Plutonium, the 51st element
In "The State of the Union: 1975" in Esquire for May of that year, Gore Vidal described his recent public lectures:
Sometimes, if I'm not careful, I drift prematurely into my analysis of the American political system: there is only one party in the United States, the Property party (thank you, Dr. Lundberg*, for the phrase) and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently (nervous laugh on that)—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties. Those who gave Nixon money in '68 also gave money to Humphrey.
Can one expect any change from either wing of the Property party? No. Look at McGovern. In the primaries he talked about tax reform and economic equality ... or something close to it. For a while it looked as if he was nobly preparing to occupy a long box at Arlington. But then he was nominated for president and he stopped talking about anything important. Was he insincere in the primaries? I have no idea. I suspect he was just plain dumb, not realizing that if you speak of economic justice or substantial change you won't get the forty million dollars a Democratic candidate for president needs in order to pay for exposure on television where nothing of any real importance may be said. Remember Quemoy? and her lover Matsu?
Once I get into this aria, I throw out of kilter the next section. Usually I do the Property party later on. Or in the questions and answers. Or not at all. One forgets. Thinks one has told Kansas city earlier in the evening what, in fact, one said that morning in Omaha.
Back to law and order.
"An example: roughly eighty 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 drink, eat, smoke, put into 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 among the most corrupt in the Western world."
Nervous intake of breath on this among women's groups. Some laughter at the colleges. Glacial silence at Atlantic City. Later I was told, "We've got a lot of very funny sort of element around here . . . you know, from Philadelphia, originally. Uh . . . like Italian." I still don't know quite what was meant.
"Not only are police on the take from gamblers, drug pushers, pimps, but they find pretty thrilling their mandate to arrest prostitutes or anyone whose sexual activities have been proscribed by a series of state legal codes that are the scandal of what we like to call a free society. These codes are very old of course. The law against sodomy goes back fourteen hundred years to the Emperor Justinian, who felt that there should be such a law because, as everyone knew, sodomy was a principal cause of earthquake."
"Sodomy" gets them. For elderly, good-hearted audiences I paraphrase; the word is not used. College groups get a fuller discussion of Justinian and his peculiar law, complete with quotations from Procopius. California audiences living on or near the San Andreas fault laugh the loudest--and the most nervously. No wonder...
From the August 1980 number of Esquire, the opening of "The State of the Union: 1980":
Five years and two presidents ago, I presented in the pages of Esquire my own State of the Union Address, based on a chat I'd been giving in various parts of the republic. Acting as a sort of shadow president, I used to go around giving a true—well, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle being what it is, atruer report on the state of the union than the one we are given each year by that loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president, who is called, depending on the year, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter. Although the presidents now come and go with admirable speed, the bank goes on forever, constantly getting us into deeper and deeper trouble of the sort that can be set right—or wrong—only by its man in the Oval Office. One of the bank's recent capers has got the Oval One and us into a real mess. The de-Peacock-Throned King of Kings wanted to pay us a call. If we did not give refuge to the Light of the Aryans (Banksman David Rockefeller and Banksman Henry Kissinger were the tactical officers involved), the heir of Cyrus the Great wouuld take all his money out of the bank, out of Treasury bonds, out of circulation in North America. Faced with a choice between loss of money and loss of honor and good sense, Banksman Carter chose not to lose money. As a result, there will probably be a new president come November. But whether it is this Banksman or that, Chase Manhattan will continue to be served and the republic will continue to be, in Banksman Nixon's elegant phrase, shafted...
*The United States can be looked upon as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party. This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: the Republican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed "Conservative"), and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoring such adjustments (hence dubbed "Liberal"). The big reason third parties have come to naught--a puzzle to some political scientists--is simiply that no substantial group of property owners has seen fit to underwrite one. There is no Anti-Property Party.
