The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK BY THAT NAME, BY GORE VIDAL
(Odonian Press; ISBN 1-878825-00-3)
We have never had a popular government … nor are we in any danger now. Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. “We have a single system,” he wrote, and “in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.”
Since the victory of 1945, the United States, as befits the leader of something called “the free world,” has fought open and unsuccessful wars in Korea and Vietnam; and relatively covert wars in Cambodia, Laos, the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, Chile, the Middle East, etc. In almost every case, our overwhelming commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights has required us to support those regimes that would deny freedom, democracy and human rights to their own people.
To their credit, our rulers don’t often bore us with tortured rationalizations. They don’t have to. Since we have no political parties and no opposition media, there is always a semblance of “consensus” for these wars. Congress funds the Pentagon, which then responds to the national security state’s directives to overthrow an Arbenz here [in Guatemala] or a Sihanouk there [in Cambodia], or—why not?—devastate a neutral country like Cambodia to show how tall we can stand in all our marvelously incredible credibility. Voices of dissent are either silenced or marginalized, while known apostates of the national religion [corporate capitalism] are either demonized or trivialized.
Our quality of life, though better than that of Russia (all that really matters, our priests hum softly) is noticeably lousy. But the reasons for our decline are never made clear because the corporate ownership of the country has absolute control of the populist pulpit—“the media”—as well as of the schoolroom.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent. Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.
Most opinion is now controlled by twenty-nine corporations … one can then identify those twenty-nine CEOs as a sort of politburo, in strict charge of what the people should and should not know. Since no voices other than those of the national consensus are heard, how could a viewer know that there are any other viewpoints?
I tried to explain to the [National] Press Club what it is they do that they don’t know they do. I quote David Hume: “The Few are able to control the Many only through Opinion.” In the eighteenth century, Opinion was dispensed from pulpit and schoolroom. Now the media are in place to give us Opinion that has been manufactured in the boardrooms of those corporations—once national, now international—that control our lives.
Every four years the naïve half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman president, everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it.

Mass Media Appearance overpowers even the truth. Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race. A crowd is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence. It thinks in images. All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. The grand achievement of the present age is the diffusion of superficial knowledge. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th Century. People are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonplace; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead. It is only because they are not used to taste what is excellent that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they are new. You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. Promises, large promises, is the soul of advertising. I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions. The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe. His second duty is to see that nothing is said in the news items or editorials which may discountenance any claims or announcements made by the advertisers, discredit their standing or good faith, or expose many weaknesses or deceptions in any business venture that is or may become a valuable advertiser. All advertising, whether it lies in the field of business or politics, will carry success by continuity and regular uniformity of application. - Adolf Hitler The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds render them more easy prey to a big lie tan a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one. - Adolf Hitler One should guard against believing the great masses to be more stupid than they actually are. - Adolf Hitler Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of men. All Hollywood corrupts, and absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely. What rage for fame attends both great and small! Better be damned than not mentioned at all! When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest. Each generation of critics does nothing but take the opposite of the truths accepted by their predecessors. Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but speaks in quotes. In America the press rules the country; it rules its politics, its religion, its social practices. - E.W. Scripps The press is the hired agent of a moneyed system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. The press of this country is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and the chicanery of the ruling and employing class. - E.W. Scripps Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put in that polluted vehicle. To withhold the news is to play God. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Woman governs America because America is a land of boys who refuse to grow up. Previous Page | Index God & Reality That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of the atoms, I will no more believe than the accidental jumbling of the alphabet should fall into a most ingenious treatise on Philosophy. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. As long as there will be an unknown there will be a God. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, creative, poetic, erotic. The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at Him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him. Called or Not Called, God is Present God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like. The earth, the sun and stars, the universe itself; and the charming variety of the seasons, demonstrate the existence of Divinity. At the core of our being we manifest God, and we become all that we love in God. This is what is meant by "The Living God is a Man". The religious, who, of course, ascribe the origins of grace to God, believe it to be literally God's love, have through the ages had the same difficulty locating God. There are within theology two lengthy and opposing traditions in this regard: one, the doctrine of Emanance, which holds that grace emanates down from an external God to men; the other the doctrine of Immanence, which holds that grace immanates out from the God within the center of man's being. There is no dichotomy between spirit and flesh, no split between Godhead and the world. Spiritual union is found in life, within nature, passion, sensuality - through being fully human, fully one's self. I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one: One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call. He is the first, he is the last. He is outward, he is inward. I don't know about God. The only things I know are what I see, feel and smell. What if you slept; and what if in your sleep you dreamed; and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower; and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Oh, what then? - Samuel Taylor Coleridge Previous Page | Index | Home