547 - A House Divided Against Itself

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Gore Vidal

Today’s podcast features a lecture by Gore Vidal about the true history of the U.S. presidency. Also included is a brief bit by George Carlin where he explains why America is always at war. And Lorenzo explains in detail why he believes that the USA is already a failed state.

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And I’m going to do a little more talking in today’s podcast than I normally do,

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but it’s been a little over a month since my last Salon 1.0 podcast,

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so, well, I figured that you wouldn’t mind too much.

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First of all, during the past four weeks,

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Roger M., Lindsay J., Paul M., and Kate M. have all made donations directly to the salon

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to help offset some of our expenses associated with these podcasts. And along with the rest of

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our fellow salonners, I would like to thank you all very much for your support. Also, on my personal

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Patreon account, the one that’s supporting the writing of a new book

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that I plan on distributing for free later this year.

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Well, during the past month,

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seven new patrons are now a part of our Patreon family.

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And they are Tommy M,

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David W,

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David B,

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Brian W,

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Luke,

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James L,

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and my good friend Darren B.

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Again, I want to thank you all for your support. It really means a lot to me.

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And now for today’s program.

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I’m going to do something a little different today,

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and that is to explain why I believe that the American Empire,

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including the so-called American Dream, is over.

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In a podcast last week, or actually it was two or three weeks ago now, one that Lex Pelger did in our Salon 2 series, Bruce Dahmer

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said that he thinks the United States is in danger of becoming a failed state. Well, I don’t often

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disagree with my good friend Bruce, but in my opinion, it is already a failed state and is now coming

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completely unglued. Granted, the USA still has the most massive military establishment

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ever seen in human history, and with it, this country will no doubt still destroy many more

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lives before turning completely belly up. But the full force of Storm USA has at long last begun to wind down,

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even though it may not feel like that just yet.

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Now, after we listen to today’s talk,

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I’ll come back and give you some more of the reasons that have caused me

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to come to the conclusion that we are living in a failed state here in the United States.

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But before I can do that,

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I think we first have to all try and get on the same page,

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the same page of history, so to speak.

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In the past, I’ve practically begged our fellow Saloners to learn the true history of our country,

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particularly by reading Howard Zinn’s important book, A People’s History of the United States. Or, for those who

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no longer read books, I’ve urged them to watch Oliver Stone’s video series titled The Untold

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History of the United States. But alas, well, as far as I can remember, no one has ever written

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to me or posted a comment here in the salon about having done so. However, I’m going to assume that you are one of those rare ones who have actually done one of those things,

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but that you just haven’t had the time to let me know.

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So please bear with me as I explain to some of our other fellow salonners what’s actually been going on for a long time now.

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What I’m going to do today is to play a lecture by the man that I consider to have been, well, the most brilliant historian to have lived during my own life.

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This man was Gore Vidal.

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The talk of his that I’m about to play concerns what a sad farce it has been for American schools to have taught such seemingly great things about our dear old founding fathers and the presidents that followed them.

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You hear a lot about so-called fake news these days, but even more important is fake history,

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and almost everything that you learned about American history in our public schools

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is exactly that, fake history. Let me ask you, if there were to be a new constitutional convention today,

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and if the only people allowed into the hall and given a voice in this convention

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were to be only white male billionaires,

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well then, how much stock would you put in a constitution crafted by these oligarchs?

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Well, that is basically the makeup of the convention

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in which our dear old founding fathers came up with

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and then saddled us with all kinds of constraints on a real democracy.

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You know, things like the electoral college, for example.

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And let’s not for even one moment forget that almost every one of those founding fathers

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actually owned other human beings as slaves.

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fathers actually owned other human beings as slaves. Rich white men created the framework under which this nation still labors. It’s no wonder that the U.S. society is now falling apart.

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I realize that there are many people throughout the world today who are finding it hard to believe

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that Donald Trump is the president of this country, but what few people realize is that he is just

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the latest in a long line of unbelievably horrible people who have already served as U.S. president.

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During my lifetime, this nation has changed, changed utterly as Yates would say, but it was

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unfolding around me, and I found it difficult at the time to see what was really taking place.

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around me, and I found it difficult at the time to see what was really taking place.

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Like many people, I had a family to think about first, and those concerns often took significantly more of my time than you would think.

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At the end of the day, politics and news from Washington just didn’t get as much of my

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attention as they should have.

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But over time, after my family responsibilities ended, I began to read more and to investigate what was taking place under the surface of the evening news shows.

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What I found caused a major break in the way that I understood what had been taking place here.

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But by then it was far too late for me, as an obscure working class person, to do very much about it.

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Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying.

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So I created several television series in my local area.

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I wrote and produced programs like my call-in show, Big Brother’s Latest Lies.

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I also had a news show called Reality Check and several series focusing on the U.S. government’s

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deliberate abandonment of some of my fellow servicemen

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who had gone missing in Vietnam.

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That show was called Freedom Now, and it led me into years of working with the Forget-Me-Not Association.

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And those were the final years of my education about the true nature of the not-so-united states of America.

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So what I’m going to do right now is to squeeze Howard Zinn’s book,

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along with the eight hours of Oliver Stone’s wonderful documentary, into the next 60 minutes

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by playing a history lesson that will give you a much better idea about how we got to this point,

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a better idea than you may have learned in school. I believe that this talk was given sometime near the end of the Clinton

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presidency, so the horrors of Bush II, Obama, and Trump had not yet taken place when this

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recording was made. Now, here is Gore Vidal.

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Currently, the American empire is governed from here. As you see, no oval office,

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only a White House TV studio

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from which His Imperial Majesty

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is beamed into every home and heart

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this side of the elusive

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and perhaps subversive Internet.

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But the President is still

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military master of our planet

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as well as of its dull moon.

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In a sense, our latest batch of presidents

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are above politics.

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He who can raise the most money to buy time on television

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is apt to be elected president

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by that half of the electorate which bothers to vote.

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Since the same corporations

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pay for our two-party, one-party system, there’s

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little or no actual politics in these elections. But we do get a lot of sex. Also, he who subtly

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hates the blacks the most will always win a plurality of the lily white-hearted. The

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word liberal has been totally demonized, while conservative, the condition of most income-challenged Americans, is being tarnished by godly pressure groups whose symbols are the fetus and the flag.

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a meaningless place called the center.

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And he who can get to the center of the center,

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the dead center, as it were,

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will have a four-year lease on this studio.

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Paradoxically, he will have almost no power within the country.

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Economic affairs are decided by the corporate ownership of the country and their Congress.

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But in foreign affairs, he is preeminent.

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And it has been our president since 1800

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who kept us perpetually on the move

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and more often than not, at war.

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So that today, we are the masters of all this.

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With military bases in every corner of the earth.

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Unfortunately, there is now no money to pay for them,

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and no evil empire ritually to confront.

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But that’s the end of the story.

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Let’s start at the beginning.

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Inspired by the enlightenment of the 18th century,

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not to mention Rousseau’s noble savage,

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we created ourselves. This act of creation was principally the work of Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia planter

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of many talents who would later become our third president. On July 4th, 1776, Jefferson

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launched the Declaration of Independence, the most important document in American history, describing why the 13 colonial states of America must now break away from irrelevant British rule, not to mention taxes.

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all men are created equal and independent it declared and from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable among which are the preservation of life

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and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Life and liberty are cherished old friends when it comes to political rhetoric,

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as they always make a nice contrast to death and slavery,

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two conditions most human beings would rather avoid.

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But the pursuit of happiness was a new notion for a new nation, or for anyone.

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It is, of course, suitably vague. But the idea that the state exists only to promote the welfare and happiness of the citizens that comprise it was a total break from the hierarchic class system of old Europe,

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where the populace were as so many bees to serve the sovereign in her hive.

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Jefferson was the founder not so much of the American political system,

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no one could be so cruel as to ascribe that to him,

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but he was the inventor of the American idea,

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which reminded the world of American exceptionalism.

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Jefferson’s own dream was a sort of vague, always vague, Arcadia, home to independent farmers.

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He embodied the southern ideal, less government is best. His enemy, Alexander Hamilton of New York, preferred

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cities to farms, international trade to self-sufficiency. The division between Jefferson and Hamilton

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was at the heart of our system from the beginning and continues in decadent form to this day.

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and continues in decadent form to this day.

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Hamilton’s system led eventually to industrialization and foreign wars.

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Jefferson’s system led finally to civil war as his agrarian Arcadia was founded upon the peculiar institution of slavery.

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Jefferson declared all men to be created equal,

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but then he had to make an exception for African slaves on the ground that they weren’t properly speaking people.

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Jefferson owned as many as 200 slaves at one point, some of them his own half-breed children.

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On a series of often dramatic contradictions,

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a nation was conceived.

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Happily, in the 19th century,

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Ralph Waldo Emerson cut the Gordian knot

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of perpetual contradiction

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when he told us most loftily, with consistency,

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a great soul has simply nothing to do. Everyone was greatly relieved.

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The Declaration of Independence was not just a hymn to liberty. It was a call to arms,

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just a hymn to liberty. It was a call to arms, read to inspire troops under the command of the British train general from Virginia, George Washington.

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Though Washington never actually won a proper battle, he had a strong and persistent character.

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He muddled through the victory thanks to the support of the French

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and to the fact that his British opposite, Cornwallis, was no Napoleon either.

