The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (60 page)

I strike a few mildly optimistic notes. “We should have a national health service, something every civilized country in the world has. Also, improved public transport (trains!). 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 set loose by a society based on greed.” Enron, of course, is decades in the future, as are the American wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the end, we may offer Richard Nixon a debt of gratitude. I'm in a generous mood. “Through Nixon's awesome ineptitude we have seen revealed the political corruption of our society.” (We had, of course, seen nothing yet!) What to do? I proposed 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 even by foreign countries. To become president, you will not need thirty, forty, fifty million dollars to smear your opponents and present yourself falsely on TV commercials.” Were the sums ever so tiny?

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 marathon. 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 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.” As I reread this, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I now add: Should the candidate happen to be a professional actor, a scene or two from Shakespeare might be required during the audition…I mean, the primary. Also, as a tribute to Ole Bell Fruit, who favors public executions of drug dealers, these should take place during prime time as the empire gallops into its Ben-Hur phase.

I must say, I am troubled by the way I responded to the audience's general hatred of government. I say we are the government. But I was being sophistical when I responded to their claims that our government is our enemy 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 even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside. Now, thirty-two years later, audiences still want to know who will let them out of the Enron-Pentagon prison with its socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. So…welcome to Imperial America.

The Nation
September 13, 2004

G
ORE
V
IDAL
was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel,
Williwaw
, written when he was nineteen years old and serving in the army, appeared in the spring of 1946. Since then he has written twenty-three novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.

J
AY
P
ARINI
is an American writer and academic. Among his works of fiction and criticism are
The Last Station
,
John Steinbeck
, and
Benjamin's Crossing
. Parini is Gore Vidal's literary executor and a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers, including
The Chronicle of Higher Education
and
The Guardian
. In 1976, he cofounded
New England Review
, and he has taught at Middlebury College since 1982. He lives in Vermont.

Also by Gore Vidal

NOVELS

Williwaw

In a Yellow Wood

The City and the Pillar

The Season of Comfort

A Search for the King

Dark Green, Bright Red

The Judgment of Paris

Messiah

Julian

Washington, D.C.

Myra Breckinridge

Two Sisters

Burr

Myron

1876

Kalki

Creation

Duluth

Lincoln

Empire

Hollywood

Live from Golgotha

The Smithsonian Institution

The Golden Age

NONFICTION

Inventing a Nation

SHORT STORIES

A Thirsty Evil

Clouds and Eclipses

PLAYS

An Evening with Richard Nixon

Weekend

Romulus

On the March to the Sea

The Best Man

Visit to a Small Planet

ESSAYS

Rocking the Boat

Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

Homage to Daniel Shays

Matters of Fact and of Fiction

The Second American Revolution

At Home

Screening History

United States

The Last Empire

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

Imperial America

MEMOIRS

Palimpsest

Point to Point Navigation

FOOTNOTES

^*1
I have not read
La speculazione edilizia
(1957). From the description of it in
Dizionario della letteratura italiana contemporanea
, it is a general indictment of Italy's postwar building boom and of the helplessness of the intellectual Quinto Anfossi to come to terms with “cement fever.”
Return to text.

^*2
I have omitted an interesting short novel because it is not part of the New York cycle. Powell made one trip to Europe after the war. Although Paris was no match for the Village, Powell, ever thrifty, uses the city as a background for a young man and woman trapped in
A Cage for Lovers
(published the year that Dawn roared at me in the Booth Theatre). The girl is a secretary-companion to a monster-lady, and the young man her chauffeur. The writing is austere; there are few characters; the old lady, Lesley Patterson, keeper of the cage, is truly dreadful in her loving kindness. In a rather nice if perhaps too neat ending, they cage
her
through her need to dominate. Thus, the weak sometimes prevail.
Return to text.

^*3
David Ignatius Walsh (Dem., Mass.).
Return to text.

^*4
Foreign Affairs
, Fall 1980.
Return to text.

^*5
“Constitutional Roulette: The Dimensions of the Risk” in
The Constitution and the Budget
, edited by W. S. Moore and Rudolph G. Penner (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington and London, 1980).
Return to text.

^*6
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.
Return to text.

Copyright © 2008 by Gore Vidal

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark and the DD colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

“Novelists and Critics of the 1940s,” “Tarzan Revisited,” “The Top Ten Best-Sellers,” “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” “American Plastic,” “Calvino's Novels,” “The Hacks of Academe,” “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” “Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes,” “William Dean Howells,” “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” “Montaigne,” “Passage to Egypt” (originally published as “Nassar's Egypt”), “Pornography,” “The Holy Family,” “Homage to Daniel Shays,” “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,” “The Second American Revolution,” “The National Security State,” and “Monotheism and Its Discontents” were published in
United States: Essays 1952–1992
by Gore Vidal (Random House: New York), 1993

“Rabbit's Own Burrow” was published in
The Last Empire: Essays 1992–2000
by Gore Vidal (Doubleday: New York), 2001.

“Black Tuesday” was originally published as “September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday)” in
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
(Nation Books: New York), 2002.

“State of the Union, 2004” was originally published in the September 13, 2004, issue of
The Nation
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vidal, Gore, 1925–

[Essays. Selections]

The selected essays of Gore Vidal / by Gore Vidal; edited by Jay Parini.—1st ed.

p.                            cm.

I. Parini, Jay. II. Title.

PS3543.I26A6 2008

814'.54—dc22

2008013517

eISBN: 978-0-385-52682-1

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