It must be more than a year since I picked up Gore Vidal’s United States, a collection of his essays published from 1952 to 1992, in a used book shop. I was looking for something with style, even to the extent of form over substance, when the book (tome could be appropriately used) caught my eye. I had first become aware of Vidal in college, when a roommate showed me his televised clash with William F. Buckley, Jr., during which Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley responded by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to hit him, all done in the most effortlessly wealthy Mid-Atlantic accents one could wish to hear. Minor research demonstrated Vidal’s place as a novelist-turned-cataloguer of the republic whose style alone made him necessary reading. As Vidal died not long thereafter, however, I never had the chance to discover a current piece that might lead me into his back catalog. Indeed, not long after I encountered Christopher Hitchens, once cited as the next incarnation of Vidal but for their ferocious falling out over the Iraq War. As much as we could have used Vidal’s voice (or at very least his piercing wit) over the past years, the ever-building wave of information kept me from really considering his material until United States leapt off the bookshelf. At $12 for 1,200 pages, it was a no-brainer.
This isn’t a space to review a book released in 1993. I imagine, in fact, that I could find such a review were I to poke around a little, but I don’t (yet) want to burden my primary enjoyment of the book with an attempt to judge it on deeper merits, because the key point is: I adore Vidal’s style. He would likely discard me as a mere underliner, noting the best bits without properly reflecting on the complete message, but as one of his consistent complaints is the diminishing quality of the American education, I hope he would forgive me from collecting here the wonderfully polished and impactful writing that is his legacy. It’s a long list. Note that I add the year of writing in parenthesis to make clear how little (for the most part) the world has changed!
“It is a poor period indeed which must assess its men of letters in terms of their opposition to their society.” (1953)
“Much of the despondency and apparent confusion in the world of peripheral letters today derives partly from the nervous, bloody age in which we live and partly from the hunger for the absolute which, in our own immediate experience, delivered two great nations into the hands of tyrants, while in our own country the terror of being man alone, unsupported by a general religious belief and undirected by central authority, has reduced many intellectuals either to a bleak nihilism or, worse, to the acceptance of some external authority (Rome, Marx, Freud).” (1953)
“At such moments, in such works, the human drama becomes so unbearably intense that time and the sea are blotted out and only the human beings are illuminated as they cease, through the high magic of art, to be mere residents in a time which stops and become, instead, archetypes – elemental figures like those wild gods our ancestors peopled heaven with.” (1953)
“A profound tolerance is in the land, a tolerance so profound that it is not unlike terror. One dare not raise one’s voice against any religion, idea or even delinquency if it is explicable by a therapist. I suspect that much of the American’s hatred of Russia and Communism is simply a siphoning off of other irrational dislikes which, blocked by the stern tolerance of the day, can find expression only in Communist-baiting. I do not propose that we return to the bad old days of holding people responsible for inherited characteristics. Yet I should like to have tolerance learned from within and not have it imposed from without.” (1958)
“We are none of us hedgehogs or foxes, but both simultaneously.” (1960)
“The thought of people sitting at home watching other people talk is profoundly sad. But that is the way we live now, electronic villagers tuned in to the machine if not to the pundits.” (1965)
“…no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” (1973)
“…her prose surged with vulgar invention and powerful feeling of the sort that cannot be faked.” (1973)
“A peculiarity of American sexual mores is that those men who like to think of themselves as exclusively and triumphantly heterosexual are convinced that the most masculine of all activities is not tending to the sexual needs of women but watching other men play games.” (1973)
“Whether or not the Professor’s [McLuhan] engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today’s students often experience difficulties in reading and writing. Linear type’s warm glow, so comforting to Gutenberg man, makes his successors uncomfortably hot.” (1967)
“Unhappily, the novelist, by the very nature of his coarse art, is greedy and immodest; unless he is read by everyone, he cannot delight, instruct, reform, destroy a world he wants, at the least, to be different for his having lived in it.” (1967)
