by Gore Vidal
3
The fifteenth of February, 1987, proved to be a bright sunny day in Hell, where I had come with nine hundred worthies from several dozen countries, to listen to Satan himself, Gorbachev, who spoke thoughtfully of the absolute necessity of abolishing all nuclear weapons on the ground that the fact of their existence endangers the human race. Plainly, the Lord of the Flies has not read the Good Book. If he had, he would know that this planet is just a staging area for that glorious place in the sky where, free of abortion and contraception and communism, the chosen will swirl about in the cosmic dust, praising the Lord for all eternity. In fact, not only did Gorbachev not seem to know the Truth that Reagan adheres to (so unlike mere irksome truth telling), he even suggested to us that this planet may be the only one that could support a human race. It would be, he said, a pity to lose everything through war or, more likely, accident. Then, to everyone’s amazement, Gorbachev mentioned Chernobyl by name, breaking the first law of the TV politician—never acknowledge failure. Since Hitler’s invasion, nothing has alarmed the Russians more than Chernobyl’s fallout, which is everywhere, including the village where I live in southern Italy: There is cesium 137 at the bottom of my garden. Gorbachev owned up to the whole mess, something our Acting President would never do…indeed has not, specifically, done.
On April 10, 1986, in order to preserve freedom for all men everywhere, the Acting President ordered a resumption of underground nuclear testing. The test’s code name was Mighty Oak; the place, Nevada. Several weeks before Chernobyl, Mighty Oak came a cropper. Some sort of unanticipated explosion went wrong. When nongovernment analysts duly noted increased radiation in the spring zephyrs, they were told by the Department of Energy that all was well. Then, on May 7, the department admitted that the level of the radioactive inert gas xenon 133 had been detected fifty miles from the site, at 550 picocuries per cubic meter. Of course things were, as always, worse in Russia. Now we learn that of our last six nuclear underground tests, three have made the atmosphere more than ever poisonous through mishap. In August 1986, Gorbachev announced a moratorium on such tests. But Reagan chooses to ignore the moratorium and stands tall.
As I stared at the stocky round-faced little man addressing us, I tried to imagine any American politician making as straightforward and intelligent an address to the likes of Trudeau and Galbraith, Milos Forman and Berio (needless to say the American press ignored the substance of the speech and zeroed in on the charismatic presence of one Yoko Ono). The only direct reference that Lucifer made to the Archangel from Warner Brothers concerned something that Reagan had said to him in Geneva: If the earth were ever to be invaded by Martians, the United States and the Soviet Union would, of course, be joint allies in a common cause. Gorbachev sighed: “I told the president that it was, perhaps, premature to prepare for such an invasion but as we had a common enemy right now, nuclear weapons, why couldn’t we unite to get rid of them?” But the planter of Mighty Oaks was not to be seduced. How could he be? Nearly every major politician in the United States is paid for by what is known as “the defense industry.” That is why close to 90 percent of the government’s income is wasted on “defense.”
Ordinarily, American conservatives (known, amusingly, as liberals) would have stopped this destruction of the economy and endangerment of life itself by the radical right (known, yet another thigh slapper, as conservatives). But things began to go awry with the invention of Israel. Many American conservatives decided that, for them, Israel comes first and so they chose to make common cause with the anti-Semitic but pro-Israel Jesus Christers, who lust for rapture.
Two years ago, Irving Kristol justified this shift in a house organ of the American Jewish Committee. Kristol noted that when the Jews were new to the American scene they “found liberal opinion and liberal politicism more congenial in their attitudes, more sensitive to Jewish concerns.” So they voted for the liberal paladin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his heirs. But now, Kristol writes, “is there any point in Jews hanging on, dogmatically and hypocritically, to their opinions of yesteryear when it is a new era we are confronting?” Because of Israel, “we are constrained to take our allies where and how we find them.” Finally, “If one had informed American Jews fifteen years ago that there was to be a powerful revival of Protestant fundamentalism as a political as well as religious force, they would surely have been alarmed, since they would have assumed that any such revival might tend to be anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. But the Moral Majority is neither.” But, of course, the Moral Majority is deeply anti-Semitic and will always remain so because the Jews killed our Lord (proving that no good deed ever goes unpunished: Were not those first-century Jews simply fulfilling The Divine Plan?), and the Jesus Christers are pro-Israel for reasons that have nothing to do with the Jews who are—except for exactly 144,000—going to get it along with the commies, at Armageddon.
