kuchinster

kuchinster

kuchinster@hub.hubzilla.de

A seeker of truth, with a keen sense of justice.

Ort:: Kharkov

Geschlecht:: Мужчина

Homepage:: https://www.mas.to/@kuchinster

2025-12-02 20:19:40

kuchinster

kuchinster@hub.hubzilla.de

harry haller schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:32:53 +0100

Sometimes, if I’m not careful, I drift prematurely into my analysis of the American political system: there is only one party in the United States, the Property party (thank you, Dr. Lundberg, for the phrase) and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently (nervous laugh on that)—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the parties. Those who gave Nixon money in ’68 also gave money to Humphrey.

Gore Vidal1 The State of the Union May 1, 1975 Esquire magazine2 #usa #gorevidal #stateoftheunion #1975

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal https://archive.ph/uIt4A ↩︎
https://classic.esquire.com/article/1975/5/1/the-state-of-the-union https://archive.is/h5euc ↩︎

“Officially this was to protect us from the evil Commies. Actually it was to continue pumping federal money into companies like Boeing and Lockheed and keep the Pentagon full of generals and admirals while filling the pork barrels of congressmen who annually gave the Pentagon whatever it asked for, with the proviso that key military installations and contracts be allocated to the home districts of senior congressmen.” Tough sentence to say. Never did get it right.
“Nobody in particular was to blame. It just happened. To justify our having become a garrison state, gallant Harry Truman set about deliberately alarming the American people. The Soviet was dangerous. We must have new and expensive weapon systems. To defend the free world. The cold war began. The irony is that the Soviet was not dangerous to us at that time. Millions of their people had been killed in the war. Their industries had been shattered. Most important, they did not have atomic weapons and we did.

“So, at the peak of our greatness, we began our decline.”

Absolute silence at this point.

“Instead of using the wealth of the nation to improve the lot of our citizens, we have been wasting over a third of the federal budget on armaments and on the prosecution of secret and/or undeclared wars. We have drafted men into the Army in peacetime, something the founders of this country would have been appalled at. We have been, in effect, for thirty-three years a garrison state whose main purpose has been the making of armaments and the prosecution of illegal wars—openly as in Vietnam and Cambodia, secretly as in Greece and Chile. Wherever there is a choice between a military dictatorship—like Pakistan—and a free government—like India—we support the dictator. And then wonder why we are everywhere denounced as hypocrites.

...

“The problem is our way of living. With six percent of the world’s population we use forty percent of the world’s raw resources. This unnatural consumption is now ending. We are faced with shortages of every kind and we will have to change the way we live whether we want to or not.

...

“This gilded class owns twenty-seven percent of the country’s real estate. Sixty percent of all corporate stock, and so on. They keep the ninety-five point six percent from rebelling by the American brand of bread and circuses: whose principal weapon is the television commercial. From babyhood to grave the tube tells you of all the fine things you ought to own because other people (who are nicer looking and have better credit ratings than you) own them.
“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return while I.T.T.’s taxes in 1970 went down, despite increased earnings.”

...

Yes, I should have said, our rulers are perfectly corrupt but they are not incompetent: in fact, they are extremely good at exercising power over those citizens whom they have so nicely dubbed “consumers.” But the consumers are not as dopey as they used to be and when they have to listen to exhortations from old-style Americans like myself, telling them they are the government and so can change it (underlying message: this bad society is what you dumb bastards deserve), they respond with the only epithets they can think of, provided them for generations by their masters: it’s the Commies, pinkos, niggers, foreigners, it’s them who have somehow fucked up everything.
But the consumers still have no idea who the enemy they are, no idea who really is tearing the place apart. No one has dared tell them that the mysterious they are the rich who keep the consumers in their places, consuming things that are not good for them, and doing jobs they detest.