“One interesting result of today’s passion for the immediate and the casual has been the decline, in all the arts, of the idea of technical virtuosity as being in any way desirable.” (1967)
“Of course he knows his book is not very interesting to read, but then life is not very interesting to live either. Hopefully, as Professor Halperin would say, the book will self-destruct once it has been ritually praised wherever English is taught but not learned.” (1976)
“But then, as we have always heard (sometimes from the French themselves), the French mind is addicted to the postulating of elaborate systems in order to explain everything, while the Anglo-American mind tends to shy away from unified-field theories. We chart our courses point to point; they sight from the stars. The fact that neither really gets much of anywhere doesn’t mean that we haven’t all had some nice outings over the years.” (1974)
“I am not exactly sure what he means by realism. After all, the Greek myths that he likes to play around with were once a reality to those who used them as stuff for narrative.” (1974)
“Personally, I find it somber indeed to think that individual personality goes on and on beyond zero, time. But I am in a minority: this generation of Americans is god-hungry and craves reassurance of personal immortality.” (1974)
“But then to be middle class is to be, by definition, frightened of losing one’s place.” (1980)
“[Thomas Peacock] possessed negative capability to a high degree. In this instance, he may well be saying what he thinks at the moment, perfectly aware that he will think its opposite in relation to a different formulation on the order, say, of certain observations in Jefferson’s memoirs which he reviewed in 1930. Peacock was absolutely bowled over by the mellifluous old faker’s announcement that between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government” he would choose the latter. This is, surely, one of the silliest statements ever made by a politician; yet it is perennially attractive to – yes, journalists. In any case, Jefferson was sufficiently sly to add, immediately, a line that is seldom quoted by those who love the sentiment: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.” The last phrase nicely cancels all that had gone before. Jefferson was no leveler.” (1980)
[Quoting Thomas Peacock] “Voltaire warred against opinions which sustained themselves by persecution.” (1980)
“…it is unlikely that [he] will ever be much read except by those solemn embalmers, the Specialists in English Lit…” (1970)
“They knew that literature was (let us use the past tense) never a democracy or even a republic. It was a kingdom…” (1970)
“Logan Pearsall Smith was born October 18, 1865, the son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker who, rather abruptly, left the family glass business and become an evangelist, preaching the Higher Life. Then, as abruptly, inspired by venery, he quit preaching…After Harvard and Oxford, Logan married literature and lived happily ever after, with occasional lapses into a kind of madness, the inevitable fate of one who has been denied not only the word processor but the Apple home computer in which to encode Thoughts.” (1984)
“No respectable man of letters had taken on the American system since Thomas Paine, who was neither American nor respectable.” (1983)
“Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president.” (1983)
“According to the Daily Mail, the last man on earth died in 1986, clutching to his dehydrated bosom a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. According to the New York Post (an Australian newspaper whose editors are able to do simple sums), the human race will be dead by century’s end due to rabid homos and drug takers (mostly black and Hispanic and viciously opposed to prayer in America’s chaste bookless schools).” (1987)
“Of Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Ellmann tells us that it “is based on the paradox that we must not waste energy in sympathizing with those who suffer needlessly, and that only socialism can free us to cultivate our personalities. Charity is no use – the poor are…right to steal rather than to take alms.” On the other hand, Wilde was wary of authoritarianism, so often socialism’s common-law helpmeet. In the end, Wilde veered off into a kind of anarchy; and defined the enemy thus: ‘There are three sorts of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. The is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.'” (1987)
“Cardinal Newman, writing of their common day, said, “The age is so very sluggish that it will not hear you unless you bawl – you must first tread on its toes, and then apologize.’” (1987)
“At seventy-two, [W. Somerset] Maughham went to Vevery, in Switzerland, where a Dr. Niehans injected ageing human organisms with the cells of unborn sheep, and restored youth. All the greats came to Niehans, including Pius XII – in a business suit and dark glasses, it was said – an old man in no hurry to meet his Jewish employer.” (1990)
“Ashden purrs his admiration for Kear: ‘I could think of no one of my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent.'” (1990)
