Pubdate: November 1998
Source: Vanity Fair
Page: 96
Copyright: 1998 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.vanityfair.com
Author: Gore Vidal

THE WAR AT HOME - Part II

	I suspect that what I wrote 28 years ago is every bit as unacceptable now
as it was then, with the added problem of irritable ladies who object to my
sexism in putting the case solely in masculine terms, as did the sexist
founders.

	I also noted the failure of the prohibition of alcohol from 1919 to 1933.
And the crime wave that Prohibition set in motion so like the one today
since "both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against
the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be
no money in them for anyone." Will anything sensible be done I wondered?
"The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment
as they are to making money--and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business
as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible
(particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow
worse." I suppose, if nothing else, I was a pretty good prophet.

	The media constantly deplore the drug culture and, variously, blame
foreign countries like Colombia for obeying that Iron law of supply and
demand to which we have, as a notion and as a nation, sworn eternal
allegiance. We also revel in military metaphors. Czars lead our armies into
wars against drug dealers and drug takers. So great is this permanent
emergency that we can no longer afford such frills as habeas corpus and due
process of law. In 1989 the former drug czar and TV talk-show fool, William
Bennett, suggested de jure as well as de facto abolition of habeas corpus
in "drug" cases as well as (I am
not inventing this) public beheadings of drug dealers. A year later,
Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers'
case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in
the end, is  the  most  compelling argument." Of course, what this
dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman
and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense,
particularly when his "morality"  abolishes  their  gift to all of us, the
Bill of Rights. But Bennett is not alone in his madness. A special
assistant  to the president on drug abuse declared, in 1984, "You cannot
let one drug come in and say, 'Well, this drug is all right.' We've drawn
the line. There's no such thing as a soft drug." There goes Tylenol-3,
containing codeine. Who would have thought that age-old palliatives could,
so easily, replace the only national religion that the United States has
ever truly had, anti-Communism?

	On June 10, 1998, a few brave heretical voices were raised in The New York
Times, on an inner page. Under the heading BIG NAMES SIGN LETTER
CRITICIZING WAR ON DRUGS. A billionaire named "George Sores has amassed
signatures of hundreds of prominent people around the world on a letter
asserting that the global war on drugs is causing more harm than drug abuse
itself." Apparently, the Lindesmith Center in New York, funded by Sores,
had taken out an ad in the Times, thereby, expensively, catching an
editor's eye. The signatories included a former secretary of state and a
couple of ex-senators, but though the ad was intended to coincide with a
United Nations special session on Satanic Substances, it carried no weight
with one General Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton's war director, who
called the letter "a 1950s perception," whatever that may mean. After all,
drug use in the 50s was less than it is now after four decades of
relentless warfare. Curiously, the New York Times story made the
signatories seem to be few and eccentric while the Manchester Guardian in
England reported that among the "international signatories are the former
prime minister of the Netherlands... the former presidents of Bolivia and
Colombia... three [U.S.] federal judges... senior clerics, former drugs
squad officers... " But the Times always knows what's fit to print. 

	It is ironic-to use the limpest adjective-that a government as
spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have
come to care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests
commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take
"hard" drugs on the parental ground that they are bad for the user's
health. One is touched by their concern--touched and dubious. After all,
these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in
and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World
country simply takes for granted, a national health service.

	When Mr. and Mrs. Clinton came up to Washington, green as grass from the
Arkansas hills and all pink and aglow from swift-running whitewater creeks,
they tried to give the American people such a health system, a small token
in exchange for all that tax money which had gone for "defense" against an
enemy that had wickedly folded when our back was turned. At the first
suggestion that it was time for us to join the civilized world, there began
a vast conspiracy to stop any form of national health care. It was hardly
just the "right wing," as Mrs. Clinton suggested. Rather, the insurance and
pharmaceutical companies combined with elements of the American Medical
Association to destroy forever any notion that we be a country that
provides anything for its citizens in the way of health care. 

	One of the problems of a society as tightly controlled as ours is that we
get so little information about what those of our fellow citizens whom we
will never know or see are actually thinking and feeling. This seems a
paradox when most politics today involves minute-by-minute polltaking on
what looks to be every conceivable subject, but, as politicians and
pollsters know, it's how the question is asked that determines the
response. Also, there are vast areas, like rural America, that are an
unmapped ultima Thule to those who own the corporations that own the media
that spend billions of dollars to take polls in order to elect their
lawyers to high office. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Oklahoma City. 

