The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (55 page)

It has been my fate—or, perhaps, function—to give warnings long before the politicians and the press are able to absorb them. After all, they are in place to give a rosy view of the National Security State, and they give good value for their salaries. Since I'm not paid, I can ruminate; and share my findings.

I am here today because I said much of what I've said just now in New York City at the Royale Theatre, on January 11, 1986. I also passed on the news that the American empire had officially died the previous year when we became, after seventy-one years, a debtor nation, and the money power had gone from New York to Tokyo. I was predictably attacked by the press that serves the National Security State. I was also attacked by those simple Jesus Christers who have been taught all their lives to fear and loathe communism, whatever it may be, and I was also attacked by that not-so-simple Israel lobby which never ceases to demonize the Soviet Union in order to make sure that half the federal revenue goes to defense, out of which the state of Israel, the lobby's sole preoccupation, is financed. I was promptly attacked by that small group of Israel Firsters, who call themselves neoconservatives. I hated my country, they said, because I had criticized that National Security State in which, like a prison, we have all been obliged to live—and go broke—for forty years.

I responded to my critics with characteristic sweetness, turning the other fist as is my wont. I said that as much as I hated what our rulers have done to my country, it was not us, the country, who were at fault. I then added, while we're on the subject of our respective homelands, I'm not so keen about yours, which is Israel. Until then, no one had really challenged the lobby in so public a way. Congress and president and press are all more or less bought or otherwise intimidated by this self-described “sexy” lobby. While the sins and errors of Israel are openly debated in Israel itself, there has been only fearful silence in bravery's home and freedom's land. Well, I lanced the boil. Naturally, I was called an anti-Semite, usually with the adjective “frenzied” or “virulent” attached.

Now, at the risk of hurting more feelings, I must tell you that I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—good people, yes, but any religion based on a single…well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But, like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.

Israel had the bad luck to be invented at a moment in history when the nation-state was going out of style. These two clumsy empires, the Soviet Union and the United States, are now becoming unstuck. Only by force can the Soviets control their Armenians and Muslims and Mongols, and only by force can we try to control a whole series of escalating race wars here at home, as well as the brisk occupation of the southern tier of the United States by those Hispanics from whom we stole land in 1847. The world, if we survive, will be one not of nations but of
inter
national cartels, of computerized money hurtling between capitals, of countries making what contributions they can to a more or less homogeneous world economy. Simultaneously, armies and flags and centralized administration will give way to a regionalism that is interdependent with everyone else on earth.

Is this possible? Well, Switzerland is a splendid small-scale model of what the world could be. Four languages, four races, four sets of superstitions about one another—all live most harmoniously in a small area where they make a fortune out of those of us who haven't learned that we are living in a post–national security world. When we finally stop giving to Israel the money that Japan so reluctantly lends us, peace will have to be made. If a cantonal system is set up, some areas of Palestine will be Orthodox Jewish; others Shiite Muslim; others secular Jewish and/or Muslim and/or Christian. In any event, the Great Bronze Age realtor in the sky will finally have to accept that none of those desirable rental properties between the Nile and the Euphrates can ever again include in the lease a discrimination clause.

So what shall we celebrate this joyous Sunday? The slow but highly visible collapse, due to bankruptcy, of the National Security Council-68 state and its ramshackle empire. Once we Americans are free of this dangerous state and its imperial burden we may not have heaven on earth, but we will certainly have lessened the current hell, and got
our
country back.

MONOTHEISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The word “radical” derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of
anything
you must be radical. It is no accident that the word has now been totally demonized by our masters, and no one in politics dares even to use the word favorably, much less track any problem to its root. But then a ruling class that has been able to demonize the word “liberal” is a master at controlling—indeed stifling—any criticism of itself. “Liberal” comes from the Latin
liberalis
, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

Meanwhile, the word “isolationist” has been revived to describe those who would like to put an end to the National Security State that replaced our Republic a half-century ago while extending the American military empire far beyond our capacity to pay for it. The word was trotted out in the presidential election of 1992 to describe one Pat Buchanan, who was causing great distress to the managers of our National Security State by saying that America must abandon the empire if we are ever to repair the mess at home. Also, as a neo-isolationist, Buchanan must be made to seem an anti-Semite. This is not hard to do. Buchanan is a classic Archie Bunker type, seething with irrational prejudices and resentments, whose origin I'll get to presently.