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The victorious colonies had now become the United States of America.

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Well, not so very united.

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well, not so very united.

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In 1786, when a group of ex-soldiers realized that they were paying more tax to the Massachusetts government

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than they had ever paid to the British,

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they went into brief rebellion under one Daniel Shays.

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During the ensuing panic,

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Washington and the rest of the landowning class realized that without a strong central government, their land holdings were at risk.

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In the spring of 1787, an emergency convention was held in Philadelphia.

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Its purpose was to design a government that would, above all, protect the rights of property.

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In the process, the peculiar notion of the American presidency was born.

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Jefferson, at a safe remove in Paris, where he was American minister,

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hailed the delegates as an assembly of demigods.

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delegates as an assembly of demigods. He also had his own man, James Madison, in place to make sure that we could never become a monarchy or a democracy. What was wanted and achieved

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was the best sort of government for white Anglo Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men of property to do business in.

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As President Coolidge put it much later in the 1920s,

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the business of America is business.

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By the 1950s, an advisor to President Truman announced,

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what is good for General Motors is good for America.

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The advisor was President of General Motors, of

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course. Business was to run the presidency until… But let’s not spoil the suspense.

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Back at the convention, the office of president was carefully edged round, as were the people

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at large, with all sorts of Venetian-style checks and balances.

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Madison, among others, was quite aware that ambitious presidents would be tempted to prosecute wars.

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So the power to declare war was reserved to Congress.

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Then, to make doubly sure, the power of the purse was also reserved to Congress.

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So if the president wanted adventures, he’d have to beg.

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Then, somewhat absentmindedly, gazing at the dignified presiding officer of the convention, General Washington,

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they made the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces

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and decided that foreign affairs

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would be pretty much his business.

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Thus the bright, brazen thread of tyranny

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was woven into the respectable flannel

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of a virtuous mercantile republic.

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Mischief is now afoot.

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Mischief is now afoot. The delegates knew that Washington was bound to be the first president, so they tailored

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the office to fit his majestic presence. Washington was abnormally tall and famously had wooden teeth.

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He had acquired much of his fortune in the most honest way.

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He had married it.

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The first president was our first billionaire.

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He did not disappoint.

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Washington presided over economic recovery,

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and he added the states of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee to the Union,

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thus beginning the inexorable move to the West,

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an expansion which would become more and more continental as it became less and less constitutional.

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Hardly enough, it was the third president, Thomas Jefferson, the believer in minimal government, a modest presidency,

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the believer in minimal government, a modest presidency, and a demure, mind your own business, republic,

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who first burst the confines of the Constitution.

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When Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Spain, he took over the Spanish colonies in North America.

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He was also faced with a highly expensive slave rebellion in Haiti, which frightened Jefferson so near to home, and bored Napoleon, who was only interested in conquering as much of Europe

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as possible. But that cost money, so Napoleon offered to sell the stolen Spanish lands to

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the United States for $27,267,000. Jefferson leapt at the deal,

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though he had no right to act on his own.

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He purchased what was called Louisiana,

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885,000 square miles

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from the Mississippi to the Rockies,

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from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada,

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acquiring in the process

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the crucial port city of New Orleans,

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whose Catholic Creole inhabitants’ pursuit of happiness was stopped dead in its tracks.

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Jefferson had now set an example for later presidents to act unilaterally,

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and the stuff for the Constitution is beginning to come unraveled.

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By the 1830s, a new generation had come to power.

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Jefferson’s rather nervous land deal had made a great impression,

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particularly on Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson.

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Old Hickory, as he was called,

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was the first of the new breed of deliberate expansionists.

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Son of Ulster immigrants, he was a successful general, planter, dualist, and Indian killer.

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He was the people’s president to such an extent that those who supported him called themselves the Democratic Party.

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He even invited the people to the White House on the day of his inauguration.

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They wrecked the place, and he had to spend his first night as president in a hotel.

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During his two terms, Jackson broke 93 treaties with the Indian tribes.

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White men wanted Indian land, and Indians were only

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savages, weren’t they? But the Cherokee Nation had a written language in which they published books

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and newspapers. They also established schools and businesses. But Jackson was ruthless and a figure for his successors to emulate.

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Under the Removal Act, the Indians were driven west across the Mississippi River.

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Many thousands died along the Natchez Trace,

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known to the Indians to this day as the Trail of Tears.

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A few years later, the Gore family acquired most of the Chickasaw Territory in northern Mississippi and started their own rustic dynasty.

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The most blatant of our expansionists was the 11th president, James Knox Polk.

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An intelligent, low-keyed figure, he annexed Texas. He was

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able to draw peacefully the boundary between the United States and Canada, which gave us

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Oregon. Then he looked south and was ravished by what he saw. We must have California, he said.

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Polk offered the Mexicans a derisive sum for California.

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It was refused, so he resorted to other means.

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On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico.

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General Ulysses S. Grant, a future president,

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later wrote that it was one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.

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He believed that our civil war was divine punishment for this transgression.

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Pope defeated Mexico, and we got California California where gold was soon discovered.

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America was to be rich and the dreams of our expansionist presidents had been fulfilled.

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The nation now spanned the continent.

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What next? Abraham Lincoln was next, and the secession of the slave states, and civil war.

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Suddenly our continental nation was falling apart.

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Lincoln was easily the most brilliant and mysterious of our presidents. Though he did not want to abolish slavery,

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he did warn that a house divided against itself cannot stand,

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much less a nation half-slave, half-free.

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He himself simply stood for the Union forever.

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When the southern states said that if the nominee of the new Republican party,

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Lincoln,

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was elected president, they would go.

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He was elected, barely,

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and they went.

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Propagandists for the American empire

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have for some time presented Lincoln

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as an abolitionist.

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He was not.

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He disliked slavery but thought the federal government had no right to free other people’s property,

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in this case three million African Americans at the South.

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The Civil War was fought to preserve the Union and, in the process, to transform it.

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to transform it.

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Lincoln found that the bronze thread

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so idly woven

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into the Constitution

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provided him as commander-in-chief

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with the powers of a dictator.

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So he became dictator.

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He levied troops without consulting Congress,

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shut down newspapers,

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suspended habeas corpus, defied the Supreme Court, all in the name of military necessity.

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When the Supreme Court hurled the Constitution at Lincoln’s head, Lincoln said he could do no other as he had sworn an oath registered in heaven to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

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The four-year war killed most of a generation of young men.

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Old Europe was astonished at the extent and ingenuity of this war and the novelty of its weapons.

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Long-range artillery.

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Iron-clad ships.

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Bismarck sent observers.

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Then everyone sent observers. Then everyone sent observers.

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Finally, it became total war,

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which involved the civilian population to an unprecedented degree.

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Whole cities were deliberately burned to the ground.

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The South ran out of men and money and collapsed. The Union had been preserved.

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A recent biography makes much of Lincoln’s remark, I have not shaped events, events have shaped me.

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This gives us a new passive Lincoln, a wealthy railroad lawyer suddenly

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made inept commander-in-chief of the first great modern war. Of course, events control everyone,

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including imperial presidents. But at the center of Lincoln, there is an ambition that is unlike that of any of his fellows. Also unlike them, he reveals himself at the age of 29 in a speech, a soliloquy, at Springfield, Illinois.

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First he speaks of the founding fathers with polite admiration.

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But, he says, always the but, new reapers will arise and they too will seek a field.

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And when they do, the question then is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others.

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Most certainly it cannot.

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Thus Lincoln warns us against Lincoln.

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Many great and good men would aspire to nothing beyond the presidential chair,

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but such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.

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What think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?

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Never.

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Towering genius disdains a beaten path.

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It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It thirsts and burns for distinction and if

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possible it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.

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This towering genius recreated a nation in his own marble image.

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Then, at the moment of victory, came the greatest stroke of luck.

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He is murdered, martyred.

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And now validated in blood, our Caesar has become our God.

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has become our God.

00:29:26 ►

And a loose confederation of states has become a sternly centralized federal system

00:29:31 ►

with a formidable military capacity.

00:29:37 ►

Well, here we are again,

00:29:40 ►

back in the president’s throne room.

00:29:44 ►

The mischievous press sometimes asks me,

00:29:46 ►

would you like to have been president?

00:29:49 ►

And I say, well, politics is a family trade.

00:29:53 ►

Yes.

00:29:55 ►

But I was born a writer,

00:29:57 ►

and the writer must always tell the truth,

00:30:00 ►

unless he’s a journalist.

00:30:01 ►

While the politician must never give away the game.

00:30:05 ►

In the end, it is better to have had some influence as a writer

00:30:09 ►

than to have bought or have let someone buy for you a title.

00:30:15 ►

On the other hand,

00:30:18 ►

I did sigh a bit

00:30:19 ►

when a cousin of mine became president.

00:30:24 ►

Of course, I lacked Jimmy’s powerful vision and radiant charisma. when a cousin of mine became president.

00:30:29 ►

Of course, I lacked Jimmy’s powerful vision and radiant charisma.

00:30:43 ►

Today, another cousin flits across the TV screens,

00:30:47 ►

a vice president lusting for promotion

00:30:59 ►

In the end I was too interested in politics and history to take seriously election in the TV age

00:31:08 ►

Naturally I do miss not having only for four years my own tv studio in the white house this all this as S.J. Perlman used to say is the beauty part the president’s constitutional role

00:31:20 ►

as commander-in-chief allows him dictatorial powers if he can prove military necessity.