“By Elsie, there were two daughters: one became a nun and never saw [Ford Maddox] Ford again; the other did not become a nun and never saw him again.” (1990)
“Since the best writers have nothing to say, only to add, Ford said it all at once and so was not left with those second thoughts – inspired blots – that ultimately add the highest interest.” (1990)
“The dust-jacket of The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980, edited by Ian S. MacNiven, shows three protagonists sprawled in a shallow wine-dark sea – Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Henry Miller’s numinous cock. Needless to say, it is the third that not only rivets attention but commands nostalgia and, well, let us be honest, pity and awe.” (1988)
“To the end of a long life, [Edmund Wilson] kept making the only thing he thought worth making: sense, a quality almost entirely lacking in American literature where stupidity – if sufficiently sincere and authentic – is deeply revered, and easily achieved.” (1980)
“[Edmund] Wilson notes, rather perfunctorily, friends and contemporaries. Scott Fitzgerald makes his usual appearances, and in his usual state. Once again we get the Hemingway-Wilson-Fitzgerald evening. ‘When Scott was lying in the corner on the floor, Hemingway said, Scott thinks that his penis is too small. (John Bishop had told me this and said that Scott was in the habit of making this assertion to anybody he met – to the lady who sat next to him at dinner and who might be meeting him for the firs time.) I explained to him, Hemingway continued, that it only seemed to him small because he looked at it from above. You have to look at it in the mirror. (I did not understand this.)’ I have never understood what Hemingway meant either. For one thing, Fitzgerald had obviously studied his diminutive part in a mirror. Even so, he would still be looking down at it unless, like a boy that I went to school with, he could so bend himself as to have an eye to eye, as it were, exchange with the Great American (Male) Obsession.” (1980)
“The fact is that Americans have never been able to deal with wit. Wit gives away the scam. Wit blows the cool of those who are forever expressing a sense of hoked-up outrage.” (1987)
“Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.” (1987)
“There is a literary man who talks constantly of Jane Austen, whom he may not have read, and teaches at the League for Cultural Foundations (a.k.a. The New School), where ‘classes bulged with middle-aged students anxious to get an idea of what it would be like to have an idea.'” (1987)
“One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who hare the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized.” (1964)
“Burns was a gifted man who wrote a book far in excess of his gift, making a masterpiece that will endure in a way he himself could not.” (1965)
“The success of the gossip column is no more than a crude exploitation of newspaper addiction. Even if you don’t want to know what the Duchess of Windsor said to Elsa Maxwell or learn what stranger in the night was visited by Sir Stork, if your eye is addicted you will read on numbly.” (1961)
“Since we are essentially a nation of hustlers rather than makers, an attempt to set limits or goals, rules or standards, is to attack a system of free enterprise where not only does the sucker not deserve that even break but the honest man is simply the one whose cheating goes undetected. Worse, to say that one English sentence might be better made than another is to be a snob, a subverter of democracy, a Know Nothing enemy of the late arrivals to our shores and its difficult language.” (1974)
“It should be noted that one of the charms of the American arrangement is that a citizen can go through a lifetime and never know his true station in life or who his rulers are.” (1974)
“The word-structure novel is intended to be taught, rather like a gnostic text whose secrets may only be revealed by tenured adepts in sunless campus chapels.” (1979)
“For me, [Anthony] Burgess demonstrates, yet again, how uninteresting the sexual lives of others are when told by them.” (1987)
“Scott Fitzgerald, that most self-conscious of writers, made others conscious of himself and his crack-up through the pages known as The Crack-Up. Ever since then, American journalists and academics have used him as our paradigmatic Cautionary Tale on the ground that if you are young, handsome, talented, successful, and married to a beautiful woman, you will be destroyed because your life will be absolutely unbearable to those who teach and are taught. If, by some accident of fate, you are not destroyed, you will have a highly distressing old age like Somerset Maugham’s, which we will describe in all its gamy incontenent horror. There is no winning, obviousy. But then the Greeks knew that.” (1985)
“Thirty-seven years ago, in March 1948, Tennessee Williams and I celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in Rome, except that he said that it was his thirty-fourth birthday. Years later, when confronted with the fact that he had been born in 1911 not 1914, he said, serenely, “I do not choose to count as part of my life the three years I spend working for a shoe company.” Actually, he had spent ten months, not three years, in the shoe company, and the reason he had changed his birth date was to qualify for a play contest open to those twenty-five or under.” (1985)
