Here I must speak for myself, acknowledging at the same time that none of the opinions I presently hold on matters of state are in the least bit novel, original or uncontroversial. Since they are, for the most part, banalities—but true banalities—I shall simply list them, not defend them.

1. The Soviet Union and the United States, while by no means morally equivalent, are basically similar in structure and purpose. Both societies are dedicated to nationalism, militarism, industrialism, technology, science, organized sport and above all, to the religion of growth—of endless expansion in numbers, wealth, power, time and space. In the SU, government controls industry; in the US, industry controls government; but each of the two great superstates is ruled in fact by an entrenched oligarchy—in the SU by the Communist Party; in the US by the power of concentrated wealth. (According to the Federal Reserve Board report of 1984, some 2 percent of US families control 40 percent of all assets.) We call our system a “representative democracy” but in fact our representatives, with honorable exceptions here and there, represent not the voters but those who finance their election campaigns. In the Soviet Union the egalitarian ideal of theoretical communism was betrayed from the beginning; in the United States the Jeffersonian vision of a decentralized society of independent agrarian freeholders was dead by the end of the nineteenth century while democracy, defined in Lincoln’s words as “government by the people,” has never even been tried.

2. Our century, the twentieth, has been a century of horrors. The century not only of Stalin’s Gulag but of Hitler’s concentration camps, where six million Jews, three million Russians, two million Poles and half a million Gypsies were methodically put to death. But America has done its bit; last nation on earth to abolish chattel slavery (and it required a civil war to accomplish that) we were the first to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow humans, the Japanese—after their government had begun suing for peace. Then followed the thirty-year ordeal of Indochina (1945–1975), a great industrial undertaking whereby more millions of corpses were produced, an effort entirely financed and largely carried out by the American government. Our slaughters do not yet equal in magnitude those of Stalin and Hitler—but we tried, we are trying and we’re not finished yet. Meanwhile the threat of nuclear annihilation, succeeded by the nuclear winter, hangs over the entire planet, with the devices of destruction continually being developed, refined and stockpiled on both sides. On several sides.

3. Old stuff. Consider a new idea, one that still seems absurd, even ridiculous, to most of the human population: I mean something called animal rights. The rights, that is, of the other animals (and plants) that share this still lovely, gracious and bountiful world with us. I refer to the deliberate torture of monkeys, dogs, rats, rabbits and other animals in the laboratories of what is called science, often for no purpose but the satisfaction of curiosity, the generation of unreadable monographs and the development of commercial products such as cosmetics, patent medicines and perfumes. I refer to the gruesome half-lives led by hundreds of millions of factory poultry, pigs, dairy cows and feedlot cattle in our mass-production industrialized agriculture.