Imperial America

The meat of Gore Vidal's latest pamphlet comes in the form of reprinted essays dating from 1972 to the present with a few new editorial embellishments. Among the highlights:

...roughly 80 percent of police work in the United States has to do with the regulation of our private morals. By that I mean, controlling what we smoke, eat, put in our veins - not to mention trying to regulate with whom and how we have sex, with whom and how we gamble. As a result, our police are the most corrupt in the western world.

For two hundred years we have had an oligarchical system in which men of property can do well and others are on their own. Or as Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or bribe the powerless majority. The so-called Great Society bribed; today coercion is much in the air. Happily, our neoconservative Mongoloids favor authoritarian if not totalitarian means of coercion.

Now (2004) that we have ceased to be a nation under law, but a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns, Homeland Security appears to be uniting our secret police into a single sort of Gestapo with dossiers on everyone to prevent us, somehow or other, from being terrorized by various implacable Second and Third World enemies.

Vidal's collection demonstrates the consistency with which the National Security State, established in 1950, has, with ever increasing intrusiveness, used fear and coercion to control public opinion and raid the treaury in the interest of conducting its several imperial wars in Korea, Vietnam, Nicuragua, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq to name a few of the bigger ones. Which, of course, is why we can only shake our heads at the martial law in effect in Boston this week and wonder where does it end.