“In Paris, [Tennessee Williams] gave me the story “Rubio y Morena” to read. I didn’t like it. So fix it, he said. He knew, of course, that there is no fixing someone else’s story (or life) but he was curious to see what I would do. So I reversed the backward-running sentences, removed repetitions, eliminated half those adjectives and adverbs that he always insisted do their work in pairs. I was proud of the result. He was deeply irritated. ‘What you have done is remove my style, which is all that I have.'” (1985)
“Since World War II, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.” (1979)
“The Italians have made the following trade-off with a nationa-state which none of them has ever much liked: if the state will not interfere too much in the lives of its citizens (that is, take most of their money in personal taxes), the people are willing to live without a proper postal serve, police force, medical care – all the usual amenities of a European industrialized society.” (1979)
“Montaigne begins his essays (first thought of as rhapsodies – confused melodies) with a pro forma bow to Cicero-Plato: ‘Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.'” (1992)
[Quoting Montaigne} “Great heroes lived before Agamemnon. Many there were: yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.” (1992)
“In response to public opinion, the Emperor Justinian made homosexuality a criminal offense on the grounds that buggery, as everyone knew, was the chief cause of earthquakes.” (1965)
“When the Cromwells fell, the disgruntled Puritans left England for Holland (not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs but because they were forbidden to persecute others for their beliefs). Holland took them in, and promptly turned them out. Only North America was left. Here, as lords of the wilderness, they were free to create the sort of quasi-theocratic society they had dreamed of. Rigorously persecuting one another for religious heresies, witchcraft, sexual misbehavior, they formed that ugly polity whose descendants we are.” (1965)
“In desperation, the nation’s ownership has now gone back to the tried-and-true hot buttons: save our children, our fetuses, our ladies’ rooms from the godless enemy. As usual, the sex buttons have proved satisfyingly hot.” (1979)
“Most of us spend too much time solving international problems at cocktail parties, rather than tying up the loose ends of our own society.” (1961)
“…who now form the ‘silent majority’ – a phrase which that underestimated wit Richard Nixon took from Homer who used it to describe the dead.” (1970)
“In 1837, after President Jackson’s savage treatment of the Creeks and Cherokees, John Quincy [Adams] wrote: ‘We have done more harm to the Indians since our Revolution than had been done to them by the French and English nations before…These are crying sins for which we are answerable before a higher Jurisdiction.'” (1976)
“The public Lincoln has been as mythologized as the private Lincoln. As a congressman, he had opposed the 1846 war with Mexico – a nasty business, started by us in order to seize new territories. In a speech that was to haunt him thirteen years later, he declared, ‘Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better…Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own so much of the territory as they inhabit.’ When the South chose to follow Congressman Lincoln’s advice, President Lincoln said they could not go. When confronted with his 1848 declaration, he remarked, rather lamely, ‘You would hardly think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.'” (1981)
“For those of us inclined to the Jamesian stricture, a given scene ought to be observed by a single character, who can only know what he knows, which is often less than the reader.” (1991)
“The heart having its reason, Alice [Longworth] saw fit to conduct a long affair with the corrupt Senator William Borah, the so-called lion of Idaho, who had one roared, ‘I’d rather be right than president,’ causing my grandfather [Senator Thomas Gore, D-OK] to murmur, ‘Of course, he was neither.'” (1981)
“As Eleanor [Roosevelt] wrote in 1927, in a plainly autobiographical sketch,
She was an ugly little thing, keenly conscious of her deficiencies, and her father, the only person who really cared for her, was away much of the time; but he never criticized her or blamed her, instead he wrote her letters and stories, telling her how he dreamed of her growing up and what they would do together in the future, but she must be truthful, loyal, brave, well-educated, or the woman he dreamed of would not be there when the wonderful day came for them to fare forth together. The child was full of fears and because of them lying was easy; she had no intellectual stimulus at the time and yet she made herself as the years went on into a fairly good copy of the picture he painted.
