by Gore Vidal
It is obvious that if we are to avoid an economic collapse, defense spending must be drastically reduced. But it is hard to reduce a budget that the people are never told about. The first politician who realizes why those politicians who appear to run against the government always win, could not only win himself but be in a position to rid us of the National Security State—which is what people truly hate. “Internal Improvements” was the slogan of Henry Clay’s popular movement. A neo-Clayite could sweep the country if he wanted seriously to restore the internal plant of the country rather than invade Honduras or bob expensively about the Persian Gulf or overthrow a duly elected government in Nicaragua while running drugs (admittedly, the CIA’s only margin of profit).
Third, as part of our general retrenchment, we should withdraw from NATO. Western Europe is richer and more populous than America. If it cannot defend itself from an enemy who seems to be falling apart even faster than we are, then there is nothing that we, proud invaders of Grenada, can effectively do. I would stop all military aid to the Middle East. This would oblige the hardliners in Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. We have supported Israel for forty years. No other minority in the history of the United States has ever extorted so much Treasury money for its Holy Land as the Israeli lobby, and it has done this by making a common cause with the National Security State. Each supports the other. I would have us cease to pay for either.
Fourth, we read each day about the horrors of drug abuse, the murder of policemen, the involvement of our own government in drug running, and so on. We are all aware that organized crime has never been richer nor the society more demoralized. What is the solution? I would repeal every prohibition against the sale and use of drugs, because it is these prohibitions that have caused the national corruption, not to mention most of the addiction. Since the American memory has a span of about three days, I will remind you that in 1919 alcohol was prohibited in the United States. In 1933 Prohibition was repealed because not only had organized crime expanded enormously but so had alcoholism. What did not work then does not work now. But we never learn, which is part of our national charm. Repeal would mean that there is no money for anyone in selling drugs. That’s the end of the playground pusher. That’s the end of organized crime, which has already diversified and is doing very nicely in banking, films, and dry cleaning. Eventually, repeal will mean the end of mass drug addiction. As there will always be alcoholics, there will always be drug addicts, but not to today’s extent. It will be safe to walk the streets because the poor will not rob you to pay for their habit.*3
Fifth, two years ago I described how the American empire ended the day the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo and we became, for the first time in seventy-one years, a debtor nation. Since then, we have become the largest debtor country in history. I suggested a number of things that might be done, some of which I’ve again mentioned. But, above all, I see our economic survival inextricably bound up with that of our neighbor in the Northern Hemisphere, the Soviet Union. Some sort of alliance must be made between us so that together we will be able to compete with Japan and, in due course, China. As the two klutzes of the north, each unable to build a car anyone wants to drive, we deserve each other. In a speech at Gorbachev’s anti-nuclear forum in Moscow, I quoted a Japanese minister of trade who said that Japan would still be number one in the next century. Then, tactlessly he said that the United States will be Japan’s farm and Western Europe its boutique. A Russian got up and asked, “What did he say about us?” I said that they were not mentioned but, if they did not get their act together, they would end up as ski instructors. It is my impression that the Russians are eager to be Americans, but, thanks to the brainwashing of the National Security State’s continuing plan, Americans have a built-in horror of the Evil Empire, which the press and the politicians have kept going for forty years.*4 Happily, our National Security State is in the red, in more ways than one. Time for a change?
THE NATION
June 4, 1988
*1 For those interested in the details, I recommend H. R. Shapiro’s Democracy in America, the only political history of the United States from British shires to present deficits. Needless to say, this masterly work, fourteen years in the making, is published privately by Manhattan Communication, 496 LaGuardia Place, Suite 406, New York, NY 10012. The present volume is only half the whole and lacks scholarly apparatus (index, bibliography) but not scholarship.
*2 See Appendix.
*3 I called for the legalization of drugs pretty much in these same words on the op-ed page of The New York Times, September 26, 1970. Today more and more voices are joining mine (e.g., The Economist, April 2, 1985).
*4 The press, which should know better, is of no help. The Iran-Contra hearings was a sudden dramatic confrontation between the real government of the United States, as represented by Ollie North et al., and the cosmetic government. Ollie told us as much. But no one got the point.
CHAPTER 13
MONGOLIA!
In August, Moscow’s weather is like that of Bangor, Maine; the cool wind has begun to smell of snow while the dark blue sky is marred with school-of-Tiepolo clouds. Last August the rowan trees were overloaded with clusters of red berries. “Rowanberries in August mean a hard winter,” said the literary critic as he showed me the view from the Kremlin terrace. “But after the hard winter,” I said, sententious as Mao, “there will come the spring.” He nodded. “How true!” As we pondered the insignificance of what neither had said, a baker’s dozen of ornithologists loped into view. Moscow was acting as host to a world ornithological congress. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds. Since they are staying at our group’s hotel, we have dubbed them the tweet-tweets.
