Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Guns are not the problem in America, where nature is still so near. These shocking incidents of school violence are ultimately rooted in the massive social breakdown of the industrial revolution, which disrupted the ancient patterns of clan and community. Our middle-class culture is affluent but spiritually empty. The attractive houses of the Columbine killers are mere shells, seething with the poisons of the isolated nuclear family and its byzantine denials.

  Alas, the Columbine bloodbath already seems to be the rationale for increased surveillance of young people, who are now exhorted to snitch on each other to the authorities. The brooding apartness of Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, or Emily Brontë; the shrinking shyness of John Keats; the passive-aggressive reclusiveness of Emily Dickinson; the erratic moodiness of Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Baudelaire—all will now be defined as antisocial, potentially dangerous behavior not to be tolerated by the omnipotent group, which will dispatch counselors of every stripe to coerce conformity. The totalitarian brave new world is upon us.

  For me, the lesson of Columbine is that primary and secondary education, as it gradually expanded over the past century, has massive systemic problems. We are warehousing students from childhood to early adulthood, channeling them toward middle-class professional jobs that they may or may not want. Young, male, hormonally driven energy is trapped and stultified by school, with its sterile regimentation into cubical classrooms and cramped rows of seats.

  I found naggingly unsettling the aggressively upbeat, we’re-all-family public discourse of the Columbine faculty and staff, particularly when juxtaposed with the bland, sometimes indistinguishably WASPy faces of the students themselves. The conflict between individualism and the norm can be brutal: bourgeois “niceness” is its own imperialism. Fantasies of student revenge go way back to Carrie (1976), Brian De Palma’s film version of Stephen King’s novel, where a tormented teen unleashes her occult force to incinerate her high school. The rock revolution began with a pounding Bill Haley song blared over the credits of Blackboard Jungle (1955), with its juvenile delinquents on the rampage against teachers and authority.

  Today’s busy, busy, busy high-school education seems to prepare young people for nothing. There are too many posh cars in the parking lot and too much stress on extracurricular activities. Just as I have argued for lowering the age of sexual consent to fourteen, so do I now propose that young people be allowed to leave school at fourteen—as they did during the immigrant era, when families needed every wage to survive. Unfortunately, in our service-sector economy, entry-level manual labor is no longer widely available.

  At home, American teenagers are being simultaneously babied and neglected, while at school they have become, in effect, prisoners of the state. Primary school should be stripped down to the bare bones of grammar, art, history, math, and science. We need to offer optional vocational and technical schools geared to concrete training in a craft or trade. Practical, skills-based knowledge gives students a sense of mastery, even if they don’t stay in that profession. A wide range of careers might be pedagogically developed, such as horticulture and landscape design; house construction; electric and plumbing; automotive and aviation mechanics; restaurant culinary arts; banking, accounting, investment, and small business management.

  The mental energy presently being recreationally diverted by teens to the Internet and to violent video games (one of the last arenas for masculine action, however imaginary) is clearly not being absorbed by school. We have a gigantic educational assembly line that coercively processes students and treats them with Ritalin or therapy if they can’t sit still in the cage. The American high school as social scene clearly spawns internecine furies in sexually stunted young men—who are emotionally divorced from their parents but too passive to run away, so that they turn their inchoate family hatreds on their peers. Like the brainy rich-kid criminals Leopold and Loeb (see the 1959 film, Compulsion), the Columbine killers were looking for meaning and chose the immortality of infamy, the cold ninth circle of the damned.

  * [Salon.com column, April 28, 1999. Reprinted in The Guardian (U.K.), May 1, 1999.]

  62

  VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND REVALORIZATION OF THE TRADES*

  Education has returned to the front pages: in the wake of the most recent school shootings, state legislatures are debating bills outlawing bullying, while the president of the University of California, concerned about low academic performance by minorities, has called for dropping the SAT exam as a criterion for college admission—as if that would solve the problem instead of merely masking it. Authoritarian intrusion and social engineering seem to be the order of the day.

  The entire American school system needs to be stringently reexamined from primary grades through college. If high school has turned into a seething arena of boredom and competitive tension erupting in mayhem, it’s partly because (as I said after the Columbine massacre two years ago) modern schools have become airless dungeons for active young men at their most hormonally driven period of life.

