gone so far as to oblige everyone to believe that Jesus was divine, a number of Moses–Jesus–Saint Paul laws are on the books, causing all sorts of havoc and making a joke of our pretense of being a free or even a civilized society. In 1975, I said: “Roughly eighty percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private morals. By that I mean controlling what we drink, eat, smoke, put into our veins—not to mention trying to regulate with whom and how we have sex, with whom and how we gamble. As a result, our police are among the most corrupt in the Western world.” This used to cause some distress with certain audiences. But I’d trudge on: “Therefore, let us remove from the statute books all laws that have to do with private morals—what are called victimless crimes. If a man or woman wants to be a prostitute, that is his or her affair. 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. He can’t really mean that sin should go unpunished, no matter what those old WASP atheists who started the country had in mind.
“All drugs should be legalized and sold at cost to anyone with a doctor’s prescription.” Gasps! Cries! Save our children! I pointed out that our children would be saved from the playground pusher because there would be no profit for the pusher—a brand-new thought. “Legalization will also remove the Mafia and other big-time drug dispensers from the scene, just as the repeal of Prohibition eliminated the bootleggers of whiskey forty years ago.” I didn’t add that the absolute political corruption of the United States can be traced to that “noble experiment” when the Christers managed to outlaw whiskey—an unconstitutional act if there ever was one. As a result, practically everyone broke the law, and gradually lawlessness became a habit, while organized crime became a huge business of Banklike proportions (and connections).
“Obviously drug addiction is a bad thing. But in the interest of good law and good order, the police must be removed from the temptation that the current system offers them and the Bureau of Narcotics should be abolished.” That would be the trick of the week! If the bureau were ever to eliminate all drugs, the bureau would be itself eliminated. Therefore…The logic is clear. But few can follow it, because the brainwashing has been too thorough.
“I worry a good deal about the police because traditionally they are the supporters of fascist movements, and America is as prone to fascism as any other country. Individually, no one can blame the policeman. He is the way he is because Americans have never understood the Bill of Rights. Since sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, are proscribed by various religions, the states have made laws against them.” I was too tactful in those days to add that the enslavement of the blacks (accursed descendants of Ham) and the persecution of the Jews (Christ-killers forever) and homosexualists (a duet of male angels claim to have been threatened with rape by a number of men in downtown Sodom), as well as the deep dislike and mistrust of woman as unclean, all derive from that book that Jimmy Carter likes to read regularly in Spanish and that Presidents Adams and Jefferson did not really like to read at all.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon referred to John Kennedy’s Catholicism six times in practically a single breath; he then said, piously, that he did not think religion ought to play any part in any political election—unless, maybe, the candidate had no religion (and Nixon shuddered ever so slightly). As the First Criminal knew only too well, religion is the most important force not only in American politics but in world politics, too. Currently, the ninth-century Imam at Qom is threatening an Islamic holy war against Satan America. Currently, the fifth-century-B.C. prime minister of Israel is claiming two parcels of desirable real estate because an ancient text says that Jews once lived there. Currently, the eleventh-century Polish pope is conducting a series of tours in order to increase his personal authority and to shore up a church whose past excesses caused so much protest that a rival Protestant church came into being—and it, in turn, hates…
Religion is an endless and complicated matter, and no one in his right mind can help agreeing with John Adams. Unfortunately, most of the world is not in its right mind; and the Bank can take some credit for this. For years, relations were kept tense between poor American whites and poor blacks (would you let your sister marry one?), on the ground that if the two groups ever got together in a single labor union, say, they could challenge the Bank’s authority. Religion is also the basis of those laws governing personal conduct that keep the prisons overcrowded with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium.
The thrust of our laws at the beginning of the country—and even now—is to make what these religions regard as sin secular crimes to be punished with fines and prison terms. The result? Last year the United States shelled out some $4 billion to keep 307,000 sinners locked up. Living conditions in our prisons are a famous scandal. Although the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals declared in 1973 that “prisons should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away people who are too dangerous to be allowed at large in a free society,” there are plans to build more and more prisons to brutalize more and more people who are, for the most part, harmless. In much of Scandinavia, even vicious criminals are allowed a degree of freedom to work so that they can lead useful lives, turning over a part of the money that they earn to their victims. At present, at least five American states are experimenting with a compensatory system. All agree that the new way of handling so-called property offenders is a lot cheaper than locking them up at a cost that, in New York State, runs to $26,000 a year—more than enough to send a lively lad to Harvard, where he will soon learn how to commit his crimes against property in safe and legal ways.
But since the Bank is not happy with the idea of fewer prisons, much less with the idea of fewer crimes on the books, the Bank has now come up with something called the Omnibus Crime Bill. This has been presented in the Senate by Banksman Kennedy as S. 1722 and in the House of Representatives by Banksman the Reverend Robert F. Drinan as H.R. 6233. Incidentally, Banksman Drinan will presently give up his seat in the House at the order of the Polish pope, who says that he does not want his minions in politics, which is nonsense. A neo-fascist priest sits as a deputy in the Italian Parliament, just across the Tiber from the Vatican. Father Drinan, alas, is liberal. He does not favor the Right to Life movement. On the other hand, he is a loyal Banksman—hardly a conflict of interest, since the Vatican has an account with the Bank, administered until recently by Michele Sindona, a master criminal.
The point of these two bills is as simple as the details are endlessly complex: the Bank wants more power to put in prison those people who challenge its authority. At the moment it looks as if this repressive legislation will become law, because, as Republican Senator James A. McClure has pointed out, the Omnibus Crime Bill is now “a law unto itself, a massive re-creation whose full implications are known only by its prosecutorial draftsmen (in the Justice Department).” Some features:
If, during a war, you should advise some
one to evade military service, to picket an induction center, to burn a draft card, you can go to jail for five years while paying a fine of $250,000 (no doubt lent you by the bank at 20 percent).
If, as a civilian, you speak or write against a war in such a way that military authorities think you are inciting insubordination, you can get up to ten years in prison or pay a fine of $250,000, or both. If, as a civilian, you write or speak against a war or against conditions on a military installation, and if the Bank is conducting one of its wars at the time (according to the bill—by omission—a war is not something that Congress declares anymore), you can get ten years in prison and pay the usual quarter-million-dollar fine. If the Bank is not skirmishing some place, you can go to jail for only five years while forking out a quarter mill.
If you break a federal law and tell your friendly law enforcer that you did not break that federal law, and if he has corroboration from another friendly cop that you did, you have made a False Oral Statement to a Law Enforcement Officer, for which you can get two years in the slammer after paying the customary quarter mill.
Anyone who refuses to testify before a grand jury, court, or congressional committee, even though he has claimed his constitutional (Fifth Amendment) right against self-incrimination, can be imprisoned if he refuses to exchange his constitutional right to remain silent for a grant of partial immunity from prosecution.
The Bank’s deep and abiding love of prison requires that alternatives to prison not be encouraged. According to a 1978 Congressional Research Service report, this bill (then S. 1437), enacted and enforced, would add anywhere from 62.8 to 92.8 percent to our already overcrowded federal prisons. The Bank’s dream, plainly, is to put all its dissident depositors either in prison or, if they’re young enough, into the army, where they lose most of their civil rights.