The critic asked, “Have you read Gorky Park?” I said that I had not because I have made it a rule only to read novels by Nobel Prize winners. That way one will never read a bad book. I told him the plot of Pearl Buck’s This Proud Heart. He told me the plot of Gorky Park. “It’s a really good bad book,” he said. “You know, everyone’s making such heavy weather about it here. I can’t think why. It’s wonderfully silly. An American gunman loose in Moscow!” He chuckled. “It’s so surrealist.” I said that they should publish it as an example of American surrealism, with a learned commentary explaining the jokes.
As we chatted, two Russian soldiers walked by us. One was in uniform; the other wore blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT. The literary critic smiled. “Could an American soldier wear a Kremlin T-shirt?” I explained to him, patiently, I hope, the difference between the free and the unfree worlds. Abashed, he changed the subject to, where was I going next? When I said, “Ulan Bator,” he laughed. When I wanted to know what was so funny, he said, “I thought you said you were going to Ulan Bator.” When I told him that that was exactly where I was going, to the capital of the Mongolian People’s Republic (sometimes known as Outer Mongolia), he looked very grave indeed. “It is said,” he whispered so that the ubiquitous KGB would not overhear us, “that the British and French embassies have a spy at the airport and that anyone who looks promising is approached—oh, very furtively—and asked if he plays bridge. You did not hear this from me,” he added.
At midnight the plane leaves Moscow for Ulan Bator, with stops at Omsk and Irkutsk (in Siberia). The trip takes ten hours; there is a five-hour time difference between Moscow and Ulan Bator (U.B. to us fans). Moscow Aeroflot planes have a tendency to be on time, but the ceilings are too low for claustrophobes, and there is a curious smell of sour cream throughout the aircraft. Contrary to legend, the stewardesses are agreeable, at least on the Siberian run.
Our party included an English-born, Nairobi-based representative of the United Nations Environment Programme—White Hunter, his name. A representative of the World Wildlife Fund Internatio
nal who turned out to be a closet tweet-tweet—and was so named. And the photographer, Snaps. We were accompanied by the youthful Boris Petrovich, who has taught himself American English through the study of cassettes of what appears to have been every American film ever made. We had all met at the Rossya Hotel in Moscow. According to the Russians, it is the largest hotel in the world. Whether or not this is true, the Rossya’s charm is not unlike that of New York’s Attica Prison. In the Soviet Union the foreigner is seldom without a low-level anxiety, which can, suddenly, develop into wall-climbing paranoia. Where are the visas? To which the inevitable Russian answer, “No problem,” is ominous indeed.
Now our little group was being hurtled through the Siberian skies to a part of Outer Mongolia where no white—or, for that matter, black—Westerner had ever been before, or as one of our men at the American Embassy put it: “You will be the first American ever to set foot in that part of the Gobi Desert.” I asked for my instructions. After all, those of us who believe in freedom must never not be busy. When I suggested that I might destabilize the Mongolian government while I was there, one of our men was slightly rattled. “Actually,” he said, “no American has ever been there because there isn’t anything there.” My fierce patriotism was seriously tried by this insouciance. “Then why,” I asked, “am I going?” He said he hadn’t a clue. Why was I going?
It all came back to me on the night flight to Ulan Bator. The World Wildlife Fund has taken to sending writers around the world to record places where the ecology is out of joint. My task was a bit the reverse. I was to report on the national park that the Mongolian government is creating in the Gobi in order to keep pristine the environment so that flora and fauna can proliferate in a perfect balance with the environment.
As I stared out the porthole window at my own reflection (or was it Graham Greene’s? The vodka bottle seemed familiar), my mind was a-whirl with the intense briefings that I had been subjected to. For instance, is the People’s Republic of Mongolia part of the Soviet Union? No. It is an independent socialist nation, grateful for the “disinterested” aid that it gets from the other socialist nations. When did it come into being? Sixty years ago, when the Chinese were ejected and their puppet, the Living Buddha, was shorn of his powers and the twenty-eight-year-old Damdiny Sükh, known as Ulan Bator (Red Hero in Mongolian), took charge of the state, with disinterested Soviet aid. Meanwhile, back at the Kremlin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin was not entirely thrilled. Classic Marxism requires that a state evolve from feudalism to monarchy to capitalism and then to communism. As of 1920, whatever had been going on in Mongolia for two millennia, it was not capitalism. The people were nomadic. Every now and then, in an offhand way, they’d conquer the world. Genghis Khan ruled from the Danube to the Pacific Ocean, and some twelve hundred years ago, according to one account, Mongol tribes crossed from Asia to North America via the Bering Strait, making the Western Hemisphere a sort of Mongol colony. Lenin knitted his brow and came up with the following concept: “With the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.” So it came to pass. In sixty years an illiterate population has become totally literate, life expectancies have increased, industries and mining have taken the place of the old nomadic way of life, and there is a boom in population. “Sixty percent of the population,” said Boris Petrovich, “is under sixteen years of age.” Tweet-tweet looked grim. “So much the worse for them,” he said. Boris Petrovich said, “But, gosh, they need people here. Why, they’ve only got one and a half million people to one and a half million square kilometers. That’s not enough people to feed themselves with.” As the environmental aspect was carefully explained to Boris Petrovich, his eyes lost their usual keenness. “Should I,” he asked me, changing the subject, “buy Lauren Bacall’s book?”