As it turned out, Eleanor did not far forth with her father Elliott but with his cousin Franklin, and she was indeed all the things her father had wanted her to be, which made her marriage difficult but her life work great.” (1971)
“‘I [Eleanor Roosevelt] remember when Queen Wilhelmina came to visit during the war’ (good democrat that she was, nothing royal was alien to Eleanor) ‘ and she would sit under a tree on the lawn and commune with the dead. She would ever try to get me interested in spiritualism but I always said: Since we’re going to be dead such a long time anyway it’s rather a waste of time chatting with all of them before we get there.'” (1971)
” ‘Well, my Franklin [Roosevelt] said, ‘We better have him down here’ – we were at Hyde Park – ‘ and see what he has to say.’ So Mr. [Joseph] Kennedy arrived at Rhinecliff on the train and I met him and took him straight to Franklin. Well, ten minutes later one of the aides came and said, ‘The President wants to see you right away.’ This was unheard of. So I [Eleanor Roosevelt] rushed into the office and there was Franklin, white as a sheet. He asked Mr. Kennedy to step outside and then he said, and his voice was shaking , ‘I never want to see that man again as long as I live.’ David Gray nodded: ‘Wanted us to make a deal with Hitler.’ But Eleanor was not going to get into that. ‘What it was, it was very bad. Then Franklin said, ‘Get him out of here,’ and I said, ‘But, dear, you’ve invited him for the weekend, and we’ve got guests for lunch and the train doesn’t leave until two,’ and Franklin said, ‘Then you drive him around Hyde Par and put him on that train,’ and I did and it was the most dreadful four hours of my life!’ She laughed. Then, seriously: ‘I wonder if the true story of Joe Kennedy will ever be known.'” (1971)
“Now we live in a society none of us much likes, all would like to change, but no one knows how.” (1971)
“[H.L.] Mencken’s ideal popular paper for that vast public which ‘gets all its news by listening’ (today one would change ‘listening’ to ‘staring’ – at television), would be ‘printed throughout, as First Readers are printed, in words of one syllable. It should avoid every idea that is beyond the understanding of a bot of ten’ on the ground that ‘ all ideas are beyond them. They can grasp only events. But they will heed only those events that are presented as drama with one side clearly right and the other clearly wrong. They can no more imagine neutrality than they can imagine the fourth dimension.’ Thus, Mencken anticipates not only the television news programme but the television political campaign with its combative thirty-second spot commercials and sound-bites.” (1991)
“Even no, the Tory Mencken understood the roots of radicalism. Although ‘it is assumed that men become radicals because they are naturally criminal, or because they have been bribed by Russian gold,’ what actually moves them ‘is simply the conviction that the Government they suffer under is unbearably and incurably corrupt…The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.'” (1991)
“For the American there is no motherland or fatherland to be shared with others of his tribe, for the excellent reason that he has no tribe; all that he holds in common with other United Statesmen is something called ‘the American way of life,’ an economic system involving the constant purchase of consumer goods on credit to maintain a high standard of living involving the constant purchase, etc. But though this materialistic, even sybaritic ethos does far less damage in the world than old-fashioned tribalism, it fails to satisfy all sorts of atavistic yearnings. A man might gladly give his life for a totemlike the flag or the Cross, but who would give so much as a breath for a washing machine not yet paid for?” (1967)
“Like most empires, this one was the result of trouble at home. With the settling of California, the frontier shut down and there was no place new to go, a matter of poignant concern to a nomadic and adventurous people.” (1967)
“For thirty or forty years I have seen the name Robert Moses on the front pages of newspapers or attached to articles in that graveyard of American prose the Sunday New York Times Magazine section.” (1974)
“ITT then set about acquiring the Hartford Insurance Company, the biggest caper in their history thus far and as all major heists nowadays seem to do, it involved the 37th president whose eccentric notions of law (ignore it) and order (impose it) have to date been contained not by the Constitution or by the Congress or by the press but by his own eerie and rather touching propensity to fuck up.” (1973)
“There is of course some consolation in the fact that we are not wasting our billions weakening the moral fiber of the American yeoman by building him roads and schools, or by giving him medical care and decent housing. In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.” (1963)
“With the high cost of politics and image-making, it is plain that only the very wealthy or those allied with the very wealthy can afford the top prizes.” (1967)
“Finally, in an age of supercommunications , one must have a clear sense of the way things are, as opposed to the way they have been made to seem.” (1967)
