The Last Empire (55 page)

Recently, the sexologist George Plimpton, a James Moran In-stitute professor emeritus, explained in
The New Yorker
how boys in his youth would go through mating stages with girls, using, significantly, baseball terminology like “getting to first base,” which meant . . . and so on. “Going all the way,” however, was used instead of “home run” for full intercourse, the old in-and-out or mature penis-vagina intercourse.

Arguably, Southerners are somewhat different from other residents of that shining city on a hill that has brought so much light and joy to all the world in the past two centuries. In balmy climes, human beings mature early. They also have a lot of chiggery outdoors to play baseball and other games in.

When I was a boy, Fairfax County, Virginia, where I lived, was Li’l Abner country. No glamorous houses. No CIA lords hidden away in Georgian mansions on the Potomac Heights. There was just a Baptist church. A Methodist church. And a lot of Sunday. Also, a whole hierarchy of do’s and don’ts when it came to boy-girl sex. What is now harshly called groping was the universal sentimental approach (put down that bazooka, Andrea). All players understood touching. Even without a thong. Endless kissing. First, second, third bases to be got to. Then a boy shootist was allowed, more soon than late, to shoot. Otherwise he might
die
, of dreaded blueballs. Girls tended to be understanding. Even so, all-the-way intercourse was not on offer unless he was “serious.” Now add to these age-old rituals of mating cold war Pentagon-CIA terminology, the concept of “plausible deniability,” and one starts to understand the truth of the President’s denial under oath that he had sexual relations
with Miss Monica. From the Testimony: “The President maintained that there can be no sexual relationship without sexual intercourse, regardless of what other sexual activities may transpire. He stated that ‘most ordinary Americans’ would embrace this distinction.” Certainly most lads and lassies in Arkansas or the Fairfax County of sixty years ago would agree.

It is true that in the age of Freud, now drawing to a close, it used to be argued by those who preached the good news in his name that
everything
was sexual. Two men shaking hands. The embrace between baseball players on the diamond. Two women friends weeping in each other’s arms, and so on. One can argue that, yes, there is a sexual element to everything if one wants to go digging but even the most avid Freudian detective would have to admit that what might be construed as sexuality by other means falls literally short of plain old in-and-out, which is the name of the game that takes precedence even over General Doubleday’s contribution to the boredom of nations.

In reference to Miss Monica’s first sworn denial of sexual relations with the President, which Clinton had originally confirmed, he later said, “I believe at the time she filled out this affidavit, if she believed that the definition of sexual relationship was two people having intercourse, then this is accurate.” To support Clinton’s reading of the matter, one has only to overhear Miss Monica and her false friend/fiend Linda Tripp bemoaning the fact that the President will not perform the absolute, complete, all-the-way act of becoming as one with her in mature heterosexual land forever glimmering somewhere over the rainbow. Without sexual intercourse there can be no sexual relationship. If this sounds like quibbling, it is. But that is the way we have been speaking in lawyerland for quite some time. The honor system at West Point regarded quibbling as worse than lying. So the officer corps became adept at quibbling, even in the ruins of the city of Ben Tre, which “we destroyed in
order to save it.”

A nation not of men but of laws, intoned John Adams as he, among other lawyers, launched what has easily become the most demented society ever consciously devised by intelligent men. We are now enslaved by laws. We are governed by lawyers. We create little but litigate much. Our monuments are the ever-expanding prisons, where millions languish for having committed victimless crimes or for simply not playing the game of plausible deniability (a.k.a. lying) with a sufficiently good legal team. What began as a sort of Restoration comedy,
The Impeachment of the President
, on a frivolous, irrelevant matter, is suddenly turning very black indeed, and all our political arrangements are at risk as superstitious Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.

With that warning, I invite the Senate to contemplate Vice President Aaron Burr’s farewell to the body over which he himself had so ably presided: “This house is a sanctuary, a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storm of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.” Do no harm to this state, Conscript Fathers.