00:31:29 ►

Lincoln’s attachment to this phrase justified his wartime powers and also allowed him to

00:31:35 ►

emancipate the slaves, all as a military necessity. Later presidents would take full advantage of Lincoln’s free interpretation

00:31:45 ►

because only in wars abroad could presidents free themselves of Congress

00:31:51 ►

and soar like eagles.

00:31:55 ►

Luckily for the generation after Lincoln,

00:31:58 ►

things were relatively quiet under a number of rather dim presidents.

00:32:04 ►

They were eclipsed by the new breed of business millionaires.

00:32:09 ►

In the 1870s, they diverted the nation with their exploits, much as Australian media moguls

00:32:15 ►

do today.

00:32:17 ►

They built their palaces along New York’s Fifth Avenue, and at Newport, Rhode Island,

00:32:23 ►

their seaside cottages. Their monopolies came to

00:32:28 ►

dominate the economy, and the White House was little more than a branch office of the

00:32:34 ►

firm. But in the depressed South and West, there was growing ferment among those who worked the land.

00:32:46 ►

Ruined by the Civil War, they were again being ruined by the financial games and panics of Eastern banks.

00:32:55 ►

By 1896, America looked ready for a real class war.

00:33:09 ►

war. Then out of the West came the greatest of American populist leaders, the radical William Jennings Bryan. Three times the Democrats nominated him for president, largely on the

00:33:16 ►

strength of his cross of gold speech. Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic.

00:33:27 ►

But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city of the country.

00:33:35 ►

You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.

00:33:40 ►

You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

00:33:47 ►

The industrialists were terrified.

00:33:50 ►

The people were coming.

00:33:52 ►

But Bryan was narrowly defeated in the election of 1896

00:33:56 ►

by the conservative William McKinley.

00:33:59 ►

Big business had triumphed.

00:34:02 ►

But the people at large were still so discontented that many

00:34:06 ►

leaders felt that an imperial distraction might prove useful. Why not put them in uniform?

00:34:14 ►

Why not conquer something? The British used to say that their empire was acquired in a

00:34:19 ►

fit of absent-mindedness. Ours was carefully thought out by four friends,

00:34:25 ►

the first time an empire has been actually planned.

00:34:30 ►

The reasons were mostly economic, as we shall see,

00:34:34 ►

but there was also a lot of daring do.

00:34:37 ►

Captain Mann, at the Naval War College,

00:34:40 ►

was now applying his much-admired analysis

00:34:43 ►

of the British Empire to the United States.

00:34:47 ►

Essentially, he said, each was an island nation set on vast silver seas.

00:34:54 ►

To increase wealth, colonies were needed for raw materials and for markets.

00:35:01 ►

Hence, build up a fleet which would need bases everywhere,

00:35:04 ►

thus acquiring in the process more colonies.

00:35:08 ►

So the more colonies, the more ships, the more ships, the more territories and markets, an irresistibly circular policy.

00:35:18 ►

Henry Adams’ brother, Brooks, was the first geopolitical thinker. He too lusted for empire, but his eyes were

00:35:28 ►

trained right across the Pacific. Brooks said that he who controls the wealth of Shanxi

00:35:37 ►

province in China will be master of the earth. So now it was the job of Senator Henry Cabot-Large

00:35:46 ►

and the bumptious Under-Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt,

00:35:51 ►

to implement the plan.

00:35:54 ►

But for this, they needed a war.

00:35:57 ►

Britain was a possible enemy,

00:35:59 ►

but we might lose that one.

00:36:02 ►

Spain looked to save a bet,

00:36:04 ►

and its colonies included the Philippines,

00:36:08 ►

an ideal place from which to eye China,

00:36:11 ►

and, of course, closer to home, Cuba.

00:36:16 ►

As if on cue, a U.S. battleship, the Maine,

00:36:20 ►

mysteriously blew up in Havana Harbor.

00:36:23 ►

Whatever the actual cause,

00:36:26 ►

Spanish sabotage was blamed,

00:36:28 ►

and the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst

00:36:31 ►

was able to unleash a tidal wave

00:36:34 ►

of anti-Spanish feeling.

00:36:40 ►

Hearst claimed to have invented the war against Spain,

00:36:44 ►

but it was Roosevelt who really got things moving.

00:36:47 ►

As Undersecretary of the Navy, he ordered the U.S. fleet to the Philippines during the government recess in the summer of 1898.

00:36:58 ►

When the President returned from cooler climes, the Spanish fleet had been sunk,

00:37:01 ►

returned from cooler climes.

00:37:04 ►

The Spanish fleet had been sunk and the Philippines seized

00:37:06 ►

with the aid of nationalist guerrillas

00:37:07 ►

to whom we promised independence.

00:37:11 ►

But McKinley decided

00:37:12 ►

we ought to keep the Philippines

00:37:14 ►

in order to Christianize the natives.

00:37:19 ►

And reminded that the Filipinos

00:37:21 ►

were already Roman Catholics,

00:37:23 ►

the president responded exactly.

00:37:25 ►

So we betrayed the nationalists and began our own conquest.

00:37:31 ►

These films from the time are reenactments.

00:37:35 ►

Unsurprisingly, they choose not to dwell on the slaughter of some 200,000 men, women, and children.

00:37:42 ►

But Mark Twain did salute our act of genocide by suggesting

00:37:47 ►

that we replace the stars and stripes in our flag with the skull and crossbones.

00:37:58 ►

When McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist at Buffalo, Roosevelt, by then vice president, succeeded him.

00:38:09 ►

Roosevelt was our first international emperor.

00:38:13 ►

He was also the first president to dominate the mass media.

00:38:19 ►

The press corps accompanied him constantly.

00:38:22 ►

He was photographed and filmed everywhere, doing

00:38:26 ►

everything. Roosevelt was in every sense a warrior emperor, a true apostle of war and

00:38:35 ►

a rhetorical precursor of Mussolini. No accomplishment of peace is half that of the glories of war.

00:38:47 ►

And yet, for his meddling in the Russian-Japanese conflict, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:38:56 ►

One must never underestimate Scandinavian wit.

00:39:02 ►

Much has been made of TR’s vigorous approach to, well, just about everything. Charging

00:39:08 ►

around on horseback, the perilous expedition up the Amazon, the prodigious slaughter of

00:39:14 ►

wildlife on his innumerable safaris and hunting trips. Henry Adams referred to him as our tricks.

00:39:26 ►

Henry Adams referred to him as our

00:39:27 ►

Dutch-American Napoleon.

00:39:30 ►

Henry James sighed.

00:39:32 ►

He is the very embodiment

00:39:33 ►

of noise.

00:39:35 ►

The British ambassador was more kind.

00:39:38 ►

We must never forget,

00:39:40 ►

he advised Whitehall,

00:39:41 ►

that the president is seven years

00:39:43 ►

old.

00:39:46 ►

It would seem that he was forever compensating for having been a sickly child,

00:39:52 ►

nearsighted and suffering from asthma.

00:39:55 ►

But give a sissy a gun and he’ll shoot everything in sight.

00:40:15 ►

in sight. Teddy regarded the presidency as a bully pulpit. From the pulpit, he attacked the scandalous rich while doing political business on the side with Standard Oil. He also believed it the manifest destiny of the white race to rule the degenerate coloreds.

00:40:29 ►

His friend, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a poem for him, urging him to take up the white man’s

00:40:35 ►

burden. And he did. TR’s so-called great white Fleet went on a goodwill cruise around the world.

00:40:48 ►

Closer to home, TR realized a 50-year-old American dream, a canal across Central America.

00:40:58 ►

When Columbia refused to give him the land, TR engineered a rebellion in the section he wanted,

00:41:06 ►

recognized the result as the new free republic of Panama, and dug his ditch. None of this, a member of his cabinet

00:41:15 ►

noted admiringly, was in any way tainted by legality. Central America now had a new fun-loving friend to the north.

00:41:32 ►

TR’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, invaded Mexico and Haiti in order to bring those poor people freedom and democracy and good government.

00:41:40 ►

But stripped of all the presidential rhetoric, the flag followed the banks.

00:41:47 ►

The president was simply chief enforcer of the great financial interests.

00:41:52 ►

So in one respect at least, the spirit of the Constitution had been preserved.

00:41:58 ►

Many years later, the commanding general of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Smedley Butler,

00:42:02 ►

the commanding general of the U.S. Marine Corps,

00:42:04 ►

General Smedley Butler,

00:42:06 ►

blew, as it were, the whistle,

00:42:08 ►

not just on Wilson,

00:42:11 ►

but on the whole Imperial racket.

00:42:17 ►

I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business,

00:42:20 ►

for Wall Street, and for the bankers.

00:42:23 ►

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for

00:42:26 ►

capitalism. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914, made in Haiti

00:42:34 ►

and Cuba a decent place for the national city bank boys to collect revenues in. In later

00:42:42 ►

years, Butler also set up shop in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic,

00:42:46 ►

and China, where in 1927, the Marines protected Standard Oil’s interests.

00:42:55 ►

The best Al Capone had was three districts. I operated on three continents.

00:43:03 ►

I operated on three continents.

00:43:08 ►

Steadily, the boats draw near the beach.

00:43:11 ►

Each man is hot and eager for action.