“Julius Caesar stood before a statue of Alexander the Great and wept, for Alexander at twenty-nine had conquered the world and at thirty-two was dead, while Caesar, at late starter of thirty-three, had not yet subverted even his own state. Pascal, contemplating this poignant scene, remarked rather sourly that he could forgive Alexander for wanting to own the earth because of his extreme youth, but Caesar was old enough to have known better.” (1961)
“It is common to hear, ‘O.K., so a lot of [Barry Goldwater’s] ideas are cockeyed, but at least he tells you where he stands. He isn’t afraid to speak up, the way the other are.” (1961)
“By adding the third character to tragedy, Sophocles changed the nature of drama. By exalting the chorus and diminishing the actors, television has changed entirely the nature of our continuing history. Watching things as they happen, the viewer is a part of events in a way new to man. And never is he so much a part of the whole as when things do not happen, for , as Andy Warhol so wisely observed, people will always prefer to look at something rather than nothing; between plain wall and flickering commercial, the eyes will have the second. As hearth and fire were once center to the home or lair so now the television set is the center of modern man’s being, all points of the room converge upon its presence and the eye watches even as the mind dozes, much as our ancestors narcotized themselves with fire.” (1968)
“Nixon next paid careful tribute to his Republican competitors, to the platform and, finally, to Spiro Agnew ‘a statesman of the first rank who will be a great campaigner.'” (1968)
“If Nixon’s reputation as the litmus-paper man of American politics is deserved, his turning mauve instead of pink makes it plain that the affluent majority intend to do nothing at all in regard to the black and the poor and the aged, except repress with force their demonstrations, subscribing finally not so much to the bland hortatory generalities of the platform and the acceptance speech but to the past statements of the real Nixon who has said 1) ‘If the conviction rate was doubled in this country, it would do more to eliminate crime in the future than a quadrupling of the funds for any governmental war on poverty.’ 2) ‘I am opposed to pensions in any form, as it makes loafing more attractive to (sic) working.’ 3) To tie health care to social security ‘would set up a great state program which would inevitably head in the direction of herding the ill and elderly into institutions whether they desire this or not.’ (1968)
“When faced with a moral issue most American commentators simply ignore it – or as Elaine May said to Mike Nichols in one of their skits, ‘I like a moral issue so much more than a real issue.'” (1973)
“I cannot for the life of me see the value of continuing this administration another day in office. More to the point, I do not think that the American system in its present state of decadence is worth preserving. The initial success of the United States was largely accidental. A rich almost empty continent was occupied and exploited by rapacious Europeans who made slaves of Africans and corpses of Indians in the process. They created a Venetian-style republican based on limited suffrage and dedicated to the sacredness of property. Now the land is no longer rich enough to support the pretensions of the inhabitants. Institutions that once worked well enough for the major stockholders are no longer adequate to bear the burden of all our mistakes. Yet I am certain that a majority of my countrymen would like things to continue pretty much as they are. If they do, then their only hope is the prompt impeachment and dismissal of the president. A ritual scapegoat is needed to absolve our sins and Nixon has obligingly put his head on the block. Certainly to allow him to go free makes us all accomplices. It also brings to a swift end the brief, and by the world no doubt unlamented, American imperium.” (1973)
“Walter [Annenberg]’s most notorious intervention in politics came in 1966 when Milton SHapp ran for governor of Pennsylvania. Aside from being a Democrat, Shapp had a number of other serious demerits in Walter’s eyes. He owned an interest in a cable television firm in direct conflict with Triangle; worse, he had managed to stop Walter from slipping through the city council a motion to grant Triangle exclusive CATV rights for the city. Finally (and the reason Walter gave for the virulence of his opposition), Shapp ‘made his objection to the merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads one of the principal campaign issues.’ This was too much for good Philadelphian Walter….It was too much. Consequently the Inquirer outdid itself in what a political observer at the time termed ‘character assassination.’ Every trick in the book was used, including what is sometimes referred to as ‘ The Best Man caper’; hint that the candidate is not right in the head. An Inquirer reporter asked Shapp if it was true that he’d sue should the paper print that he’d ever been in a mental home. Having never been in a loony bin, Shapp quite naturally said, yes, he would sue. Next day’s headlines: SHAPP DENIES EVERY HAVING BEEN IN A MENTAL HOME. After the campaign the general public learned that the largest individual stockholder in the Pennsylvania Railroad was Walter Annenberg.” (1970)