The Nation

28 December 1998

* 
A L
ETTER TO
B
E
D
ELIVERED

I am writing this note a dozen days before the inauguration of the loser of the year 2000 presidential election. Lost republic as well as last empire. We are now faced with a Japanese seventeenth-century-style arrangement: a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors. Do they dream, as did the shoguns of yore, of the conquest of China? We shall know more soon, I should think, than late. Sayonara.

11 January 2001

*
Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. Like everyone else, I’m eagerly looking forward to your inaugural address. As you must know by now, we could never get enough of your speeches during the recent election in which the best man won, as he always does in what Spiro Agnew so famously called “the greatest nation in the country.”

Apropos your first speech to us as president. I hope you don’t mind if I make a few suggestions, much as I used to do in the Sixties when I gave my regular States of the Union roundups on David Susskind’s TV show of blessed memory. Right off, it strikes me that this new beginning may be a good place to admit that for the last fifty years we have been waging what the historian Charles A. Beard so neatly termed “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

It is my impression, Mr. President-Elect, that most Americans want our economy converted from war to peace. Naturally, we still want to stand tall. We also don’t want any of our tax money wasted on health care because that would be Communism, which we all abhor. But we would like some of our tax dollars spent on education. Remember what you said in your terminal debate with your opponent, now so much charred and crumbling toast? “Education is the key to the new millennium.” (Actually, looking at my notes, all four of you said that.)

In any case, it is time we abandon our generally unappreciated role as world policeman, currently wasting Colombia, source of satanic drugs, while keeping Cuba, Iraq, and, until recently, Serbia “in correction,” as policepersons call house arrest. This compulsive interference in the affairs of other states is expensive and pointless. Better we repair our own country with “internal improvements,” as Henry Clay used to say. But in order to do this your first big job will be to curb the Pentagon warlords and their fellow conspirators in Congress and the boardrooms of corporate America. Ever since the Soviet Union so unsportingly disbanded in order to pursue proto-capitalism and double-entry bookkeeping, our warlords have been anxiously searching for new enemies in order to justify an ever increasing military budget. Obviously, there is Terrorism to be fought. There is also the war on Drugs, to be fought but never won. Even so, in the failed attempt, the coming destruction of Colombia, a once
liberal democratic nation, promises to be great fun for warlords and media, if not the residents of a once happy nation. Lately, a new clear and present danger has been unveiled: Rogue States, or “states of concern.” Currently, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran have been so fingered, while the world’s one billion Muslims have been demonized as crazed fanatics, dedicated to destroying all that is good on earth, which is us.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, Rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships. So to protect ourselves, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Nuclear Space Shield must be set in place at an initial cost of $60 billion even though, as of July, tests of the system, no matter how faked by the Pentagon, continued to fail. The fact that, according to polls, a majority of your constituents believe that we already have such a shield makes it possible for you to say you’re updating it and then do nothing. After all, from 1949 to 1999 the U.S. spent $7.1 trillion on “national defense.” As a result, the national debt is $5.6 trillion, of which $3.6 trillion is owed to the public, and $2 trillion to the Social Security–Medicare Trust Funds, all due to military spending and to the servicing of the debt thus incurred.

Mr. President-Elect, since Treasury figures are traditionally juggled, it would be nice if you were to see to it that the actual income and outgo of federal money are honestly reported. Last year the government told us, falsely, that its income was just over $1.8 trillion while it spent just under $1.8 trillion; hence, the famous, phantom surplus when there was, of course, our usual homely deficit of around $90 billion. Year after year, the government’s official income is inflated by counting as revenue the income of the people’s Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds. These funds are not federal revenue. This year Social Security has a healthy surplus of $150 billion. No wonder corporate America and its employees in Congress are eager to privatize this healthy fund, thus far endangered only by them.