00:43:16 ►

Once they have landed, they lose no time in running to cover where they site for their objective and begin spraying the terrain with machine gun and rifle fire.

00:43:21 ►

Native huts are investigated so as to avoid the possibility of an ambush

00:43:25 ►

when engaged in guerrilla warfare. Far across the Pacific lies turbulent China. Here are

00:43:32 ►

the U.S. Marines on the streets of Shanghai. Woodrow Wilson had been a run-of-the-mill historian

00:43:39 ►

and an unpopular president of Princeton, when he turned to politics.

00:43:48 ►

After only two years’ experience as governor of New Jersey,

00:43:50 ►

he served eight years as president.

00:43:55 ►

Wilson was an eloquent, high-minded speaker who brought racial segregation to Washington.

00:43:59 ►

He wanted to be a domestic president, but his destiny lay elsewhere.

00:44:04 ►

As the Great War engulfed Europe, Wilson announced,

00:44:08 ►

we are too proud to fight. But then, like much of the nation, he was plainly excited

00:44:14 ►

by the prospect of a showdown with the evil Kaiser.

00:44:22 ►

But he must first get a declaration of war from Congress.

00:44:27 ►

This looked unlikely after his Secretary of State, Brian,

00:44:31 ►

designed fearful that Wilson wanted war.

00:44:35 ►

But then German U-boat activity became a sudden threat in the Atlantic.

00:44:44 ►

Predictably,

00:44:46 ►

U-boats sunk ships on which Americans were traveling.

00:44:49 ►

And Wilson promptly

00:44:51 ►

shredded the Monroe Doctrine

00:44:53 ►

on April 2, 1917,

00:44:56 ►

when he asked Congress

00:44:57 ►

for a declaration of war

00:44:59 ►

and got it.

00:45:01 ►

And, oh,

00:45:03 ►

what a lovely war it was. I’ve often thought, had we stayed out, Germany

00:45:09 ►

might have dominated the European continent for a generation or so, and no one would have

00:45:15 ►

been the sadder. The Kaiser was not Hitler. In fact, one suspects that a mildly victorious Germany in 1917 could never have produced a vengeful Fuhrer 15 years later.

00:45:30 ►

But it wasn’t to be.

00:45:32 ►

Troops were enlisted for the European war,

00:45:35 ►

and from that point on,

00:45:36 ►

we would be inextricably linked with Europe,

00:45:40 ►

our fourth continent.

00:45:42 ►

The Germans stopped fighting

00:45:44 ►

because Wilson had promised a peace without victory.

00:45:49 ►

But England and France had other plans,

00:45:52 ►

like revenge.

00:45:55 ►

At Versailles, Wilson attempted to redraw the map of Europe.

00:46:00 ►

Blithely, he erased the useful Austro-Hungarian Empire,

00:46:03 ►

replacing part of it with Yugoslavia,

00:46:06 ►

source of so much recent joy.

00:46:13 ►

Wilson returned home, thinking to be crowned with Laurel,

00:46:17 ►

but Congress refused to ratify his new League of Nations.

00:46:24 ►

During a speaking tour, he was partially paralyzed by a stroke.

00:46:29 ►

But the administration continued with his wife, Edith, as regent.

00:46:35 ►

A constitutional mess no one knew how to handle.

00:46:41 ►

After Wilson, we had no president of note until Franklin Roosevelt,

00:46:46 ►

who proved to be our Augustus.

00:46:49 ►

He was elected four times a record.

00:46:53 ►

He was a superb radio performer, and even better on film,

00:46:57 ►

than his distant cousin, Teddy.

00:47:00 ►

He called his newsreel performances, with characteristic modesty, My Garbles.

00:47:08 ►

Always seen looking hardy, he was in fact unable to walk due to polio.

00:47:14 ►

There was an unofficial agreement that no photographer show him with leg braces or in his wheelchair.

00:47:22 ►

or in his wheelchair.

00:47:28 ►

When he came to power in 1933, the country was deep in economic depression.

00:47:31 ►

Nature was also doing her bit

00:47:33 ►

by turning the best farmland into dust.

00:47:38 ►

The New Deal was Roosevelt’s ramshackle plan

00:47:42 ►

to overcome the Depression.

00:47:47 ►

The government provided work for the unemployed.

00:47:51 ►

Many of our best public buildings were built in those days,

00:47:55 ►

and public education was at its peak.

00:47:58 ►

But recovery was fragile.

00:48:03 ►

Also, other empires were now loose in the world. The Germans in Europe and the Japanese in our Pacific.

00:48:09 ►

And then, despite the New Deal, the Depression flared up again.

00:48:14 ►

One third of the workforce was again unemployed.

00:48:19 ►

Roosevelt, hinting darkly of dangers from abroad, said,

00:48:22 ►

We must rearm.

00:48:26 ►

darkly of dangers from abroad, said, we must rearm. Roosevelt pumped ten billion dollars into the economy and ended the depression within a year. There was now full employment.

00:48:34 ►

Finally, without a declaration of war from Congress, FDR, both foe and ally of big business,

00:48:43 ►

waged his own presidential war against Germany,

00:48:47 ►

providing England with ships and arms.

00:48:50 ►

FDR thought this would be a replay of 1917.

00:48:54 ►

The Germans would sink our shipping and we would go to war.

00:49:00 ►

Our ships were sunk, but not by the Germans.

00:49:03 ►

Our ships were sunk, but not by the Germans.

00:49:11 ►

After Pearl Harbor, Congress declared war on December 8, 1941.

00:49:18 ►

This was to be the last time that Congress would be allowed to declare war.

00:49:27 ►

As usual, we arrived a bit late to the European conflict,

00:49:32 ►

but once again in perfect time to control the subsequent peace.

00:49:35 ►

Although our emperor was dying,

00:49:38 ►

he made his way to Russia, to Yalta,

00:49:41 ►

to meet with Churchill and Stalin. At Yalta, the world was carved up into spheres of influence.

00:49:48 ►

Stalin, fearful of yet another invasion from the West, held on to the states of Eastern Europe

00:49:54 ►

as a buffer. It was agreed by all that Germany never again be rearmed. Churchill looked upon FDR as friend and inseparable ally

00:50:05 ►

but emperors can be neither

00:50:08 ►

FDR coldly commanded the former colonial powers of England, France, Holland

00:50:13 ►

to give up their empires or else

00:50:16 ►

as they were too poor to do otherwise

00:50:19 ►

they let go

00:50:21 ►

as bits of the European colonial system came unstuck,

00:50:26 ►

they adhered like metal filings to the American magnet.

00:50:31 ►

There can be room for only one empire in the American world.

00:50:36 ►

FDR condescended to what he called Uncle Joe Stalin,

00:50:42 ►

was sympathetic to his fears,

00:50:43 ►

let him have whatever it was he had taken and nothing else.

00:50:49 ►

The Russian bear was then locked in his wintry cage and FDR blithely pocketed the key.

00:50:57 ►

To this day, right-wingers go on about how FDR sold us out at Yalta.

00:51:04 ►

Well, Stalin did get Romania, but we got West Germany.

00:51:09 ►

Stalin got some Japanese islands. We got Japan. The entire globe except for Russia

00:51:17 ►

and China was ours. Then in order to contain the new evil of communism, we circled the globe with nuclear

00:51:28 ►

bases. We were home free at last. Well, fairly free, and not for very long.

00:51:41 ►

Someone, Gibbon, observed that as empires decline, they indulge in greater pageantry and show and bluff.

00:51:51 ►

At Byzantium’s end, the court rituals were so awesome and intricate as to paralyze the emperor.

00:51:58 ►

American presidents are less showy, but I recall as a boy how easy it was to wander into the White House

00:52:06 ►

with only a few guards on hand. Now there are Secret Service men, armored cars, so that

00:52:12 ►

the embodiment of the nation can be seen, but not shot.

00:52:16 ►

…have been for a generation two-dimensional figures on a screen, in a sense captives of the empire they created. Essentially, they are men

00:52:26 ►

hired to give the commercials for a state which more and more resembles a conglomerate like

00:52:33 ►

General Electric. In fact, one of our most popular recent presidents spent nearly 20 years actually

00:52:40 ►

doing commercials for General Electric, one of our greatest makers of weapons.

00:52:46 ►

Then Mr. Reagan came to work here, and there was the same Russians-are-coming dialogue

00:52:51 ►

on the same teleprompter, the same makeup, man.

00:52:54 ►

Ask yourselves, what in the world are Soviets, East Germans, Bulgarians, North Koreans, Cubans,

00:53:01 ►

and terrorists from the PLO and the Red Brigades doing in our

00:53:06 ►

hemisphere camped on our own doorstep.

00:53:10 ►

No president since Woodrow Wilson has written his own speeches.

00:53:14 ►

The president reads what others write.

00:53:17 ►

Sometimes he agrees, sometimes he pays no attention.

00:53:21 ►

Eisenhower always read his speeches with a real sense of discovery. During his first

00:53:27 ►

campaign for election, the country was as excited as he when in the middle of his speech he said,

00:53:34 ►

and if elected, I will go to Korea. There was real fury in that reading. No one had told him about that pledge, but go to Korea, he did.

00:53:47 ►

The second law of thermodynamics assures us that everything is running down, and so the United

00:53:55 ►

States is no exception. But at the end of the Second World War, we were on top of the world.