Ferdinand Lundberg. The Rich and The Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today. 1968. Lyle Stuart, Inc., New York
Chapter Two - Room At The Top: The New Rich
Sometimes, if I'm not careful, I drift prematurely into my analysis of the American political system: there is only one party in the United States, the Property party (thank you, Dr. Lundberg*, for the phrase) and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently (nervous laugh on that)—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties. Those who gave Nixon money in '68 also gave money to Humphrey.
Can one expect any change from either wing of the Property party? No. Look at McGovern. In the primaries he talked about tax reform and economic equality ... or something close to it. For a while it looked as if he was nobly preparing to occupy a long box at Arlington. But then he was nominated for president and he stopped talking about anything important. Was he insincere in the primaries? I have no idea. I suspect he was just plain dumb, not realizing that if you speak of economic justice or substantial change you won't get the forty million dollars a Democratic candidate for president needs in order to pay for exposure on television where nothing of any real importance may be said. Remember Quemoy? and her lover Matsu?
Once I get into this aria, I throw out of kilter the next section. Usually I do the Property party later on. Or in the questions and answers. Or not at all. One forgets. Thinks one has told Kansas city earlier in the evening what, in fact, one said that morning in Omaha.
Back to law and order.
"An example: roughly eighty 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 drink, eat, smoke, put into 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 among the most corrupt in the Western world."
Nervous intake of breath on this among women's groups. Some laughter at the colleges. Glacial silence at Atlantic City. Later I was told, "We've got a lot of very funny sort of element around here . . . you know, from Philadelphia, originally. Uh . . . like Italian." I still don't know quite what was meant.
"Not only are police on the take from gamblers, drug pushers, pimps, but they find pretty thrilling their mandate to arrest prostitutes or anyone whose sexual activities have been proscribed by a series of state legal codes that are the scandal of what we like to call a free society. These codes are very old of course. The law against sodomy goes back fourteen hundred years to the Emperor Justinian, who felt that there should be such a law because, as everyone knew, sodomy was a principal cause of earthquake."
"Sodomy" gets them. For elderly, good-hearted audiences I paraphrase; the word is not used. College groups get a fuller discussion of Justinian and his peculiar law, complete with quotations from Procopius. California audiences living on or near the San Andreas fault laugh the loudest--and the most nervously. No wonder...
From the August 1980 number of Esquire, the opening of "The State of the Union: 1980":
Five years and two presidents ago, I presented in the pages of Esquire my own State of the Union Address, based on a chat I'd been giving in various parts of the republic. Acting as a sort of shadow president, I used to go around giving a true—well, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle being what it is, atruer report on the state of the union than the one we are given each year by that loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president, who is called, depending on the year, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter. Although the presidents now come and go with admirable speed, the bank goes on forever, constantly getting us into deeper and deeper trouble of the sort that can be set right—or wrong—only by its man in the Oval Office. One of the bank's recent capers has got the Oval One and us into a real mess. The de-Peacock-Throned King of Kings wanted to pay us a call. If we did not give refuge to the Light of the Aryans (Banksman David Rockefeller and Banksman Henry Kissinger were the tactical officers involved), the heir of Cyrus the Great wouuld take all his money out of the bank, out of Treasury bonds, out of circulation in North America. Faced with a choice between loss of money and loss of honor and good sense, Banksman Carter chose not to lose money. As a result, there will probably be a new president come November. But whether it is this Banksman or that, Chase Manhattan will continue to be served and the republic will continue to be, in Banksman Nixon's elegant phrase, shafted...
*The United States can be looked upon as having, in effect, a single party: the Property Party. This party can be looked upon as having two subdivisions: the Republican Party, hostile to accommodating adjustments (hence dubbed "Conservative"), and the Democratic Party, of recent decades favoring such adjustments (hence dubbed "Liberal"). The big reason third parties have come to naught--a puzzle to some political scientists--is simiply that no substantial group of property owners has seen fit to underwrite one. There is no Anti-Property Party.
Ferdinand Lundberg. The Rich and The Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today. 1968. Lyle Stuart, Inc., New York
Chapter Two - Room At The Top: The New Rich
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