Jet lag and culture shock greeted us at the airport, where blue asters had broken through the landing strip. But no one was asked to play bridge, because we were whisked aboard an Air Mongolia plane and flown five more hours to the provincial capital of Gobi Altai, the southwestern province of Mongolia. At the foot of the Altai range of mountains is the town of Altai. Here we spent the night in a two-story hotel on the main street, whose streetlamps did not turn on. Opposite the hotel is the police station. At the end of the street is a new hospital of raw cement.
We were given dinner by the deputy chairman of the province, the Soviet director of the park, and the deputy minister of forestry (under whose jurisdiction is the near-treeless Gobi), as well as two ministerial officials assigned to the United Nations Environment Programme. Toasts were drunk as dishes of mutton came and went. Money is no longer flowing from the UN, White Hunter pointed out. The Reagan administration is cutting back. The Soviet Union is making a fair contribution to the fund, but—such is the Soviet sense of fun—the money is in unconvertible rubles. This means that the Soviet contribution can be spent only in the Soviet sphere. Hence, the Gobi park.
Although Mongolia smells of mutton fat, the Mongols smell not at all, even though the Russians go on about the great trouble they have getting them to bathe. Men and women are equally handsome: tall, narrow-waisted, with strong white teeth. Some wear the national tunic with sash and boots; others wear the international uniform of blue jeans. “Why,” I asked one of our Mongolian colleagues, “are there no bald men here?” He was startled by the question. “The old men shave their heads,” he said, as if this was an answer. Even so, there are no bald men to be seen anywhere. Our group came to the conclusion that over the millennia bald babies were exposed at birth.
As the evening ended, I had a sense of what the English call déjà vu. I had been in this company before. But where? It came to me: in my grandfather’s state of Oklahoma, on one of the Indian reservations. Physically, the Mongolians are dead ringers for the Cherokees, whose nation my grandfather represented as an attorney in an effort to get some money for the land that the American government had stolen from them. All in all, the Russians are doing rather better by their Mongols than we are doing by ours.
I proposed a toast to Kublai Khan, “China’s great Mongol emperor, who opened up a peaceful discourse between East and West.” The Mongols at table were amused. The Russians less so. “You know,” said one of the ministerials, “we are making a number of movies about Mongolian history.” I did not ask if any of these films would deal with the 250-year Mongol occupation of Russia. The Russians still complain of their suffering during the Mongol occupation. “Now,” said the ministerial, “we are making a movie about American Indians.” When I asked what the theme was, I got a vague answer. “Oh, the…connections. You’ll see.”
The next day there was rain in the Gobi. Something unheard of, we were told. In fact, there had been a flood a few days before, and many people were said to have been drowned. Due to bad weather, the plane would not take us to the encampment. So we set out on a gray afternoon in jeeps and Land Rovers. There is no road, only a more or less agreed-upon trail.
* * *
As we left Altai, we saw a bit of the town that Snaps and I had not been allowed to see earlier that morning, when we had set out to record the real life of the Mongols, who live in what the Russians call a yurta and the owners call a ger: a round tent, ingeniously made of felt, with a removable flap across the top to let out smoke. In winter the fire is lit in the morning for cooking; then it goes out until sundown, when it is lit again for the evening meal. Apparently the yurta retains warmth in winter and is cool in summer. At Altai, every hundred or so yurtas are surrounded by wooden fences, “to hold back the drifts of snow in winter,” said a Russian, or “to keep them in their particular collective,” said a cynical non-Russian. Whatever, the wooden fences have curious binary devices on them: “king’s ring and queen’s ring,” I was told by a Mongol—and no more.
Every time Snaps and I were close
to penetrating one of the enclosures, a policeman would indicate that we should go back to the hotel. Meanwhile, the children would gather around until Snaps snapped; then they would shriek nyet and scamper off, only to return a moment later with many giggles. The older people quite liked being photographed, particularly the men on their ponies, whose faces—the ponies’—are out of prehistory, pendulous-lipped and sly of slanted eye. In costume, women wear boots; not in costume, they wear high heels as they stride over the dusty graveled plain, simulating the camel’s gait.
The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable with Francesca French is an invaluable look at central Asia in the twenties and thirties by two lady missionaries who traveled the trade routes, taught the Word, practiced medicine.* “The Mongol’s home is his tent, and his nomadic life is the expression of a compelling instinct. A house is intolerable to him, and even the restricting sense of an enclosing city wall is unbearable.” One wonders what today’s Mongols think, cooped up in their enclosures. “They hate the new housing,” said one official. “They put their animals and belongings in the apartment houses, and then they stay in their yurtas.” Others told me that, in general, the people are content, acclimatized to this bad century. “The Mongol lives in and for the present, and looks neither backward toward his ancestors nor forward to his descendants.”