00:54:02 ►

And if anyone had told me then that so much would be lost in my lifetime,

00:54:06 ►

I wouldn’t have believed them.

00:54:09 ►

But with hindsight,

00:54:11 ►

I can now see that our ending was implicit all along.

00:54:16 ►

And the blame can be laid largely at one man’s door.

00:54:21 ►

Eisenhower’s predecessor, Harry S. Truman,

00:54:24 ►

S for nothing. Little was known in

00:54:27 ►

1945 about the new president other than that he played piano. Currently he is

00:54:36 ►

being turned into a hero, a Frank Capra sort of leading man who stands up for the little guy.

00:54:49 ►

Actually, he was a capable, sharp, machine politician who privately remained deeply unsure of himself in the big league.

00:54:57 ►

When he took charge, a decision had to be made

00:55:00 ►

to convert from war to peace or to maintain our military capacity at full strength.

00:55:07 ►

The economic reasons for maintaining a war economy were seductive for president and arms

00:55:13 ►

manufacturers alike. But the Democrat Truman was told by Republican Senator Vandenberg,

00:55:19 ►

you’re going to have to scare the hell out of the American people to make them spend all that money on war and peace time.

00:55:27 ►

Truman accepted the assignment.

00:55:31 ►

Truman set out to convince the American people

00:55:34 ►

that the Soviet Union meant to conquer the Earth.

00:55:38 ►

The fact that we alone had the atomic bomb,

00:55:41 ►

as well as bases all around the globe,

00:55:44 ►

apparently counted for nothing.

00:55:46 ►

The fact that they had lost 20 million people was not factored in. They were monolithic

00:55:53 ►

and worse, communism, always identified as godless and atheistic, was an attractive religion

00:56:01 ►

for evil people in every land.

00:56:03 ►

was an attractive religion for evil people in every land.

00:56:11 ►

In 1950, men throughout the world learned to look on the brutal face of communism.

00:56:17 ►

Berlin, powder keg of Europe, saw a mass demonstration of indoctrinated young Germans on May Day.

00:56:20 ►

And across the world in Japan, America’s stronghold in the Pacific,

00:56:22 ►

the busy commies were at it again.

00:56:25 ►

But far more sinister to Americans was home front communism. Union Square in New York was the backdrop for these scenes

00:56:30 ►

of red violence. From their ranks will come the saboteurs, spies, and subversives should

00:56:35 ►

World War III be forced upon America. For nearly 50 years, occupants of this room have

00:56:41 ►

been able to convince most Americans that the Soviet Union was far in advance of us militarily and economically.

00:56:50 ►

In due course, they did become a formidable atomic military power.

00:56:56 ►

We had turned them into one.

00:56:58 ►

Truman was re-elected barely in 1948.

00:57:02 ►

And we lost the opportunity of transforming our superpower status into prosperity and

00:57:09 ►

growth at home. By now, the presidency had embraced the military, and we were ready to

00:57:17 ►

become a national security state. What is the national Security State? Well, it began with the National Security Act of 1947

00:57:30 ►

and was implemented three years later by National Security Council Directive Number 68.

00:57:40 ►

This contained the blueprint for a new kind of country, unlike anything the U.S. had ever known before.

00:57:50 ►

First, there was to be a permanent Cold War.

00:57:54 ►

We would never negotiate ever with Russia.

00:57:58 ►

Second, full speed ahead on developing the hydrogen bomb.

00:58:02 ►

So when the Soviets finally managed an atom bomb,

00:58:05 ►

we still wouldn’t have to deal with them.

00:58:08 ►

Third, rapidly build up conventional forces.

00:58:13 ►

Although Stalin had cut his military forces

00:58:15 ►

from 12 to 4 million,

00:58:18 ►

a complete military draft was introduced,

00:58:20 ►

something unheard of in peacetime America.

00:58:25 ►

Fourth, a massive increase in taxes to pay for all this.

00:58:29 ►

The sky’s the limit.

00:58:31 ►

Income tax as high as 90%.

00:58:34 ►

Fifth, set up a strong alliance system of friendly nations directed by the U.S.

00:58:42 ►

This was to become NATO, which tied Western Europe to America

00:58:46 ►

militarily, effectively giving us dominion over a fourth continent. We could control and intimidate

00:58:55 ►

our allies with something called the CIA, with its secret unconstitutional budget and its mandate

00:59:03 ►

to overthrow governments, kill foreign leaders,

00:59:06 ►

do whatever dirty work

00:59:08 ►

needed doing.

00:59:10 ►

And finally,

00:59:11 ►

mobilize the whole of America

00:59:13 ►

to fight the terrible specter

00:59:15 ►

of communism. Root out

00:59:17 ►

the enemy within with lists

00:59:19 ►

of dissident organizations,

00:59:22 ►

wiretaps of

00:59:23 ►

surveillance, and loyalty oaths for all federal employees.

00:59:32 ►

The first big adventure of the national security state occurred when South Korea was invaded

00:59:37 ►

by the communist North.

00:59:40 ►

The generals and the CIA persuaded Truman that Moscow was challenging us in Asia.

00:59:47 ►

But since Truman did not dare ask Congress for an actual declaration of war,

00:59:52 ►

he settled for something called a United Nations police action.

00:59:59 ►

So, here we are, policing.

01:00:02 ►

So, here we are, policing.

01:00:11 ►

In 1952, Truman was replaced by General Eisenhower, who went, as promised, to Korea.

01:00:15 ►

We were now locked into a land war in Asia.

01:00:20 ►

Two millennia and four centuries ago,

01:00:31 ►

Pericles observed that whether or not the Athenian Empire had been obtained in good faith, once acquired, an empire is a very dangerous thing to let go.

01:00:47 ►

With an American defeat on Asia’s mainland, it was clearly time to start letting go those parts of the empire that were too expensive to maintain, using the money saved to spend at home for something eccentric,

01:00:54 ►

like schools. But the imperial momentum, institutionalized by Truman, was out of control. Under Eisenhower,

01:01:02 ►

a freely elected government in Guatemala was overthrown by the CIA. Next, we replaced a popular leader in Iran, Mosaddegh, with a ill-fated Shah.

01:01:06 ►

We interfered with governments in every continent, including Australia. Eisenhower was perhaps

01:01:16 ►

the only post-war president not to be hoodwinked by the military. He won the military. He understood their games. But that didn’t make him soft on communism.

01:01:28 ►

When Vietnam’s new, freely elected leader, Ho Chi Minh, a former chef at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, asked the United States to take Vietnam under its eagle wing to protect it from China, Eisenhower told him,

01:01:42 ►

No. You are a communist. You’re in league with the Chinese.

01:01:46 ►

That was that. Eisenhower made the same gaffe with Castro. He hated Castro’s beard and his

01:01:58 ►

uniform and his populist rhetoric and refused to meet him. You are a communist, he declared. Whatever Castro

01:02:08 ►

may or may not have been at the time, he certainly ended up in the arms of the Russians.

01:02:15 ►

It wasn’t until Eisenhower’s farewell speech years later that he warned us that we were in danger of becoming a totally militarized economy.

01:02:27 ►

The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual,

01:02:32 ►

is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.

01:02:38 ►

We recognize the imperative need for this development,

01:02:41 ►

yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

01:02:48 ►

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,

01:02:54 ►

whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

01:03:00 ►

But incoming President John F. Kennedy wasn’t listening.

01:03:05 ►

Let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

01:03:17 ►

John F. Kennedy made much of the fact that he was the first president to be born in this century.

01:03:24 ►

Not much of an endorsement when one considers

01:03:26 ►

how terrible, in every sense, our century has been.

01:03:31 ►

Kennedy was different from his predecessors,

01:03:34 ►

the cynical old presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

01:03:38 ►

They knew that the communist threat was all nonsense.

01:03:43 ►

They also knew that it was good for business. But Kennedy

01:03:46 ►

believed the nonsense, and he wanted to win the Cold War with a hot war. Oddly, for one

01:03:56 ►

so young, he spoke obsessively of this twilight time. But then he was the first of our continuing line of Twilight presidents.

01:04:08 ►

Who would ever have heard of Lincoln?

01:04:10 ►

He once said to me, without the Civil War.

01:04:15 ►

Although Jack was no Lincoln, he was easily one of the most charming men I’ve ever known.

01:04:20 ►

And he was also, in retrospect, one of the very worst of our presidents.

01:04:31 ►

Kennedy gave the green light to an invasion of Cuba and suffered a humiliating defeat.

01:04:38 ►

Nevertheless, he was still so confrontational that Khrushchev, another geopolitical genius, put nuclear missiles into Cuba, bringing the whole world to that famous brink.

01:04:50 ►

Then, undaunted, Jack started his hot war in Vietnam.

01:04:55 ►

Kennedy committed some 20,000 troops as advisors to the South Vietnamese army.

01:05:03 ►

Of course, in the gospel, according to Oliver Stone, Kennedy planned to stop the

01:05:08 ►

war in Vietnam. Apparently, after a little trip to Dallas, he would bring back the troops

01:05:13 ►

he had sent into battle. Why? Because he’s the good guy. Actually, he had no intention

01:05:22 ►

of ending the war, for he had just begun.

01:05:28 ►

After Cuba, he told several mutual friends of the time,

01:05:32 ►

I have to go all the way with this one.