Currently, there is little open debate in the United States on any of these matters. The Soviet Union must be permanently demonized in order to keep the money flowing to the Pentagon for “defense,” while Arabs are characterized as subhuman terrorists. Israel may not be criticized at all (ironically, the press in Israel is far more open and self-critical than ours). We do have one token Palestinian who is allowed an occasional word in the press, Professor Edward Said, who wrote (Guardian, December 21, 1986): since the “1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon…it was felt by the Zionist lobby that the spectacle of ruthless Israeli power on the TV screen would have to be effaced from memory by the strategy of incriminating the media as anti-Semitic for showing these scenes at all.” A wide range of Americans were then exuberantly defamed, including myself (see this page, “A Cheerful Response”).
I wondered, as I listened to Gorbachev, if he had any notion of the forces arrayed against him in the United States. Obviously, he is aware of the Israeli lobby, but that is something that he can come to terms with: Neither the Israelis nor the Russians are interested in suicide. But the Dispensationalists are quite another matter. By accident, the producers of that one-time hit-show the United States of America picked for the part of president a star with primitive religious longings. We cannot blame them. How could they have known? They thought that he was giving all that money to defense simply to reward them for giving him the lead, which he was doing, in part; but he was also responding to Ezekiel, and the glory of the coming end.
On the other hand, Gorbachev said that because he believes in life, the nuclear arms race will end because this is the only world that we have. We applauded. He paused. Then, with perfect timing, he said, “I had expected warmer applause on that line.” We gave it to him. He laughed. The speech was soon over.
I said to Norman Mailer, “I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.” Mailer said, “Well, that rules me out.” I was astonished and said so. “If there isn’t an afterlife,” he said, “then what’s the point to all this?” Before I could answer, he said, “All right, all right. I know what you’re going to say. There is no point.” A pride of exotic bishops separated us.
Yes, that is what I would have said, and because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.
THE OBSERVER (LONDON)
November 15, 1987
(But written as of March 1987)
* Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1986.
CHAPTER 9
THE DAY THE AMERICAN EMPIRE RAN OUT OF GAS*1
On September 16, 1985, when* the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died. The empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic
primacy.*2
After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets. Then, in 1914, New York replaced London as the world’s financial capital. Before 1914, the United States had been a developing country, dependent on outside investment. But with the shift of the money power from Old World to New, what had been a debtor nation became a creditor nation and central motor to the world’s economy. All in all, the English were well pleased to have us take their place. They were too few in number for so big a task. As early as the turn of the century, they were eager for us not only to help them out financially but to continue, in their behalf, the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race: to bear with courage the white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling not so tactfully put it. Were we not—English and Americans—all Anglo-Saxons, united by common blood, laws, language? Well, no, we were not. But our differences were not so apparent then. In any case, we took on the job. We would supervise and civilize the lesser breeds. We would make money.
By the end of the Second World War, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America’s hegemony lasted exactly five years. Then the cold and hot wars began. Our masters would have us believe that all our problems are the fault of the Evil Empire of the East, with its satanic and atheistic religion, ever ready to destroy us in the night. This nonsense began at a time when we had atomic weapons and the Russians did not. They had lost twenty million of their people in the war, and eight million of them before the war, thanks to their neoconservative Mongolian political system. Most important, there was never any chance, then or now, of the money power shifting from New York to Moscow. What was—and is—the reason for the big scare? Well, the Second War made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic, with many a wink, in the people’s name. In order to maintain a general prosperity (and enormous wealth for the few) they decided that we would become the world’s policeman, perennial shield against the Mongol hordes. We shall have an arms race, said one of the high priests, John Foster Dulles, and we shall win it because the Russians will go broke first. We were then put on a permanent wartime economy, which is why close to two thirds*3 of the government’s revenues are constantly being siphoned off to pay for what is euphemistically called defense.
As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, “The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.” Thirty-five years later, they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per capita income, to forty-sixth in literacy and so on, until last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to two trillion dollars in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we—the white race—have become the yellow man’s burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.*4 In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan’s advanced technology with China’s resourceful landmass. Europe and the United States will then be, simply, irrelevant to the world that matters, and so we come full circle: Europe began as the relatively empty uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.
