If there were awards for making predictions about the future, Gore Vidal would win the gold!

Please note the date of these comments: May 1, 1975 !!

Full article: https://classic.esquire.com/article/1975/5/1/the-state-of-the-union

According to the polls, our second principal concern today is the breakdown of law and order. Now, to the right wing, law and order is often just a code phrase meaning ‘get the niggers.’ To the left wing it often means political oppression. When we have one of our ridiculous elections—ridiculous because they are about nothing at all except personalities—politicians declare a war on crime which is immediately forgotten after the election.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property party (thank you, Dr. Lundberg, for the phrase) and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently (nervous laugh on that)—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the parties…

Back to law and order.

“An example : 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.

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Meanwhile, we are afflicted with secret police of a sort which I do not think a democratic republic ought to support. In theory, the F.B.I. is necessary. For the investigation of crime. But in all the years that the F.B.I. has been in existence the major criminals—the Mafia, Cosa Nostra—have operated freely and happily. Except for the busting of an occasional bank robber or car thief, the F.B.I. has not shown much interest in big crime. Its time has been devoted to spying on Americans whose political beliefs did not please the late J. Edgar Hoover, a man who hated Commies, blacks and women in more or less that order.

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I propose that the F.B.I. confine its activities to organized crime and stop pretending that those who are against undeclared wars like Vietnam or General Motors or pollution want to overthrow the government and its Constitution with foreign aid. Actually, in my lifetime, the only group of any importance that has come near to overthrowing the Constitution was the Nixon Administration.

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At the turn of the century we made our bid for a world empire. We provoked a war with Spain. We won it and ended up owning the Spanish territories of Cuba and the Philippines. The people of the Philippines did not want us to govern them. So we killed three million Filipinos, the largest single act of genocide until Hitler….

Much interest in this statistic. Taken from Galloway and Johnson’s book, West Point: America’s Power Fraternity. Recently I got a letter from a Filipino scholar who has been working on the subject. She says that no one will ever know the exact number killed because no records were kept. But whole towns were wiped out, every man, woman and child slaughtered. The American Army does admit that perhaps a quarter million were killed during the “mopping up.” The spirit of My Lai is old with us.

The first and second world wars destroyed the old European empires, and created ours. In 1945 we were the world’s greatest power, not only economically but militarily—we alone had the atom bomb. For five years we were at peace. Unfortunately those industries that had become rich during the war combined with the military—which had become powerful—and together they concluded that it was in the best interest of the United States to maintain a vast military establishment.

Officially this was to protect us from the evil Commies. Actually it was to continue pumping federal money into companies like Boeing and Lockheed and keep the Pentagon full of generals and admirals while filling the pork barrels of congressmen who annually gave the Pentagon whatever it asked for, with the proviso that key military installations and contracts be allocated to the home districts of senior congressmen…

Nobody in particular was to blame. It just happened. To justify our having become a garrison state, gallant Harry Truman set about deliberately alarming the American people. The Soviet was dangerous. We must have new and expensive weapon systems. To defend the free world. The cold war began. The irony is that the Soviet was not dangerous to us at that time. Millions of their people had been killed in the war. Their industries had been shattered. Most important, they did not have atomic weapons and we did.

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Instead of using the wealth of the nation to improve the lot of our citizens, we have been wasting over a third of the federal budget on armaments and on the prosecution of secret and/or undeclared wars. We have drafted men into the Army in peacetime, something the founders of this country would have been appalled at. We have been, in effect, for thirty-three years a garrison state whose main purpose has been the making of armaments and the prosecution of illegal wars—openly as in Vietnam and Cambodia, secretly as in Greece and Chile. Wherever there is a choice between a military dictatorship—like Pakistan—and a free government—like India—we support the dictator. And then wonder why we are everywhere denounced as hypocrites.

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In a third of a century the only people who have benefited from the constant raid on our treasury and the sacrifice of our young men have been the companies that are engaged in making instruments of war…

What to do? A modest and obvious proposal: cut the defense budget. It is currently about a quarter of the national budget—eighty-five billion eight hundred million dollars. Unhappily both Ford and Rockefeller are loyal servants of the Pentagon. They will never cut back. They will only increase a military budget that is now projected for the end of the decade to cost us one hundred fourteen billion dollars a year. This is thievery. This is lunacy.

Conservative estimates say that we can cut the budget by ten percent and still make the world free for I.T.T. to operate in. I propose we aim to cut it by two thirds in stages over the next few years. I propose also a reduction of conventional forces. We need maintain no more than an army, navy, air force of perhaps two hundred thousand highly trained technicians whose task would be to see that anyone who tried to attack us would be destroyed.

A larger army only means that we are bound to use it sooner or later. To attack others.

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I would also propose phasing out the service academies… The academies have created an un-American military elite that has the greatest contempt for the institutions of this country, for democratic institutions anywhere… The motto of the academy is ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’ Which is the wrong order of loyalties. Worse, the West Point elite has created all around the world miniature West Points. Ethiopia, Thailand, Latin America are studded with academies whose function is to produce an elite not to fight wars—there are no wars in those parts of the world—but to limit democracy.

West Point also trains many of these past and future oligarchs—like the present dictator of Nicaragua, Somoza. Retired West Pointers also do profitable business in those nations that are dominated by West Point-style elites.

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The problem is our way of living. With six percent of the world’s population we use forty percent of the world’s raw resources. This unnatural consumption is now ending. We are faced with shortages of every kind and we will have to change the way we live whether we want to or not.

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But since none of us trusts our government to do anything right—much less honest—national resources should be a separate branch of the government, coequal with the other three but interconnected so that Congress can keep a sharp eye on its funding and the courts on its fairness. The President, any President, on principle, should be kept out of anything that has to do with the economy.