01:05:48 ►

Starting in 1964, I used to go on television and debate what seemed to be the entire American establishment.

01:05:50 ►

I did this for eight years.

01:05:53 ►

I thought the war was perfect folly.

01:06:00 ►

And I used to ask the president’s advisors on air, what is this war about?

01:06:02 ►

Why are we in Vietnam? At first they said to contain China forever on the march.

01:06:09 ►

When I pointed out that the Viet Cong and the Chinese were ancient enemies, the subject would

01:06:15 ►

mysteriously change. My friends on the left were convinced that oil had been discovered in Vietnam and that we wanted it. I said that no one in our government

01:06:26 ►

had anything so reasonable as theft in mind.

01:06:32 ►

This was a war about vanity.

01:06:35 ►

Imperial presidential vanity.

01:06:38 ►

We must destroy Vietnam

01:06:40 ►

in order to preserve it

01:06:43 ►

for democracy and freedom and, yes, the pursuit of happiness.

01:06:47 ►

I have never known of any example in the history of the world, what little I know of it, where

01:06:55 ►

a country has done something so suicidal for no motive and the war went on and on and on.

01:07:10 ►

And enter Richard Milhouse Nixon

01:07:13 ►

in riverboat gambler style.

01:07:18 ►

The supreme opportunist,

01:07:20 ►

he would do anything to get elected.

01:07:23 ►

I pledge to you,

01:07:26 ►

we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. But Nixon had no plan, and the war went on. As the nation was running down,

01:07:37 ►

the only glory point left is the space program. It was launched under Kennedy, but Nixon gets the good of it. Hello, Neil and Buzz.

01:07:46 ►

I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House.

01:07:50 ►

And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.

01:07:59 ►

Why is he so pleased with himself?

01:08:02 ►

Well, Teddy Kennedy had just gone off the bridge at Chappaquiddick,

01:08:07 ►

so Nixon’s chief political rival is out of the picture,

01:08:11 ►

and re-election is a certainty.

01:08:17 ►

After years of confrontation with China,

01:08:21 ►

Nixon paid a call on Chairman Mao.

01:08:24 ►

While Nixon was praising the Great War,

01:08:27 ►

he and Kissinger were bombing the independent countries of Laos and Cambodia in order, mysteriously,

01:08:33 ►

to break the unbreakable Viet Cong. This last futile exercise in genocide was called linkage.

01:08:43 ►

exercise in genocide was called linkage.

01:08:49 ►

Then in 1974, Nixon gave us his grand finale.

01:08:55 ►

For various civilian crimes committed in the election campaign of 1972,

01:09:00 ►

he resigned, the first president ever to do so.

01:09:11 ►

Here he is, just before he is to say his solemn farewell to the nation that he loved.

01:09:14 ►

My friend Ollie always wants to take a lot of pictures.

01:09:17 ►

I’m afraid he’ll catch me picking my nose.

01:09:21 ►

Oh, you’re on a level, aren’t you?

01:09:22 ►

Yes, yes.

01:09:23 ►

Good evening.

01:09:31 ►

This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shape the history of our nation.

01:09:37 ►

That’s enough, okay? Now, all Secret Service, is there any Secret Service in the room?

01:09:43 ►

Out. You don’t have to stay, do you? You’re required to? I’m just kidding you.

01:09:51 ►

Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere,

01:09:57 ►

to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

01:10:03 ►

complete the term of office to which you elected me.

01:10:08 ►

In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress

01:10:14 ►

to justify continuing that effort.

01:10:18 ►

After more than a dozen years of a losing war,

01:10:23 ►

Vietnam finally ended, and with it, the dream of an all-American globe.

01:10:34 ►

At this point, the American empire finally gave up the ghost.

01:10:38 ►

It was 71 years old and had not been well for quite some time.

01:10:47 ►

old and had not been well for quite some time. The realization finally dawned that our status depended not on military prowess or a zeal to set up democratic regimes around the globe.

01:10:54 ►

A curious impulse on our part, since we were never that keen to try one at home,

01:10:59 ►

it rested on economic primacy. And we lost it to Tokyo, hardly surprising when close

01:11:07 ►

to two-thirds of the government’s revenues had been siphoned off for a half century to

01:11:12 ►

pay for what is euphemistically called defense.

01:11:17 ►

As the Asiatic Colossus takes its turn as world leader, temporarily standing in for

01:11:22 ►

China, America becomes a yellow man’s burden. And

01:11:26 ►

so we come full circle. Europe began as a relatively empty, uncivilized wild west of

01:11:34 ►

Asia. Then the Americas became the wild west of Europe. Now the sun, setting in our west,

01:11:41 ►

is rising once more in the east.

01:11:44 ►

setting in our West is rising once more in the East.

01:11:53 ►

As the American empire ran out of gas, so did the Russian threat that has sustained it for half a century.

01:11:55 ►

No one expected the Soviet to behave in such an unsportsmanlike way.

01:12:03 ►

It was going to take someone pretty special to keep alive the ghost of communism.

01:12:10 ►

Fortunately, we had him.

01:12:18 ►

In order to justify our military budget, the search for enemies gets more and more desperate.

01:12:25 ►

We now have an enemy of the month club.

01:12:28 ►

Noriega.

01:12:31 ►

Gaddafi.

01:12:33 ►

Saddam.

01:12:34 ►

And drugs and terrorism.

01:12:37 ►

So much for us to fear in so wicked a world.

01:12:42 ►

The last hurrah of Truman’s legacy

01:12:45 ►

was the Gulf War.

01:12:47 ►

Iraq invaded freedom-loving Kuwait.

01:12:50 ►

Suddenly Middle Eastern oil and Israel

01:12:52 ►

are at terrible risk.

01:12:55 ►

So George Bush finally paid off

01:12:58 ►

the American people with a circus,

01:13:00 ►

if not bread.

01:13:02 ►

A spectacular light and sound show

01:13:04 ►

was produced for television

01:13:05 ►

by CNN’s Ted Turner.

01:13:09 ►

It proved to be a brilliant finale

01:13:10 ►

to our pretensions.

01:13:13 ►

There was, as often happens in television,

01:13:15 ►

trouble finding sponsors.

01:13:18 ►

But in the end, the Japanese

01:13:19 ►

and a few others bought the program.

01:13:22 ►

The skies over Baghdad

01:13:24 ►

have been illuminated.

01:13:27 ►

What a long way we have come

01:13:29 ►

since Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

01:13:34 ►

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,

01:13:40 ►

that all men are created equal and independent,

01:13:46 ►

that from that equal creation

01:13:49 ►

they derive rights inherent and inalienable,

01:13:55 ►

among which are the preservation of life and liberty

01:14:01 ►

and the pursuit of happiness.

01:14:08 ►

And now my home city of Washington has become a vast memorial

01:14:15 ►

to those dead in wars that have glorified the odd president,

01:14:22 ►

enriched the military-industrial complex, but lest the rest of us, we the people,

01:14:31 ►

the nation, with this.

01:14:40 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:14:48 ►

And so, as Gore Vidal just said, we the people have been left with this.

01:14:55 ►

And had he lived to see what this has now actually come to, I think even Gore Vidal, as cynical as he was, would, well, he’d most likely be pretty shocked.

01:15:06 ►

I know that I am.

01:15:08 ►

Now, before I get into this little rap that I’d like to put on you,

01:15:12 ►

I first want to point out something about the Declaration of Independence,

01:15:16 ►

particularly a line that Vidal just closed with.

01:15:19 ►

It was about the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

01:15:24 ►

We’ve all heard that a thousand times, but here’s the rest of the story.

01:15:29 ►

As you know, Thomas Jefferson didn’t write the Declaration of Independence completely on his own.

01:15:35 ►

John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were also on that committee.

01:15:39 ►

And that famous line, as Jefferson originally wrote it, went,

01:15:43 ►

The Preservation of Life, went, It was Benjamin Franklin who pointed out that while the men making the Declaration were all men of property,

01:15:54 ►

the vast majority of citizens in this country at the time barely even had a pot to piss in.

01:16:00 ►

So, on Franklin’s suggestion, the word property was replaced with the word happiness,

01:16:07 ►

and since happiness is so ill-defined, they simply added the phrase pursuit of in front of it.

01:16:14 ►

Now, if you think about this for a moment, the Declaration doesn’t guarantee happiness,

01:16:19 ►

only the pursuit of it, and there’s a big difference there for sure.

01:16:24 ►

In other words, happiness is simply a

01:16:26 ►

code word that the dear old founding fathers used instead of the word property. And since then,

01:16:33 ►

corporations and their advertising minions have successfully implanted in the American mind

01:16:39 ►

that the pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of, and the constant acquisition of, property, which equates

01:16:46 ►

mainly into things that you want to buy but don’t actually need. In the USA, the pursuit of happiness

01:16:52 ►

has become the pursuit of money. And interestingly, there’s an old aphorism that says money can’t buy

01:16:59 ►

you happiness. Now, how ironic is that? Now, subsequent to the talk by Gore Vidal that you and I just listened to,

01:17:07 ►

there have been three more presidents, Bush II, Obama, and Trump.

01:17:11 ►

And under them, we have constantly been at war.

01:17:15 ►

Now, why do you think that is?

01:17:18 ►

Well, maybe this little clip of the late great comedian George Carlin will bring us all up to date.

