i was one of those curious, fixing moments in the swirling American scene. Gore Vidal, lifelong excoriator of the political circus, is once again donning his tutu for the high trapeze: later this year, he hopes to replace California’s S.I. Hayakawa in the US Senate. Vidal has often said that any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. Yet he confessed over dinner (or, rather, over a Virginian meat tea, before his speech) that he is intending to go the whole way. And so, last Monday night, Vidal strolled sturdily up to the lectern at Lynchburg College and gave his annual State of the Union address, his mocking echo of the Presidential bulletin of the previous week. But this is no longer Vidal’s lecture-circuit, after-dinner oration: it is his stump speech, and it is sweepingly, piercingly radical.
Meanwhile, across town, Jerry Falwell lurked brooding behind the walls of his $300,000 house. Jerry’s house is a Doric mansion, but it lies in the wrong end of town: ‘among the cracker boxes’, in the local parlance. For all his Hugh-Hefner trappings, Jerry remains a rockbottom grass-roots figure, regarded as riff-raff even by petit-bourgeois Lynchburgers. (Jerry minds about this; Vidal’s new-Virginian remark was meant to sting.) Asked along that night by the local anti-Falwell group, which arranged Vidal’s talk, Jerry had silently declined. Perhaps he was watching the first episode in a new soap-opera about a video evangelist, called — with an appropriate glance at Pay TV — Pray TV. Or perhaps, like everyone else in America, he was monitoring the depravities of Charles and Sebastian, in Brideshead Revisited.
Against this varied opposition, Vidal still attracted a full house. After a few preliminary jokes and jabs (enough to make a few heavy citizens walk from the hall shaking their heads), he kicked off with the proposition that America was run by a single-party system. The party happened to have two factions – Democrats and Republicans. ‘It’s supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X versus Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.’
Ever since the Bust of 1919, Vidal pursued, the US had been in thrall to the notion that ‘war is good for business’. Open or covert, hot or cold, war had been waged for the past fifty years; and now Reagan, ‘in the bright springtime of his senility’, was busy arranging the next war with Nicaragua, say, or El Salvador (‘I lie awake at night worrying about the hordes of El Salvadorans pouring across our border in Greyhound buses’). Reagan’s $1½ trillion five-year defence budget could result only ‘in nuclear war or bankruptcy — one or the other’. The CIA, he claimed, was now as active and ubiquitous as the KGB.
Without too much chapter and verse, Vidal switched from the question of global policing to that of domestic enforcement. He estimated that 50 per cent of all police work was taken up with ‘victimless crime’. Why do we meekly accept that our private lives should be run by Washington? If people want to kill themselves with drink, drugs, or indeed bullets, then that is their business; ditto with restraints on sexual morality. Released from their patrols of parlour and bedroom, the police would be free to combat the crimes that really etc., etc.
All this may have surprised — and delighted and scandalised — the gathered Lynchburgers; but it was hardly news to anyone who had read Vidal in the New York Review or Esquire over the years. Indeed, there is practically nothing in his stump speech that isn’t to be found in his Collected Essays, 1952—1972. But now Vidal moved on to tax reform, acknowledging the help of certain ‘advisers’, and we began to get a glimpse of a possible platform.
‘To govern’, Vidal had written ten years ago in Homage to Daniel Shays, ‘is to choose how the revenue from taxes is to be spent.’ Nowadays, though, the question is not how to cut the cake but how to bake it. Vidal’s new recipe is simple and direct: lay off the poor, and squeeze the corporations. He further suggested that the corporations would include the electronic ministries of the airwaves, and their tax-exempt revenues. By this means alone, $ioo billion would be raised, ‘enough to service the national debt’.