  Forcing restless teens of both sexes to sit like robots in regimented rows in crowded classrooms for the better part of each day is a pointless, sadistic exercise except for those with their sights on office jobs. This school system is not even 200 years old, yet most people treat it as if the burning bush floated it down from Mount Sinai. Too often, school has become a form of mental and physical oppression.

  Exactly what is being taught? Certainly not wisdom or perspective on life. Can anyone honestly claim that current high-school students know more about history, science, language, and the arts than students forty years ago? As for college students, the shallowness of their training in the humanities has become all too evident as graduates of the elite schools have entered the professions and the media over the past twenty years.

  A gigantic, self-perpetuating school system is forcing students along a pre-professional track whether they want it or not. Perhaps as many as half the college students currently in the elite schools may not really want to be there but have just numbly followed along in the track of their parents’ and peers’ social expectations. They have no other options. If our pampered students have the best of all possible worlds, why are so many of them binge drinking and anesthetizing themselves with brain-wrecking designer drugs?

  As I’ve argued in the past, there’s no way that the daughter of prosperous, successful, white upper-middle-class parents could decide to drop out of an Ivy League school in her sophomore year to get married and be a stay-at-home mom. She would be upbraided and shamed, accused of “wasting” her education and betraying her “real” talents—and embarrassing her status-conscious parents.

  Similarly, it’s scarcely imaginable that the son of such a family could opt for the career of auto mechanic or trucker instead of physician, lawyer, or businessman. There was a time when most high schools offered shop classes and when technical institutions gave practical preparation in the trades to non-college-bound students. As the service sector expanded in the U.S. economy after World War Two, such choices became fewer.

  The boys who are collecting guns and fantasizing about shooting up their schools need a more constructive outlet for their energy—which working with their hands would partly satisfy. As for the misfits who are being “bullied” into homicidal rampages, those who find school life unbearable or useless should be permitted to leave at age fourteen (as was legal during the immigrant era) to try to live life on their own. Let them return to school when and if they so desire; the presence in the classroom of adult students would infinitely improve both primary and secondary education, since it’s grade segregation by age that perpetuates and aggravates the tyranny of social cliques.

  You say that the young are far too immature to survive at fourteen? Well, that’s proof positive that they’ve been infantilized by their parents in this unctuously caretaking yet flagrantly permissive culture that denies middle-class students adulthood until
they are in their twenties and later—long after their bodies are ready to mate and reproduce. The Western career system is institutionalized neurosis, elevating professional training over spiritual development and forcing the young to put emotional and physical satisfaction on painful hold.

  The trades need to be revalorized. Young men and women should be encouraged to consider careers outside the effete, word-obsessed, office-bound professions. Construction, plumbing, electrical wiring, forestry, landscaping, horticulture: such pursuits allow free movement and require a training of the body as well as the mind.

  * [Salon.com column, March 21, 2001.]

  POLITICS

  63

  NO TO THE INVASION OF IRAQ*

  Color caricature by Zach Trenholm of Camille Paglia as no-nonsense schoolmarm scolding Presidents Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Published with The Salon Interview: Camille Paglia, Salon.com, February 7, 2003.

  Camille Paglia is a rarity in the increasingly polarized world of public intellectuals, a high-profile thinker and writer who is not readily identified with any political camp or party line. She burst onto the scene in 1990 following the publication of her book, Sexual Personae. Paglia was a rough-trade feminist not afraid to challenge the orthodoxy of the women’s movement or its reigning sisterhood; a professor from a small college with no qualms about torching the Parisian academic trends then enthralling Ivy League humanities departments; a self-proclaimed “Democratic libertarian” who voted twice for Bill Clinton and then loudly denounced him for bringing shame to his office.

  Given Paglia’s originality and unpredictability, we had no idea what to expect when we phoned her earlier this week for her opinions on the Bush administration’s looming war with Iraq. Paglia proudly describes herself as a Dionysian child of the ’60s, a generation not known for its martial spirit. And yet, during her long run as a Salon columnist, she developed an enthusiastic following among conservatives, including retired and active military personnel, for her eloquent tributes to family, tradition, country, and uniformed service, as well as her stop-your-blubbering take on modern American life.

  Paglia retired her Salon column last year to focus on teaching—she is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—and to finish her fifth book, a study of poetry that will be published by Pantheon Books. She returns in the Salon Interview to reveal her opinions on Iraq for the first time. “The foreign press has asked me repeatedly to comment on Iraq, and I’ve said I don’t think it’s right as an American citizen to do that. I said I should reserve my criticisms of the administration for home consumption,” said Paglia. “That’s why I’m talking to you now.”

