Gore Vidal shares his incisive perspectives on U.S. history and politics. Excerpt from In Depth with Gore Vidal, published on October 1, 2000, on C-SPAN.
Has it always been a situation of the powerful interests versus the people? Yes. And it is really the essential conflict in American life. And it’s the real party system, no matter what the official parties are. There is the line of Jefferson and there is the line of Hamilton.
Hamilton was for big industry, banking, national bank, world trade, forcing ourselves upon other people if necessary. Jefferson was the mind your own business, more agricultural life, more bucolic. And most Americans are Jeffersonians. Only the bankers, at least at the time of World War I, World War II, were interventionists. Americans do not want to go abroad to be killed in other countries, sometimes countries they’ve never heard of.
You asked me earlier about my politics. Well, it is anti-imperialist. And certainly I’m not anti-banking, that would be flat earth politics. We must have that, but it must be kept in balance. And our problem is that they are the masters and they have bought the politicians.
Just look at this year, there’s going to be a billion dollars, half a billion anyway, paid on this election, an election that nobody’s going to bother with if they can help it, because they’re not interested. The candidates, whether they are intelligent, like my cousin Albert, or if they are somewhat disturbed or disturbing, like his opponent, basically don’t differ much and have nothing to say because the people who give the money to run don’t want them to address real issues. What is a real issue? There’s only one thing to talk about in the year 2000, and that is for years we have been a militarized economy, a garrison state. We’ve spent over $7 trillion since 1949 on war.
That is the theme of my American Chronicle, as it is called. How the people on the one hand are left behind and are exploited in the early days by Eastern banks now, of course it’s the great corporations that own the country, buy the politicians. The corruption is total. Now, when corruption is systemic, you can’t say, “Well, Bush is corrupt, or Gore is corrupt, or this one or that one.” The whole system is corrupt, the whole means of raising money. Well, this starting out with Burr, you see the fight, my first novel in that series, you see the fight going on between Burr and Jefferson on these very issues in the fight, particularly Hamilton.
These two men, Hamilton and Jefferson, define American life. Jefferson is with the people. The Hamilton is with the Aristos or the great business magnates. This is a struggle, except the Hamiltonians have won. Now what you should talk about is why 51% of our budget, 1999, went for war, went to the Pentagon.
They are now demanding $billion a year more over the next decade. $7.1 trillion has gone for war since 1949, and we have had no enemy except the ones we selected. As far as I know, the Viet Cong never attacked us. We attacked them in the interests of corporate America. There were a lot of ties between great corporations and South Vietnam.
We interfered in their civil war and in their affairs, and we have suffered greatly. Same thing with Korea, it was 1949, it was one of the big build-ups started. Officially, the good reason for the build-up was Truman and Acheson were afraid we’d fall back into the Depression. We didn’t get out of the Depression until 1940, when we started to arm to go to war against Hitler and Japan struck at us. That ended the Depression.
Now they’re beginning to see dicey times coming. They love General Motors, they said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” said the chairman of the board. That meant war. It’s been nothing but war ever since. One historian put it very nicely in one phrase, “Our policy is perpetual war for perpetual peace,” and that is insanity.
That is why we have the worst public educational system in the first world. That’s why we have no healthcare for the people. The people get nothing back for their tax money. This is a populist line that you’re hearing from me, and that is the theme of many of my books. We get nothing back except all this armament.
And lately, if you’ve been reading the papers, the chiefs of the various services are demanding more and more money because it’s all deteriorating, and there is no enemy. We create enemies. We blow up an aspirin factory in the Sudan. Well, if the Sudanese had any power, they’d probably blow up a factory here, but they don’t and they won’t. We go right on.
We are the number one terrorist on Earth, and through my series of seven books, you see this evolution and how the American people were left out. Decisions were made over their heads by the equivalent of corporate America back in the 18th century, and that nowadays. We have no redress because we have no representative government. One senator, if you remember, Scoop Jackson, was known as the senator from Boeing, not the senator from Washington. That’s what happened to us.
We have so many secret services that we don’t know anything about them, and we have so many activities going on abroad that we will never know anything about because they are kept obscure from us. Remember, David Hume said in 1745, he said, “How are the many who are many and so powerful, and thus powerful, controlled by the few who are few and less powerful?” He said, “It is done through opinion, and opinion is formed by the schools and the churches and the broadsheets,” which is what they call newspapers then. “He who controls religion, who controls education and the press, the class that does, will create any opinion that it wants to do anything that it wants. If it’s in England, they want a war with France, opinion will go against the French.” I have been reading American opinion all my life. I have never read a story in the American press that was favorable to any other society.
We are constantly bad-mouthing every other country on earth, and we’re the greatest. We’re the greatest. We’re the … Everybody envies us. We’re so good.
Sweden, yes, they have better education, better health service, better daycare centers for working mothers, but they’re all alcoholics, and they kill themselves, as though because you have good health and good education, you will be so bored with your life that you will want to commit s*e and get drunk. This constant drip torture of misinformation has really skewed the entire country. No one knows what to think about anything. I think a great many people have just pulled out. They just ignore the constant propaganda.
Yes, we do get a lot of fairly true information, but who can wade through it? It comes at us in such avalanches. Everything changed after 1989. We lost our enemy. It takes a lot of money to create opinion, as powerful as the opinion our ownership created for us in the Russians are coming, and communism is everywhere.
When it isn’t anywhere, at least not in the United States, it wasn’t. I see it more as too few people have too much money, too many people have too little, and the graspingness and the total power of corporate America, if you own the New York Times, if you own the President, and if you own the Congress, there is no way for the people to express themselves. There is no means of redress. You can’t say we’ve got a great out of the West, out of the Monongahela Valley came a man, a titan. You can’t do that anymore.
Times won’t report the great new leader. These speeches will not be recorded. They have silenced just about every dissenting voice in the country.
