Gore Vidal’s State of the Union Nation Essays 1958–2005 by The Nation Magazine & Edited by Richard Lingeman

Author:The Nation Magazine & Edited by Richard Lingeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gore Vidal, The Nation magazine, Nation, magazine, essay, literary criticism, Political, Progressive, Liberalism
Publisher: The Nation magazine
Published: 2013-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

Monotheism and Its Discontents (1992)

It is very easy to discuss what has gone wrong with us. It is not so easy to discuss what should be done to correct what has gone wrong. It is absolutely impossible in our public discourse to discuss why so much has gone wrong and, indeed, has been wrong with us since the very beginning of the country, and even before that when our white tribes were living elsewhere. Unfortunately, there are two subjects that we are never permitted to discuss with any seriousness: race and religion, and how our attitudes toward the first are rooted in the second. Thanks to this sternly—correctly?—enforced taboo, we are never able to get to the root of our problems. We are like people born in a cage and unable to visualize any world beyond our familiar bars of prejudice and superstition. That Opinion the Few create in order to control the Many has seen to it that we are kept in permanent ignorance of our actual estate.

A political analyst wrote at the time of the New Hampshire primary that the two irrelevant candidates for President this year, Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan should leave the field to the heavyweights—like Bush and Clinton. As the media are a large part of the mess that we are in, the journalist—deliberately?—got it wrong. Brown and Buchanan were the only substantive, relevant and representative—in the best and worst senses—candidates on display. So let us brood on them and what it is that they represent in the way of race and religion, the two root issues.

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 was able to demonize the word “liberal” in the past ten years 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 this year to describe Pat Buchanan, when he 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.

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