The country is now dividing, as it did a half-century ago, between those who think that America comes first versus those who favor empire and the continued exertion of force everywhere in the name of democracy, something not much on display here at home. In any case, as the whole world is, more or less, a single economic unit in which the United States is an ever smaller component, there are no isolationists today. But the word games go on and the deliberate reversals of meaning are always a sign that our corporate masters are worried that the people are beginning to question their arrangements. Many things are now coming into focus.
The New York Times
promptly dismissed Buchanan as a minor irritant, which was true, but it ignored his potentially major constituency—those who now believe that it was a mistake to have wasted, since 1950, most of the government's revenues on war.

Another candidate, Jerry Brown, alarmed the
Times
even more than Buchanan did. There was the possibility that he could be elected. More important, he might actually change our politics in the sense of who pays for whom. In a sudden frenzy, the
Times
compared him to Perón—our Jerry?—a dangerous demagogue whose “sharp-edged anger…resonates among a variety of Americans.” Plainly, the ownership of the country is frightened that the current hatred of politicians, in general, may soon be translated into a hatred of that corporate few who control the many through Opinion, as manufactured by the
Times
, among others.

         

Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the omnipotent father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

The founders of the United States were not enthusiasts of the sky-god. Many, like Jefferson, rejected him altogether and placed man at the center of the world. The young Lincoln wrote a pamphlet
against
Christianity, which friends persuaded him to burn. Needless to say, word got around about both Jefferson and Lincoln and each had to cover his tracks. Jefferson said that he was a deist, which could mean anything or nothing, while Lincoln, hand on heart and tongue in cheek, said he could not support for office anyone who “scoffed” at religion.

From the beginning, sky-godders have always exerted great pressure in our secular republic. Also, evangelical Christian groups have traditionally drawn strength from the suppressed. African slaves were allowed to organize heavenly sky-god churches, as a surrogate for earthly freedom. White churches were organized in order to make certain that the rights of property were respected and that the numerous religious taboos in the New and Old Testaments would be enforced, if necessary, by civil law. The ideal to which John Adams subscribed—that we would be a nation of laws, not of men—was quickly subverted when the churches forced upon everyone, through supposedly neutral and just laws, their innumerable taboos on sex, alcohol, gambling. We are now indeed a nation of laws, mostly bad and certainly antihuman.

Roman Catholic migrations in the last century further reinforced the Puritan sky-god. The Church has also put itself on a collision course with the Bill of Rights when it asserts, as it always has, that “error has no rights.” The last correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson expressed their alarm that the Jesuits were to be allowed into the United States. Although the Jews were sky-god folk, they followed Book One, not Book Two, so they have no mission to convert others; rather the reverse. Also, as they have been systematically demonized by the Christian sky-godders, they tended to be liberal and so turned not to their temple but to the A.C.L.U. Unfortunately, the recent discovery that the sky-god, in his capacity as realtor, had given them, in perpetuity, some parcels of unattractive land called Judea and Samaria has, to my mind, unhinged many of them. I hope this is temporary.

In the First Amendment to the Constitution the Founders made it clear that this was not to be a sky-god nation with a national religion like that of England, from whom we had just separated. It is curious how little understood this amendment is—yes, everyone has a right to worship any god he chooses but he does
not
have the right to impose his beliefs on others who do not happen to share in his superstitions and taboos. This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. During the Civil War, they actually got the phrase “In God We Trust” onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment, while “Under God” was added to the Oath of Allegiance under Eisenhower.

Although many of the Christian evangelists feel it necessary to convert everyone on earth to their primitive religion, they have been prevented—so far—from forcing others to worship as they do, but they
have
forced—most tyrannically and wickedly—their superstitions and hatreds upon all of us through the civil law and through general prohibitions. So it is upon that account that I now favor an all-out war on the monotheists.