“As individuals, the presidents are accidental; but as types, they are inevitable and represent, God help us, us. We are Nixon; he is us.” (1983)
“Like ever good and bad American, Nixon knows almost no history of any kind.” (1983)
“To govern is to choose how the revenue raised from taxes is spent. So far so good, or bad. But some people earn more money than others. Should they pay proportionately more money to the government than those who earn less? And if they do pay more money are they entitled to more services than those who pay less or those who pay nothing at all? And should those who pay nothing at all because they have nothing get anything? These matters are of irritable concern to our rulers, and of some poignancy to the rest. Although the equality of each citizen before the law is the rock upon which the American Constitution rests, economic equality has never been an American ideal. In fact, it is the one unmentionable subject in our politics, as the Senator from South Dakota [George McGovern] recently discovered when he came up with a few quasi-egalitarian tax reforms. The furious and enduring terror of communism in America is not entirely the work of those early cold warriors Truman and Acheson. A dislike of economic equality is something deep-grained in the American Protestant character. After all, given a rich empty continent for vigorous Europeans to exploit (the Indians were simply a disagreeable part of the emptiness, like chiggers), any man of gumption could make himself a good living. With extra hard work, any man could make himself a fortune, proving that he was a better man than the rest. Long before Darwin the American ethos was Darwinian.” (1972)
“To maintain its grip on the nation, the Property Party must keep actual issues out of political debate. So far they have succeeded marvelously well. Faced with unemployment, Nixon will oppose abortion. Inflation? Marijuana is a halfway house to something worse. The bombing of North Vietnam? Well, pornographers are sing the mailing lists of Cub Scouts.” (1972)
“Our armed forces have been, literally, demoralized by what we have done to them in using them for unjust ends.” (1975)
“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.” (1975)
“Here are two comments not to be found in any American public-school book. Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” John Adams (in a letter to Jefferson): “Twenty times, in the course of my late reading, have I been on the point of breaking out. ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there was no religion in it.'” (1980)
“Although the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals declared in 1973 that ‘prisons should be repudiated as useless for any purpose other than locking away people who are too dangerous to be allowed at large in a free society,’ there are plans to build more and more prisons to brutalize more and more people who are, for the most part, harmless.” (1980)
“In the United States there are two political parties of equal size. One is the party that votes in presidential elections. The other is the party that does not vote in presidential elections.” (1980)
“Our ancestors did not like paying taxes on their tea; we do not like paying taxes on our houses, traditionally the only form of capital that the average middle-class American is allowed to accumulate.” (1981)
“The general tone [of the Federalist Papers] is that of a meeting of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell.” (1981)
“In the convention debates, Hamilton took on the romantic notion of the People: ‘The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to [the rich and wellborn] a distinct, permanent share in the government.’ The practical old Tory Gouverneur Morris took the same view, though he expressed himself rather more serenely than the fierce young man on the make: ‘The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest.’ Each was arguing for a Senate of lifetime appointees, to be chosen by the state legislatures for the best and the richest. It is curious that neither envisioned political parties as the more natural way of balancing economic interests.” (1981)
“Since Jefferson’s teeth were set on edge by the word property, the euphemism ‘pursuit of happiness’ had been substituted in the Declaration of Independence. Much pleased with this happy phrase, Jefferson recommended it highly to the Marquis de Lafayette when we was Rights of Man-ing it in France.” (1981)
“Thomas Jefferson thought that there should be a constitutional convention at least once a generation because ‘laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy, as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.’ Jefferson would be amazed to see how the boy’s jacket of his day has now become the middle-aged man’s strait-jacket of ours.” (1981)
“I felt particularly sorry for the media when a former president named Eisenhower, reading a speech with his usual sense of discovery, attacked the press, and the [1964 Republican] convention hall went mad. At last Ike was giving it to those commie-weirdo-Jew-fags who did not believe in the real America of humming electric chairs, well-packed prisons, and kitchens filled with every electrical device that a small brown person of extranational provenance might successfully operate at a fraction of the legal minimum wage.” (1983)