01:17:24 ►

And I should warn our fellow Sal salonners who aren’t native English speakers

01:17:28 ►

and who aren’t familiar with George Carlin

01:17:30 ►

that he is a comedian who uses a lot of satire in his work.

01:17:34 ►

So when you hear the audience applauding for something that sounds insane on its face,

01:17:39 ►

well, you should know that they are applauding the satire, not the idea.

01:17:44 ►

It’s been a little while since I’ve been here,

01:17:46 ►

and a couple of things have happened in that time.

01:17:48 ►

I’d like to talk a little bit about the war in the Persian Gulf.

01:17:53 ►

Big doings in the Persian Gulf.

01:17:55 ►

You know my favorite part of that war?

01:17:56 ►

It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel plus cable.

01:18:01 ►

And the war got good ratings, too, didn’t it?

01:18:04 ►

Got good ratings. Well, we like war we like war we’re

01:18:08 ►

a war like people we like war because we’re good at it you know why we’re good at it because we get

01:18:14 ►

a lot of practice this country’s only 200 years old and already we’ve had 10 major wars we average

01:18:21 ►

a major war every 20 years in this country so So we’re good at it. And it’s a

01:18:26 ►

good thing we are. We’re not very good at anything else anymore. Can’t build a decent car. Can’t make

01:18:32 ►

a TV set or a VCR worth of fuck. Got no steel industry left. Can’t educate our young people.

01:18:39 ►

Can’t get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the shit out of your country, all right?

01:18:44 ►

Huh? We can bomb the shit out of your country, all right?

01:18:48 ►

We can bomb the shit out of your country, all right?

01:18:55 ►

Especially if your country is full of brown people.

01:18:59 ►

Oh, we like that, don’t we? That’s our hobby.

01:19:03 ►

That’s our new job in the world, bombing brown people.

01:19:08 ►

Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country,

01:19:13 ►

tell them to watch the fuck out, or we’ll goddamn bomb them.

01:19:17 ►

Well, when’s the last white people you can remember that we bombed?

01:19:21 ►

Can you remember the last white, can you remember any white people we’ve ever bombed? The Germans, those are the only ones, And that’s only because they were trying to cut in on our action.

01:19:27 ►

They wanted to dominate the world. Bullshit! That’s our fucking job! That’s our fucking job!

01:19:41 ►

Now we only bomb brown people. Not because they’re trying to cut in on our action, just because they’re brown.

01:19:50 ►

Now you probably noticed I don’t feel about that war the way we were told we were supposed to feel about that war,

01:19:56 ►

the way we were ordered and instructed by the United States government to feel about that war.

01:20:01 ►

You see, I tell you, my mind doesn’t work that way. I got this

01:20:06 ►

real moron thing I do. It’s called thinking. And I’m not a very good American because I

01:20:13 ►

like to form my own opinions. I don’t just roll over when I’m told to. Sad to say, most

01:20:20 ►

Americans just roll over on command. Not me. I have certain rules I live by.

01:20:27 ►

My first rule, I don’t believe anything the government tells me.

01:20:31 ►

Nothing.

01:20:34 ►

Zero.

01:20:36 ►

Nope.

01:20:38 ►

And I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country,

01:20:43 ►

who in the case of the Persian Gulf War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense, and who most

01:20:50 ►

of the time, most of the time function as kind of an unofficial public relations agency

01:20:54 ►

for the United States government. So I don’t listen to them. I don’t really believe in

01:20:58 ►

my country. And I got to tell you, folks, I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I consider

01:21:05 ►

them, I consider them to be symbols and I leave symbols to the symbol minded. Me, I look at war

01:21:15 ►

a little bit differently. To me, war is a lot of prick waving. Okay. Simple thing. That’s all it

01:21:20 ►

is. War is a whole lot of men standing out in a field, waving their pricks at one another.

01:21:27 ►

Men are insecure about the size of their dicks,

01:21:30 ►

and so they have to kill one another over the idea.

01:21:36 ►

That’s what all that asshole jock bullshit is all about.

01:21:40 ►

That’s what all that adolescent, macho, male posturing

01:21:44 ►

and strutting in bars and locker rooms is all about. It’s what all that adolescent, macho, male posturing and strutting in bars

01:21:45 ►

and locker rooms is all about. It’s called dick fear. Men are terrified that their pricks are

01:21:53 ►

inadequate, and so they have to compete with one another to feel better about themselves.

01:21:57 ►

And since war is the ultimate competition, basically men are killing each other in order

01:22:01 ►

to improve their self-esteem. You don’t have to be a historian or a political scientist to see the bigger dick foreign policy theory at work.

01:22:11 ►

It sounds like this.

01:22:13 ►

What? They have bigger dicks? Bomb them!

01:22:18 ►

And, of course, the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks.

01:22:29 ►

It’s a subconscious need to project the penis into other people’s affairs.

01:22:33 ►

It’s called fucking with people.

01:22:50 ►

So, as far as I’m concerned, that whole thing in the Persian Gulf was nothing more than a big, prick-waving dick fight.

01:22:56 ►

In this particular case, Saddam Hussein had questioned the size of George Bush’s dick.

01:23:00 ►

And George Bush had been called a wimp for so long.

01:23:02 ►

Wimp rhymes with limp. Now, to some people who live in other countries,

01:23:18 ►

hearing an American comedian tell jokes about the size of a president’s penis,

01:23:22 ►

well, this may sound just a little too crass for you.

01:23:25 ►

But if you were paying attention to the presidential debates here in the United States last year,

01:23:31 ►

then you heard the candidate, who is now the president of the United States,

01:23:36 ►

talking about the size of his own penis. I wish that was a joke, but it isn’t. In fact,

01:23:43 ►

that simple-minded screwhead still brings it up from time to time in his unscripted speeches.

01:23:49 ►

Just a few weeks ago, at our rescue shelter in Texas,

01:23:52 ►

he made yet another comment implying that he had a big dick.

01:23:56 ►

So, the best we can hope for right now is that he and that other psychotic child king, Kim Jong-un,

01:24:03 ►

don’t begin comparing the relative sizes of their dicks,

01:24:06 ►

at least anytime soon. But if you’ve been paying attention to the news from Washington this year,

01:24:12 ►

well, then you know that we have now passed into the twilight zone and nothing is too weird to not

01:24:18 ►

be able to happen. I think that even Hunter S. Thompson would now find that things are weird enough to make him chew on Nixon’s skull.

01:24:27 ►

Until the entire nation is willing to agree that the emperor is wearing no clothes, well, we’re all in deep shit.

01:24:33 ►

People have to be honest with themselves and admit that if they had a 71-year-old parent acting like that unhinged man in the White House is acting, that they would have them put away.

01:24:44 ►

like that unhinged man in the White House is acting, that they would have them put away.

01:24:50 ►

Large numbers of medical professionals have already come forward to describe as a mental illness the narcissistic, antisocial, paranoid, delusional, and possibly even demented

01:24:56 ►

as the emotional status of the president.

01:25:00 ►

Now, let me return for a minute here to the premise of this podcast,

01:25:04 ►

that the United States of America has already become a failed state.

01:25:10 ►

You see, to me, an example of a failed state, when I think of it, is, well, I think a lot of us could probably agree on North Korea.

01:25:17 ►

If you’ve been paying even the slightest attention to the antics of Kim Jong-un, you know what I mean.

01:25:23 ►

to the antics of Kim Jong-un, you know what I mean.

01:25:28 ►

Little things like executing members of his family who might threaten his grip on power,

01:25:33 ►

or his nuclear testing and the firing of missiles over Japanese islands.

01:25:38 ►

Little things like that are not things that the citizens of successful states would tolerate.

01:25:45 ►

Any group of people who put a guy like Kim Jong-un in charge of nuclear weapons and missiles simply must admit that their state has failed.

01:25:49 ►

They’re living under a family oligarchy.

01:25:52 ►

Only failed states would turn over control of their nuclear weapons to a dangerous, unpredictable psychopath.

01:25:58 ►

So here’s my equation.

01:26:01 ►

The United States plus Donald Trump equals a failed state. I can go on, of course,

01:26:07 ►

because there is more, much more than only Donald Trump that is wrong with this nation.

01:26:12 ►

For example, I find it alarming at how militarized our local police departments have become.

01:26:19 ►

There’s hardly a U.S. city today that doesn’t have grenade launchers, automatic weapons, and even tanks.

01:26:26 ►

But did you also know that American universities have now become heavily armed as well?

01:26:31 ►

Already, at least 117 colleges and universities have received surplus military gear, which

01:26:39 ►

means that at least 117 places of higher education felt that they needed military gear.

01:26:46 ►

So, now 117 institutions, higher level educational institutions, are armed and armored.

01:26:55 ►

This is the state of higher education in the United States.

01:26:59 ►

Another example is that today, right now in 2017,

01:27:08 ►

example is that today, right now in 2017, the wage gap between black and white workers is even worse than it was after the civil rights movement. The median American income is up, but for black

01:27:14 ►

Americans it’s going down. What we have come to, the this that we have been left with, is at least

01:27:21 ►

at the national level, in my opinion, a failed state. Now let’s talk about

01:27:27 ►

a few of the things that are taking place right now that haven’t been caused by the actions of

01:27:32 ►

nations, but by Mother Nature instead. And while I’m going to be focusing on the United States here,

01:27:38 ►

all over the world other significant natural disasters are also taking place, such as the

01:27:44 ►

recent earthquake in Mexico. I’m still waiting to hear from a close friend of mine who lives in Puebla, and I suspect

01:27:50 ►

that many of our fellow slaughters also have Mexican friends that were made on visits to that

01:27:55 ►

wonderful land. Anyway, a few weeks ago, just as I was getting ready to post another podcast,

01:28:02 ►

I learned that a monster hurricane was heading toward Texas.