Let us dwell upon the evils they have wrought. The hatred of blacks comes straight from their Bad Book. As descendants of Ham (according to Redneck divines), blacks are forever accursed, while Saint Paul tells the slaves to obey their masters. Racism is in the marrow of the bone of the true believer. For him, black is forever inferior to white and deserves whatever ill fortune may come his way. The fact that some monotheists can behave charitably means, often, that their prejudice is at so deep a level that they are not aware it is there at all. In the end, this makes any radical change of attitude impossible. Meanwhile, welfare has been the price the sky-godders were willing to pay to exclude blacks from their earthly political system. So we must live—presumably forever—with a highly enervating race war, set in train by the One God and his many hatreds.

Patriarchal rage at the thought of Woman ever usurping Man's place at the helm, in either home or workplace, is almost as strong now as it ever was, while the ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sexuality has made the United States the laughingstock of the civilized world. After all, in most of the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, private sexual behavior has nothing at all to do with those not involved, much less with the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good
practical
reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.

We are now, slowly, becoming alarmed at the state of the planet. For a century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions, and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. The lower atmosphere is filled with dust, we have just been told from our satellites in space. Climate changes; earth and water are poisoned. Sensible people grow alarmed; sky-godders are serene, even smug. The planet is just a staging area for heaven. Why bother to clean it up? Did not the sky-god tell his slaves to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion…over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”? Well, we did just like you told us, massa. We've used everything up. We're ready for heaven now. Or maybe Mars will do.

Ordinarily, as a descendant of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shaped our Republic, I would say live and let live and I would try not to “scoff”—to use Lincoln's verb—at the monotheists. But I am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens. We are forbidden abortion here, gambling there, same-sex almost everywhere, drugs, alcohol in a dry county. Our prisons are the most terrible and the most crowded in the First World. Our death-row executions are a source of deep disgust in civilized countries, where more and more we are regarded as a primitive, uneducated, and dangerous people. Although we are not allowed, under law, to kill ourselves or to take drugs that the good folk think might be bad for us, we are allowed to buy a handgun and shoot as many people as we can get away with.

         

Of course, as poor Arthur (There Is This Pendulum) Schlesinger, Jr., would say, these things come in cycles. Every twenty years liberal gives way to conservative, and back again. But I suggest that what is wrong now is not cyclic but systemic. And our system, like any system, is obeying the second law of thermodynamics. Everything is running down; and we are well advanced along the cold, dusty road to entropy. I don't think much of anything can be done to halt this progress under our present political-economic system. We lost poor Arthur's pendulum in 1950 when our original Constitution was secretly replaced with the apparatus of that National Security State, which still wastes most of our tax money on war or war-related matters. Hence deteriorating schools, and so on.

Another of our agreed-upon fantasies is that we do not have a class system in the United States. The Few who control the Many through Opinion have simply made themselves invisible. They have convinced us that we are a classless society in which anyone can make it. Ninety percent of the stories in the pop press are about winners of lotteries or poor boys and girls who, despite adenoidal complaints, become overnight millionaire singers. So there is still hope, the press tells the folks, for the 99 percent who will never achieve wealth no matter how hard they work. We are also warned at birth that it is not polite to hurt people's feelings by criticizing their religion, even if that religion may be damaging everyone through the infiltration of our common laws.

Happily, the few cannot disguise the bad times through which we are all going. Word is spreading that America is now falling behind in the civilization sweepstakes. So isn't it time to discuss what we all really think and feel about our social and economic arrangements?

Although we may not discuss race other than to say that Jesus wants each and every one of us for a sunbeam, history is nothing more than the bloody record of the migration of tribes. When the white race broke out of Europe five hundred years ago, it did many astounding things all over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions. Now the tribes are on the move again. Professor Pendulum is having a nervous breakdown because so many different tribes are now being drawn to this sweet land of liberty and, thus far, there is no indication that any of the new arrivals intends ever to read
The Age of Jackson
. I think the taking in of everyone can probably be overdone. There may not be enough jobs for very many more immigrants, though what prosperity we have ever enjoyed in the past was usually based on slave or near-slave labor.