Tag Archives: State of the Union

Rioting in Understatement

22 Friday Sep 2017

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“The two parties, which are really one party, cannot be put to use. They are the country’s ownership made carnival. Can the united action of individual citizens regain some control over government? I think so. But it won’t be easy, to riot in understatement. Attempts to cut back the war budget — whether the war be against communism or drugs or us — will be fought with great resourcefulness. When challenged with the billions of dollars wasted or stolen from the Pentagon, the establishment politician’s answer is clear: Abortion is against God’s law. He promptly changes the subject, the way a magician does when he catches your attention with one hand while the other picks your pocket…

Our political debate — what little there is — can never speak of the future except in terms of the past. I shall, therefore, present a formula to restore the Republic by moving boldly forward into the past. I wish to invoke the spirit of Henry Clay. Thanks to our educational system, no one knows who he is, but for political purposes he can be first explained, then trotted out as a true America Firster who felt that it was the task of government to make internal improvements, to spend money on education and on the enlargement of the nation’s economic plant… This does not seem to me to be too ambitious a program.”

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Pulled from Gore Vidal’s classic “Notes on Our Patriarchal State,” which is taken from his “State of the Union” speech from 1990 (embedded below). To get the full effect, flash forward to minute twenty-six and listen to this section. The text can be found in his collection Gore Vidal’s State of the Union.

Gore Vidal: I Always Thought Lincoln Was Wrong

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in History, Interview

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Abraham Lincoln color

“I always thought Lincoln was wrong. I always thought the South had every right to go. If Lincoln had a high moral purpose — which has now been invented for him, posthumously, the abolition of slavery — I’d say, well it’s illegal but it’s morally worthy.

He was not interested in freeing the slaves. He was interested in the preservation of the union and power and centralization. He turned to the Constitution and said I have no right to free the slaves, no constitutional right.

When he finally did get around to a degree of emancipation, he did it entirely under military necessity. I think he made a great mistake.

If I had been around at the time, I think I would have been for [Secretary of State William H.] Seward, who said let the South go. He called them the ‘Mosquito Republics,’ and asked ‘What are they going to do?’. They have two crops: cotton and tobacco. They’ve got no place to go. We’re getting all this immigration. We’re going to seize Canada one day. Let’s take over Mexico and Central America — he was extremely ambitious — and the South will come back. They’ll be knocking on the door. Why kill 600,000 young men for a notion of the union, which nobody had thought much of before then?”

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Gore Vidal, responding to a question about whether his favorite theory of government — that of devolution, where power is drawn outward to states and localities — contradicted the principles fought for by our 16th president.

Unsurprisingly, one of Vidal’s most acclaimed books, Lincoln: A Novel, shatters the saintly Lincoln death mask to reveal a man unrelentingly political, beset by personal and marital hang ups, and often unsure of even minor decisions in office. It’s a compelling portraiture, one you won’t find in the National Gallery.

They’re Supposed to Be Awful

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley

Questioner: Was there more civility among politicians in the early years of the Republic?

Gore Vidal: Well that’s not what they’re there for. Civility among politicians is oxymoronic – they’re supposed to be awful. And that’s part of the fun of it; if they’re going to talk about real issues and they care about real issues, then they get to really hate each other and they talk rather savagely.

In past generations, they could actually talk. As opposed to politicians today, they could actually speak without reading – hesitantly – a speech somebody else had written for them.

As I once said of General Eisenhower: he always read his speeches with a sense of real discovery. He was terribly interested in some of things he was reading. There was a great moment during the campaign of ’52, when he said, ‘And, if elected President, I will go to… Korea!’ And he went. Nobody’d told him. And he had to go.

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From the question and answer section of Gore Vidal’s “State of the United States” speech, given in November 1994.

More from Vidal…

Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

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Gore Vidal Portrait Session

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

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From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

  • Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
  • Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
  • The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

Gore Vidal