“I had never actually spoken to [Ronald Reagan] at a party because I knew – as who did not? – that although he was the soul of amiability when not excoriating the international monolithic menace of atheistic godless communism, he was, far and away, Hollywood’s most grinding bore – Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader’s Digest, which eh studied the way that Jefferson did Montesquieu.” (1983)
“Meanwhile, Edith [Luckett, mother of Nancy Reagan] had found Mr. Right, Loyal Davis, M.D., F.A.C.S, a brain surgeon of pronounced reactionary politics and a loathing of the lesser breeds, particularly those of a dusky hue.” (1983)
“This world is simply a used-up Kleenex, as Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, acknowledged when he scorned the environmentalists with the first hint of what was in the works: ‘I do not know,’ he said to Congress in 1981, ‘how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.’ So why conserve anything, if Judgment Day is at hand?” (1987)
“Wars of the sort that the Four Horsemen enjoyed are, if no longer possible, no longer practical. Today’s conquests are shifts of currency by computer and the manufacture of those things that people everywhere are willing to buy.” (1986)
“When Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state – his never-to-be fulfilled dream – he said rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.” (1986)
“I seldom watch television. But when I do set out to twirl the dial, it is usually on a Sunday, when our corporate rulers address us from their cathode pulpit. Seedy Washington journalists, sharp-eyed government officials who could no dispose of a brand-new car in Spokane, think-tank employees, etiolated from too long residence ‘neath flat rocks, and always, always, Henry Kissinger, whose destruction of so many Asians and their once-charming real estate won him a prize for peace from the ironists of northern Europe.” (1989)
“The next two champ guests, weighing in at twelve appearances each [on Nightline], were the mendacious Elliott Abrams (Koppel assumes that although Abrams will lie to Congress, he won’t lie to Koppel) and Jerry Falwell, a certified voice of God whose dolorous appearance suggests a deep, almost personal grief that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution are not yet repealed.” (1989)
“The Reverend Malthus is often revived in order to show how wrong he was with his formula that population increase in a geometrical ratio, food in an arithmetical one; hence, the first must outgrow the second. So far it has not, but in order to feed so many, the damage to air, earth and water has been catastrophic.” (1989)
“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.” (1992)
“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.” (1992)
“In 1946 and 1947 Europe was still out-of-bounds for foreigners. But by 1948 the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.” (1976)
“Orson’s conversation was often surreal and always cryptic. Either you picked up on it or you were left out. At one point, he asked me to intervene on his behalf with Johnny Carson because there had been a ‘misunderstanding’ between them and he was no longer asked to go on The Tonight Show and his lecture fees had, presumably, plummeted. I intervened. Carson was astonished. There was no problem that he knew of. I reported this to Orson in the course of one of our regular lunches at a French restaurant in Hollywood where Orson always sat in a vast chair to the right of the door. There was a smaller chair for a totally unprincipled small black poodle called Kiki.
‘There is more to this than Johnny will ever tell you,’ he rumbled. ‘Much, much more. Why,’ he turned to the waiter with cold eyes, ‘ do you keep bringing me a menu when you know what I must eat? Grilled fish.’ The voice boomed throughout the room. ‘And iced tea. How I hate grilled fish! But doctor’s orders. I’ve lost twenty pounds. No one ever believes this. But then no one ever believes I hardly eat anything.’ He was close to four hundred pounds at the time of our last lunch in 1982. He wore bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit. He hated the fat jokes that he was obliged to listen to – on television at least – with a merry smile and an insouciant retort or two, carefully honed in advance. When I asked him why he didn’t have the operation that vacuums the fat out of the body, he was gleeful. “Because I have seen the results of liposuction when the operation goes wrong. It happened to a woman I know. First, they insert the catheter in the abdomen, subcutaneously.’ Orson was up on every medical procedure. ‘The suction begins and the fat – it looks like yellow chicken fat. You must try the chicken here. But then the fat – hers not the chicken’s – came out unevenly. And so where once had been a Ruebenesque torso, there was now something all hideously rippled and valleyed and canyoned like the moon.’ He chuckled and, as always, I wondered what I’d do were he to drop dead of a stroke.” (1989)
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