Much of today’s mess is due to Johnson’s attempt to conquer Asia without raising taxes, and to Nixon’s opportunistic mucking about with the economy at election time. These Presidential ninnies should stick to throwing out baseballs, and leave the important matters to serious people.

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

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I do find curious and disturbing the constant hatred of government which is of course a hatred of themselves. Do these “average” Americans know something that I don’t? Is the world really Manichaean? Perhaps deep down inside they really believe that we are all crooked fuckups, and murderous ones, too (thank you, Lieutenant Calley, President Johnson). After all, the current national sport is shoplifting. For once, I am probably too optimistic about my country.

Now those who object to nationalizing our resources in the name of free enterprise must be reminded that the free enterprise system ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

For those of you who are in love with Standard Oil and General Motors and think that these companies are really serving you, my sympathy. I would propose, however, that the basic raw resources, the true wealth of the country, be in our hands, not in theirs. We would certainly not manage our affairs any worse than they have.

As for the quality of our life, well, it isn’t much good for most people because most people haven’t got much money. Four point four percent own most of the United States. To be part of the four point four you must have a net worth of at least sixty thousand dollars.

This projected figure is from the I.R.S., and I find it hard to believe. Surely individual net worth is higher. In any case, recent figures show that most of the country’s ownership is actually in the hands of one percent with, presumably, a much higher net capital.

This gilded class owns twenty-seven percent of the country’s real estate. Sixty percent of all corporate stock, and so on. They keep the ninety-five point six percent from rebelling by the American brand of bread and circuses: whose principal weapon is the television commercial. From babyhood to grave the tube tells you of all the fine things you ought to own because other people (who are nicer looking and have better credit ratings than you) own them.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return while I.T.T.’s taxes in 1970 went down, despite increased earnings.

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We should also get something back for the money we give the government. We should have a national health service, something every civilized country in the world has. Also, improved public transport. Also, schools which do more than teach conformity. Also, a cleaning of the air, of the water, of the earth before we all die of the poisons let loose by a society based on greed.

Television advertising should be seriously restricted if not eliminated. Although the TV commercial is the only true art form our society has yet contrived, the purpose of all this beauty is sinister—to make us want to buy junk we don’t need by telling us lies about what is being sold.

Fascism is probably just a word for most of you. But the reality is very much present in this country. And the fact of it dominates most of the world today. Each year there is less and less freedom for more and more people. Put simply, fascism is the control of the state by a single man or by an oligarchy, supported by the military and the police. This is why I keep emphasizing the dangers of corrupt police forces, of uncontrolled secret police, like the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. and the Bureau of Narcotics and the Secret Service and Army counterintelligence and the Treasury men—what a lot of sneaky types we have, spying on us all!

From studying the polls, I would guess that about a third of the American people at any given moment would welcome a fascist state. This is because we have never been able to get across in our schools what the country was all about. I suspect that the reason for this failure is the discrepancy between what we were meant to be and what we are—a predatory empire—is so plain to children that they regard a study of our Constitution as just another form of television commercial and just as phony. This is sad. Let us hope it is not tragic. The means exist to set things right.

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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. To become President you will not need thirty, forty, fifty million dollars to smear your opponents and present yourself falsely on TV commercials.

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. This ought to get a better class into politics.

There is about as much chance of getting such a change in our system approved by Congress as there is of replacing the faces on Mt. Rushmore with those of Nixon and company. After all, the members of the present Congress got there through the old corrupt route and, despite the probity of individual members, each congressman is very much part of a system which now makes it impossible for anyone to be elected President who is not beholden to those interests that are willing to give him the millions of dollars he needs to be a candidate.

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As I make these notes, I am troubled by the way that I responded to the audiences’ general hatred of the government. Yes, we are the government—but only in name. I realize that I was being sophistical when I countered their cliché that our government is dishonest and incompetent with that other cliché: you are the government.

Unconsciously, I seem to have been avoiding the message that I got from one end of the country to the other: we hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how. We don’t know what our cage really looks like because we were born in it and have nothing to compare it to, but if anyone has the key to the lock then where the hell is he?

Most Americans lack the words, the concepts that might help them figure out what has happened; and it is hardly their fault. Simple falsities have been drummed into their heads from birth (Sweden = socialism = suicide) so that they will not rebel, not demand what is being withheld them . . . and that is not Nixon’s elegant “a piece of the action” but justice. Social justice.

The myth of upward social mobility dies hard; but it dies. Working-class parents produce children who will be working class while professional people produce more professionals. Merit has little to do with one’s eventual place in the hierarchy. We are now locked into a class system nearly as rigid as the one that the Emperor Diocletian impressed upon the Roman empire.

Yes, I should have said, our rulers are perfectly corrupt but they are not incompetent: in fact, they are extremely good at exercising power over those citizens whom they have so nicely dubbed “consumers.” But the consumers are not as dopey as they used to be and when they have to listen to exhortations from old-style Americans like myself, telling them they are the government and so can change it (underlying message: this bad society is what you dumb bastards deserve), they respond with the only epithets they can think of, provided them for generations by their masters: it’s the Commies, pinkos, niggers, foreigners, it’s them who have somehow fucked up everything.

But the consumers still have no idea who the enemy they are, no idea who really is tearing the place apart. No one has dared tell them that the mysterious they are the rich who keep the consumers in their places, consuming things that are not good for them, and doing jobs they detest. Witness, the boredom and fury of the younger workers on the Detroit assembly lines; no doubt made more furious—if not bored—by the recent mass firings, as the depression deepens.

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Thanks for reading,

Notes:

https://classic.esquire.com/article/1975/5/1/the-state-of-the-union