01:28:06 ►

And this captured my full attention because the Houston-Galveston area holds many memories for me,

01:28:12 ►

not to mention the fact that I still have friends who live in that area.

01:28:16 ►

You see, for over one-third of my life, I made my home in the Houston-Galveston area.

01:28:22 ►

My two sons were born in Houston.

01:28:24 ►

The offices of my law firm,

01:28:26 ►

McInnich and Haggerty, were on Main Street in Houston. Our last house in that area was in

01:28:31 ►

Friendswood on Mary’s Creek, just a few miles from where the record-breaking rainfall was recorded.

01:28:37 ►

So for much of the time that Hurricane Harvey was drenching Houston, I was just glued to the

01:28:42 ►

internet watching to see if the places where my

01:28:45 ►

friends still lived were underwater. As the waters began to recede, I started to look and see if I

01:28:52 ►

could find someone I knew in the area who needed help. While I couldn’t make much of a donation,

01:28:56 ►

I at least wanted to send what I could to someone I knew. But then, before I figured out where to

01:29:02 ►

send a donation, Hurricane Irma began her approach.

01:29:06 ►

And that caused me to change my focus to Florida.

01:29:09 ►

You see, two of my children and three of my grandchildren live in Tampa.

01:29:14 ►

Well, it’s been a difficult time for them as they all had to evacuate,

01:29:18 ►

but fortunately they’re all safe and only experienced minor storm damage to the places where they lived.

01:29:24 ►

Even the trailer that my son rents wasn’t flooded or damaged.

01:29:28 ►

But there’s another part of these storms that most of us seldom find out about.

01:29:32 ►

You see, my son and daughter, like many of the people who have gone through these storms,

01:29:37 ►

are low-paid hourly workers who lost almost two weeks’ wages

01:29:41 ►

because their places of work were flooded and temporarily closed.

01:29:45 ►

Now, when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, this presents a serious problem.

01:29:50 ►

One would think that everyone affected by the storm would come together and help one another get back on their feet.

01:29:56 ►

But not so with some landlords who are demanding that rent be paid on time

01:30:00 ►

or else significant daily late charges would be charged.

01:30:04 ►

So my decision about

01:30:06 ►

whom to help out after these storms, well, it became quite simple. I chose to help my own family,

01:30:11 ►

as you would too. And I’m happy to say that thanks to my followers on Patreon, I’ll be able to get

01:30:19 ►

my two children back on their feet. And by the way, I call them children, but they’re both in their 50s now.

01:30:25 ►

So they’re actually middle-aged people with few assets, and they needed some help.

01:30:31 ►

And so I’ve already told my Patreon supporters that for the next five months,

01:30:34 ►

their donations will be used to help my children get back on their feet and recover from Hurricane Irma.

01:30:40 ►

Hopefully, the currently active hurricane, Maria,

01:30:44 ►

the one which has already devastated much of the Caribbean, will at least spare Florida.

01:30:50 ►

But sadly, Puerto Rico, where I also have some friends living, has been hit quite hard.

01:30:56 ►

Now, what do these stories about storms have to do with the United States being a failed state?

01:31:02 ►

Well, all of this bad weather news has caused me to do a lot of thinking

01:31:06 ►

about where we are all heading on this little planet. Even though I have nothing but contempt

01:31:11 ►

for Donald Trump, I have to admit that he’s not the one responsible for the devastation that parts

01:31:17 ►

of this country are now undergoing due to natural disasters. As much as I’d like to blame him for

01:31:23 ►

these disasters, I can’t. But I can point

01:31:26 ►

out the fact that he has significantly reduced this country’s ability to study, predict, and respond

01:31:31 ►

to serious weather events due to his inability to understand that the world’s weather patterns

01:31:37 ►

are changing. You can argue all night about the causes of these changes, but only a moron like

01:31:43 ►

Trump would put his head in the sand

01:31:45 ►

and deny that we should be making plans to accommodate these changes in our weather.

01:31:50 ►

What I’m leading up to here is the fact that in a successful state, the millions of people who have

01:31:56 ►

suffered big setbacks due to natural disasters, well, they’d be taken care of. Instead, the Trump

01:32:04 ►

administration has been trying to cut almost a billion dollars a year

01:32:07 ►

out of FEMA’s disaster recovery fund.

01:32:10 ►

Now, I can blame that psychopathic screwhead in the White House for that.

01:32:15 ►

So, what are you to do now, now that you’re living in a failed state?

01:32:20 ►

Well, there is no one-size-fits-all solution here.

01:32:24 ►

If you have a job and a family and you’re living near a coast,

01:32:28 ►

well, it isn’t a simple thing to just pull up stakes and move somewhere

01:32:31 ►

that isn’t going to be affected by these increasingly powerful storms.

01:32:36 ►

Not to mention the undeniable fact that sea levels everywhere are rising as well.

01:32:42 ►

Already there have been Pacific Islanders who have had to abandon their

01:32:45 ►

ancestral homes and leave a sinking island. In the Caribbean, the 300-year-old civilization on the

01:32:52 ►

island of Barbuda came to an end when that island became uninhabitable after Irma scoured it clean.

01:32:58 ►

So what do we do? Well, the only people that I feel I can give any advice to right now are the young people who haven’t yet begun families and become locked down in a grueling job struggling to pay off a massive amount of college debt.

01:33:14 ►

And my advice to those somewhat free young people is, before you put down any permanent stakes, well, I think you should first find a community that you feel comfortable living in, but one which is relatively safe from the rising seas and the storms that they bring.

01:33:30 ►

If I were you, what I’d do is what I’ve already done, and that is move to the West Coast.

01:33:36 ►

All along the coast from San Diego to Seattle, there are wonderful places to settle.

01:33:41 ►

And whether you’re a conservative, a liberal, or something else, you can find a community out here of like-minded people.

01:33:48 ►

And if you live a few miles inland from the Pacific,

01:33:51 ►

then what you have to worry about are earthquakes and fires, of course.

01:33:54 ►

And you may laugh, but having grown up in the Midwest

01:33:57 ►

and having lived in the Southwest and Southeast,

01:34:00 ►

I know what tornadoes and hurricanes are like.

01:34:02 ►

And so I’ve come to understand that if you are careful about where you decide to live out here on the coast,

01:34:08 ►

you can significantly minimize the risk of earthquakes and fires.

01:34:12 ►

I’ve experienced both of those events several times in the last 18 years, and I find them to be significantly less stressful than tornadoes and hurricanes.

01:34:22 ►

But hey, that’s just me.

01:34:26 ►

than tornadoes and hurricanes. But hey, that’s just me. So let me circle back to the premise of this podcast, and that is the fact that, at least in my opinion, that we are now living in

01:34:32 ►

a failed state. It is a failed state that has led its people into believing that the pursuit of

01:34:38 ►

happiness was their main objective. Happiness being just another word for property, for stuff.

01:34:46 ►

objective. Happiness being just another word for property, for stuff. And to get stuff, you actually need money. You need to pursue money, which is what a lot of people actually dream about when

01:34:51 ►

they think about moving to the USA. And if that’s still what you want, well, then have at it.

01:34:58 ►

But what it has taken me many years to learn is that my pursuit of money, while it was successful for me from time to time,

01:35:06 ►

it nonetheless mainly brought on a lot of stress for me. First of all, I was stressed about not

01:35:12 ►

having enough money to buy cool stuff like my friends had. Then, after I earned enough money

01:35:17 ►

to get that shiny new toy, my stress came from having to earn enough money to hold on to all

01:35:23 ►

of the stuff that I had by then acquired.

01:35:26 ►

So, if I was going to rewrite the Declaration of Independence today,

01:35:30 ►

I would change that one line to read that the unalienable rights all people have

01:35:36 ►

include life, liberty, and the absence of stress.

01:35:41 ►

Because I think it’s a lot easier for you and me to measure our levels of stress

01:35:45 ►

than it is to measure happiness. Ultimately, I still believe that locals always survive empires.

01:35:53 ►

The American empire is falling apart. It’s time for our local clans to begin crystallizing and

01:36:00 ►

to find ways to avoid contact with the empire as much as possible as it continues to unravel.

01:36:06 ►

But you don’t have a lot of time to dilly-dally around anymore.

01:36:10 ►

It’s time for you to begin making a plan for yourself and with your family and friends.

01:36:15 ►

Instead of figuring out whom to picket or whom to vote for,

01:36:18 ►

instead, you need to figure out what you, your family, and your friends have to do

01:36:23 ►

so as to become local enough

01:36:25 ►

that you can survive the ongoing collapse of this empire. And if you now think back to the

01:36:31 ►

history lesson that Gore Vidal just gave us, you won’t feel so bad about this state failing.

01:36:37 ►

It never actually had much of a chance to begin with, as Benjamin Franklin so astutely observed

01:36:43 ►

not long before he died.

01:36:49 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.

00:00:00 ►

Be well, my friends. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

547 - A House Divided Against Itself

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Program Notes

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