The British used to say that their empire was obtained in a fit of absentmindedness. They exaggerate, of course. On the other hand, our modern empire was carefully thought out by four men. In 1890 a U.S. Navy captain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, wrote the blueprint for the American imperium, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. Then Mahan’s friend, the historian-geopolitician Brooks Adams, younger brother of Henry, came up with the following formula: “All civilization is centralization. All centralization is economy.” He applied the formula in the following syllogism: “Under economical centralization, Asia is cheaper than Europe. The world tends to economic centralization. Therefore, Asia tends to survive and Europe to perish.” Ultimately, that is why we were in Vietnam. The amateur historian and professional politician Theodore Roosevelt was much under the influence of Adams and Mahan; he was also their political instrument, most active not so much during his presidency as during the crucial war with Spain, where he can take a good deal of credit for our seizure of the Philippines, which made us a world empire. Finally, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt’s closest friend, kept in line a Congress that had a tendency to forget our holy mission—our manifest destiny—and ask, rather wistfully, for internal improvements.
From the beginning of our republic we have had imperial longings. We took care—as we continue to take care—of the indigenous population. We maintained slavery a bit too long even by a cynical world’s tolerant standards. Then, in 1846, we produced our first conquistador, President James K. Polk. After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did. And that is why to this day the Mexicans refer to our southwestern states as “the occupied lands,” which Hispanics are now, quite sensibly, filling up.
The case against empire began as early as 1847. Representative Abraham Lincoln did not think much of Polk’s war, while Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, who fought at Veracruz, said in his memoirs, “The war was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” He went on to make a causal link, something not usual in our politics then and completely unknown now: “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
But the empire has always had more supporters than opponents. By 1895 we had filled up our section of North America. We had tried twice—and failed—to conquer Canada. We had taken everything that we wanted from Mexico. Where next? Well, there was the Caribbean at our front door and the vast Pacific at our back. Enter the Four Horsemen—Mahan, Adams, Roosevelt, and Lodge.
The original republic was thought out carefully, and openly, in The Federalist Papers: We were not going to have a monarchy and we were not going to have a democracy. And to this day we have had neither. For two hundred years we have had an oligarchical system in which men of property can do well and the others are on their own. Or, as Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority. The so-called Great Society bribed; today coercion is very much in the air. Happily, our neoconservative Mongoloids favor only authoritarian and never totalitarian means of coercion.
Unlike the republic, the empire was worked out largely in secret. Captain Mahan, in a series of lectures delivered at the Naval War College, compared the United States with England. Each was essentially an island state that could prevail in the world only through sea power. England had already proved his thesis. Now the United States must do the same. We must build a great navy in order to acquire overseas possessions. Since great navies are expensive, the wealth of new colonies must be used to pay for our fleets. In fact, the more colonies acquired, the more ships; the more ships, the more empire. Mahan’s thesis is agreeably circular. He showed how small England had ended up with most of Africa and all of southern Asia, thanks to sea power. He thought that we should do the same. The Caribbean was our first and easiest target. Then on to the Pacific Ocean, with all its islands. And, finally, to China, which was breaking up as a political entity.
Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams were tremendously excited by this prospect. At the time Roosevelt
was a mere police commissioner in New York City, but he had dreams of imperial glory. “He wants to be,” snarled Henry Adams, “our Dutch-American Napoleon.” Roosevelt began to maneuver his way toward the heart of power, sea power. With Lodge’s help, he got himself appointed assistant secretary of the navy, under a weak secretary and a mild president. Now he was in place to modernize the fleet and to acquire colonies. Hawaii was annexed. Then a part of Samoa. Finally, colonial Cuba, somehow, had to be liberated from Spain’s tyranny. At the Naval War College, Roosevelt declared, “To prepare for war is the most effectual means to promote peace.” How familiar that sounds! But since the United States had no enemies as of June 1897, a contemporary might have remarked that since we were already at peace with everyone, why prepare for war? Today, of course, we are what he dreamed we would be, a nation armed to the teeth and hostile to everyone. But what with Roosevelt was a design to acquire an empire is for us a means to transfer money from the Treasury to the various defense industries, which in turn pay for the elections of Congress and president.