	Three warning bells from a heartland that most of us who are urban
dwellers know little  or  nothing  about.  Cause of rural dwellers' rage?
In 1996 there were 1,471 mergers of American corporations in the interest
of "consolidation." This was the largest number of mergers in American
history, and the peak of a trend that had been growing in the world of
agriculture since the late 1970s. One thing shared by the victims at Ruby
Ridge and Waco, and Timothy McVeigh, who committed mass murder in their
name at Oklahoma City, was the conviction that the government of the United
States is their implacable enemy and that they can only save themselves by
hiding out in the wilderness, or by joining a commune centered on a
messianic figure, or, as revenge for the cold blooded federal murder of two
members of the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, blow up the building that
contained the bureau responsible for the murders.

	To give the media their due, they have been uncommonly generous with us on
the subject of the religious and political beliefs of rural dissidents.
There is a neo-Nazi "Aryan Nations." There are Christian fundamentalists
called "Christian Identity," also known as "British Israelism." All of this
biblically inspired nonsense has taken deepest root in those dispossessed
of their farmland  in  the  last  generation. Needless to say, Christian
demagogues fan the flames of race and sectarian hatred on television and,
illegally, pour church money into political campaigns.

	Conspiracy theories now blossom in the wilderness like night-blooming
dementia praecox, and those in thrall to them are mocked invariably by the
... by the actual conspirators. Joel Dyer, in Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma
City Is Only the Beginning, has discovered some very real conspiracies out
there, but the conspirators are old hands at deflecting attention from
themselves. Into drugs? Well, didn't you know Queen Elizabeth II is overall
director of the world drug trade (if only poor Lillibet had had the
foresight in these republican times!).  They tell us that the Trilateral
Commission is a world-Communist conspiracy headed by the Rockefellers.
Actually, the commission is excellent shorthand to show how the
Rockefellers draw together politicians and academics-on-the-make to serve
their business interests in government and out. Whoever it was who got
somebody like Lyndon LaRouche to say that this Rockefeller Cosa Nostra is
really a Communist front was truly inspired. 

	But Dyer has unearthed a genuine ongoing conspiracy that affects everyone
in the United States.  Currently, a handful of agro-conglomerates are
working to drive America's remaining small farmers off their land by
systematically paying them less for their produce than it costs to grow,
thus forcing them to get loans from the conglomerates' banks, assume
mortgages, undergo foreclosures and the sale of land to
corporate-controlled agribusiness. But is this really a conspiracy or just
the Darwinian workings of an efficient marketplace? There is, for once, a
smoking gun in the form of a blueprint describing how best to rid the
nation of small farmers. Dyer writes: "In 1962, the Committee for Economic
Development comprised approximately seventy-five of the nation's most
powerful corporate executives. They represented not only the food industry
but also oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail industries. Almost
all groups that stood to gain from consolidation were represented on that
committee. Their report [An Adaptive Program for Agriculture] outlined a
plan to eliminate farmers and farms. It was detailed and well thought out."
Simultaneously, "as early as 1964, Congressmen were being told by industry
giants like Pillsbury, Swift,  General  Foods,  and  Campbell Soup that the
biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers." Good psychologists,
the C.E.O.'s had noted that farm children, if sent to college, seldom
return to the family farm. Or as one famous economist said to a famous
senator who was complaining about jet lag on a night flight from New York
to London, "Well, it sure beats farming." The committee got the government
to send farm children to college. Predictably, most did not come back.
Government then offered to help farmers relocate in other lines of work,
allowing their land to be consolidated in ever vaster combines owned by
fewer and fewer corporations. 

	So a conspiracy had been set in motion to replace the Jeffersonian ideal
of a nation whose backbone was the independent farm  family with a series
of agribusiness monopolies where, Dyer writes, "only five to eight
multinational companies have, for all intents and purposes, been the sole
purchasers and transporters not only of the American grain supply but that
of the entire world." By 1982 "these companies controlled 96% of US wheat
exports, 95% of US corn exports," and so on through the busy aisles of chic
Gristedes, homely Ralph's, sympathetic Piggly Wigglys.

	Has consolidation been good for the customers? By and large, no.
Monopolies allow for no bargains, nor do they have to fuss too much about
quality because we have no alternative to what they offer. Needless to say,
they are hostile to labor unions and indifferent to working conditions for
the once independent farmers, now ill-paid employees.  For those of us who
grew up in pre-war United States there was the genuine ham sandwich. Since
consolidation, ham has been so rubberized that it tastes of nothing at all
while its texture is like rosy plastic. Why? In the great hogariums a hog
remains in one place, on its feet, for life. Since it does not root about
or even move-it builds up no natural resistance to disease. This means a
great deal of drugs are pumped into the prisoner's body until its death and
transfiguration as inedible ham.

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Checked-by: Patrick Henry