  What is your position on the increasingly likely U.S. invasion of Iraq?

  Well, first of all, I’m on the record as being pro-military and in insisting that military matters and international affairs were neglected throughout the period of the Clinton administration—which partly led to the present dilemma. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 should have been a wake-up call for everyone. However, I’m extremely upset about our rush to war at the present moment. If there truly were an authentic international coalition that had been carefully built, and if the administration had demonstrated sensitivity to the fragility of international relations, I’d be 100 percent in favor of an allied military expedition to go into Iraq and find and dispose of all weapons of mass destruction.

  But most members of the current administration seem to have little sense that there’s an enormous, complex world beyond our borders. The president himself has never traveled much in his life. They seem to think the universe consists of America and then everyone else—small-potatoes people who can be steamrolled. And I’m absolutely appalled at the lack of acknowledgment of the cost to ordinary Iraqi citizens of any incursion by us, especially aerial bombardment. Most of the Iraqi armed forces are pathetically unprepared to respond to a military confrontation with us. These are mostly poor people who have a profession and a dignity within their country, and they’re not necessarily totally behind Saddam Hussein’s ambition to dominate his region. There’s just no way that Saddam’s threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War Two. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don’t need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations.

  As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas—the president’s home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they’re doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was “weeks, not months” away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.

  From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half—two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence—that the president’s own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.

  Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.

  Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut on board who had bombed Iraq twenty years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology—of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you’re doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he’d call it off.

  The Bush administration is not known for thinking twice—they pride themselves on their certitude, a certitude that strikes many as arrogant.

  I’d call them parochial rather than arrogant. Last summer, Bush’s tone was certainly arrogant, but he’s quieted his rhetoric since then. I don’t know who got to him, his father or the elders around him. Talk about destabilizing the world! “Regime change” and “you’re with us or against us” and so on—impatient, off-the-cuff rants that tore the fabric of international relations. You don’t unilaterally demand the overthrow of a government of a sovereign nation, for heaven’s sake. It turns our own presidents into targets. As for [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, I think he’s some kind of hot dog. It’s as if he’s trying to pump up his testosterone, to operate on some constant, hyper-adrenaline level, to show “I can still hack it, man!” I was of two minds about Rumsfeld’s snide comment about “old Europe.” On the one hand, I love to see France put in its place, because of course it no longer is the center of the world but keeps insisting that it is. On the other hand, this is yet another example of the ham-handedness of this administration in world relations.

  I think that Bush administration officials are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their positions, although their biblical piety is cloying. I think they do intend the best for the American people. It’s not just a covert grab for oil to placate corporate interests. But I also think that their current course of action in Iraq is disastrous for long-term world safety. After 9/11, what should have been perfectly clear is that we need a long, slow process of reeducating the peoples of the world, to try to convince Muslims of the fundamental benevolence of American intentions. And we had most of the wo
rld behind us in the days after 9/11, except for the Muslim extremists. We desperately need the world’s cooperation, from police agencies to informers. Above all, we need moderate Muslims to turn out the homicidal fanatics in their midst.

  Do you think the Bush administration’s focus on Saddam is a diversion from this global campaign against terrorism?

  The real diversion is from other global hot spots. If we get bogged down in Iraq, China might think it’s a good moment to retake Taiwan. Saddam is an amoral thug, but he’s not the principal danger to American security. The real problem is a shadowy, international network of young, radical Islamic men. And we have played right into their hands since last summer by coming across as a bullying world power, threatening war with Iraq and acting completely callous to the resulting human carnage and death of innocent civilians. What privileges American over Iraqi lives? Why does the chance of American casualties through random terrorism outweigh the certain reality of Iraqi devastation in a crushing invasion?

  But don’t you think if Saddam were to succeed in his longtime goal of building an operational arsenal of doomsday weapons, that he would then provide an umbrella for this network of terrorists to carry out its plots against the West?

  But how are we going to counter that threat? Are we going to bomb laboratories and facilities storing dangerous chemicals and release them in the air near population centers? Are we going to poison Baghdad? This is as barbarous as what we’re opposing in Saddam. We need to be going in the opposite direction—to lower global tensions. This constant uncertainty is bad for everyone. It’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for people’s psychic health, and it’s going to endanger Americans around the world. How are we ever going to do business around the world and function in a global market, when any American traveling abroad is subject to assassination?