Although actual military spending was indeed lower last year than usual, half the budget still went to pay for wars to come as well as to blowing up the odd aspirin factory in the Sudan. Cash outlays for the military were $344 billion while interest on the military-caused national debt was $282 billion: sorry to bore you with these statistics, but they are at the heart of our—what was Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate word?—malaise (that’s French for broke). The Clinton administration’s airy promise of a $1.8 trillion budget surplus over the next decade was, of course, a bold if comforting fiction, based on surreal estimates of future federal income—not to mention expenditures which, if anything like last September’s congressional spending spree, will drown us in red ink.

Sir, if you are going to be of any use at all to the nation and to the globe that it holds hostage, you will have to tame the American military. Discipline the out-of-control service chiefs. Last September, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General H. H. Shelton, declared that more, not less, dollars were needed. Specifically, the Marines want an extra $1.5 billion per year, the Army wants over $30 billion, the Navy $20 billion, the Air Force $30 billion, all in the absence of an enemy (we spend twenty-two times more than our seven potential enemies—Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria—combined). You must not grant these ruinous increases.

In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup—reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro’s Cuba. It should be noted that Jack hated liberals more than he did conservatives. “No one can ever be liberal enough for the
New York Post
,” he said. “Well, the
Post
should be happy now. Berlin’s going to cost us at least three and a half billion dollars. So, with this military buildup, we’re going to have a seven-billion-dollar deficit for the year. That’s a lot of pump priming.” He scowled. “God, I hate the way they throw money around over there at the Pentagon.”

“It’s not they,” I said. “It’s you. It’s your administration.” Briskly, he told me the facts of life, and I repeat them now as advice from the thirty-fifth to the—what are you, Mr. President? Forty-third president? “The only way for a president to control the Pentagon would be if he spent the entire four years of his first term doing nothing else but investigating that mess, which means he really could do nothing else . . .”

“Like getting reelected?”

He grinned. “Something like that.”

So I now propose, Mr. President-Elect, while there is still time, that you zero in on the links between corporate America and the military and rationalize as best you can the various procurement policies, particularly the Ronald Reagan Memorial Nuclear Shield. You should also leak to the American people certain Pentagon secrets. In 1995, we still had our missiles trained on 2,500 foreign targets. Today, to celebrate peace in the world, our missiles are trained on 3,000 foreign targets—of which 2,260 are in Russia; the rest are directed at China and the Rogue States. Although President Clinton has spoken eloquently of the need for a reduction in such dangerous nuclear targeting, the Pentagon does as it pleases, making the world unsafe for everyone. But then
USA Today
recently reported that the military enjoys the highest popularity rating (64 percent) of any group in the country—the Congress and Big Business are among the lowest. Of course, the services do spend $265 million annually on advertising.

Jack Kennedy very much enjoyed Fletcher Knebel’s thriller
Seven Days in May
, later a film. The story: a jingo based on the real-life Admiral Arthur Radford plans a military coup to take over the White House. Jack found the book riveting. “Only,” he chuckled, rather grimly, “it’s a lot more likely that this president will one day raise his own army and occupy their damned building.” No, I don’t agree with Oliver Stone that the generals killed him. But there is, somewhere out there, a watchdog that seems never to bark in the night. Yet the dog that doesn’t bark is the one that should be guarding the house from burglars, in this case the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so generously warned us against. Although there are many media stories about costly overruns in the defense industries as well as the slow beginning of what may yet turn into an actual debate over the nuclear shield that Reagan envisaged for us after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s
Torn Curtain
, a movie nowhere near as good as
Seven Days in May
, there is, as yet, no debate over the role of the military in the nation’s life and its ongoing threat to us all, thanks to the hubris of senior officers grown accustomed to dispensing vast amounts of the people’s money for missiles that can’t hit targets and bombers that can’t fly in the rain. Congress, which should ride herd, does not because too many of its members are financed by those same companies that absorb our tax money, nor is it particularly helpful that senior officers, after placing orders with the defense industries, so often go to work as salesmen for the very same companies they once bought from.