Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Working-class style is far more aggressive and vigorous than that of the effete, self-censored wordsmiths who emote at us from the rostra of the Democratic Party and its special-interest groups. Today’s Democrats have become hypocrites and pharisees, a smug, clubby establishment concerned with showy, sanctimonious rituals rather than self-critique.

  Liberals’ addiction to melodramas of victimhood has been particularly counterproductive in the national debate over abortion. While I support abortion rights, I loathe the grotesquely inflammatory language used for fifteen years by many abortion organizations, which portray their opponents as “fanatics” and “right-wing extremists…fanning the flames of pro-choice hatred.” Pro-life activists, in this view, are never motivated by ethics; they are “opponents of women’s empowerment” determined to “deny women their basic rights.” (I quote from recent mailings by Planned Parenthood, to which I belong.)

  The hysterical Manichaean language of abortion leaders who starkly see the world as a battle between good and evil has polarized the nation. Those women have wasted untold millions of dollars in shrill advertising campaigns whose propaganda has prevented liberals from recognizing the genuinely moral forces that drive most of the pro-life movement. It is not surprising that, having manipulated their Washington cronies into using fascist tactics to curb legitimate pro-life protests, feminist leaders have now left clinics (not designed as fortresses) vulnerable to murderous attacks by lunatic commandos.

  The moment when authentic liberalism turned delusional may well have been the Anita Bryant controversy of 1977, when a perky, all-American, over-the-hill singer who hawked orange juice was hounded and destroyed because she said, amid a Florida fight over gay rights, that the Bible condemns homosexuality. The latter point—which seems to me as an atheist historically incontrovertible—was never honestly dealt with by liberals. For years, Christian ministers addressing the issue on talk shows were screamed at and silenced by gays, egged on by liberal hosts. That strategy of intimidation was stupidly shortsighted, since religious fundamentalism was gaining ground worldwide.

  The ignominious defeat of Anita Bryant intoxicated liberal activists with their new rhetorical style of cheap derision, which they were to use again and again. Short-circuiting serious inquiry and real thought, it was to lead them into disastrously underestimating the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich, all of whom were spokesmen for profound changes in the culture. There is reason for concern about a new regime of utilitarian politics that overvalues sectarian piety and devalues art. But liberals cannot offer a promising alternative until they analyze their own systematic failures.

  * [Last Word column, The Advocate, March 7, 1995.]

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  [“Camp Insensitivity,” illustration by Martin Kozlowski, editorial page, The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 1998.]

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  BILL CLINTON: THE HORMONAL PRESIDENT*

  Why does Bill Clinton seem to bob and weave, drift and circle on policy issues? His strength—a supersensitive attunement to mercurial public opinion—is also his weakness. He values intuition and spontaneity over steadiness and consistency. The reason so many men viscerally detest Clinton is that he is “womanish,” as the word was negatively used in the pre-feminist era. He is as moody, capricious, flirtatious, and teary-eyed as fickle females were alleged to be in their mysterious monthly cycle.

  A gifted politician if a sometimes weak leader, Clinton has true charisma, a magic aura hovering around major historical figures and screen stars. This makes him a seductive television presence at a time when an ability to manipulate the media is, for better or worse, the primary tool for communication with the electorate. Charisma, as I analyzed it in Sexual Personae, is always androgynous. By subtly shifting between male and female, the charismatic personality has mass appeal to both sexes in the transsexual theatricality of public life.

  In his quest for identity, Clinton has been haunted by two key personae, John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley, whom he has tried to co-opt and conflate, with mixed results. Elvis is the sensual, soulful Southern boy who bridged white and black popular culture. With their full faces and fleshy cheeks, Elvis and Clinton (an activist of the enlightened New South) do appear to come from the same, perhaps racially mixed stock.

  But Clinton, donning shades to blow his sax on talk shows, seems to work too hard to please. He lacks Elvis’ relaxed animal beauty and imperious athleticism. Painfully chubby as a child, Clinton remains awkward and lumberingly bottom-heavy. Even as a jogger, he chugs. His presentation as president is much improved from early on, when ill-fitting suits, goofy arm dangling, and prickly, flyaway hair were the rule. With his pasty, chapped skin, thin upper lip, and nervous dry mouth, the chatty, affable Clinton can’t capture the Elvis of aggressive flamboyance and brooding Byronic menace. As lover boy and candy man, laying on sweet talk with a trowel, Clinton more resembles the copycat crop of lightweight Elvises such as Fabian, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Rydell—pretty, adolescent Adonises with creamy skin and pompadour locks.

  Jack Kennedy’s dashing precedent has bedeviled several generations of politicians, from Canada’s Pierre Trudeau to England’s Tony Blair. No one has yet duplicated Kennedy’s suave blend of brash Irish vitality, crisp wit, sharp tailoring, and cock-of-the-walk strut. In the past, Clinton longed to imitate the predatory lady-killing of the Kennedy men, but he genuinely likes women more and enjoys their company. Indeed, one of Clinton’s problems is that he craves women’s approval and is addicted to their attention. Hence the feminist establishment leads him around by the nose, as in the very expensive and poorly conceived Violence Against Women Act. Clinton’s strong mother and lack of a positive father figure made him appreciative of assertive women and uneasy with conventionally masculine men—which directly led to his naïve bungling of the gays-in-the-military issue. And too many of his top male appointees look like Milquetoasts or runts of the litter.

  Clinton’s ambivalence about authority produced his habit of skipping law school classes and (thanks to a photographic memory) cramming for exams, analogous to his sporadic binge eating. Without the long discipline of clock time, Clinton is a scheduler’s nightmare, chronically late. From the start, Clinton’s relationship with Hillary Rodham was that of naughty Huck Finn and the schoolmarm, who keeps her charming rascal in line. Hillary does not need to throw lamps at her husband; she whips him with words, with the sheer terror of her cold fury.

  Workaholic and yet procrastinating, Clinton is in love with process, with squeezing, lubricating, wringing, and milking the hidden organs of power. He gorges on facts, yet is paralyzed by decision-making. His graceful hands, with their waxy, tendrilous fingers, betray his feminine openness and irresolution. He is indifferent to the fixed coordinates of policy. He prefers endless jawing, chewing the fat. His emotional diffuseness and volatility, which endear him to a public remarkably forgiving of his mistakes, are curbed and regimented only by Hillary.

  Like the gender-blending Walt Whitman, Clinton wants an indiscriminate, all-inclusive democracy in which masculine judgment is suspended and female nurturance fills the cosmos. Unlike dour Bob Dole, rigid with testosterone poisoning, Clinton is a brilliant improviser, coasting ecstatically on the liquid responsiveness of his audience. Like the actor who lives in performance, he is in constant psychic flow. Sexually, he has never fully jelled. The White House is currently bimbo-free, in my opinion, only because of the president’s chaste homoerotic bonding with cutesy George Stephanopoulos, the human pincushion and chief court catamite. What is Clinton’s position on gay rights or any other issue? Look up at the clouds, for the answer is blowing in the wind.

  * [Last Word column, The Advocate, June 25, 1996.]

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  SARAH PALIN: COUNTRY WOMAN*

  In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president
must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation—a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

  As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly twenty years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women’s studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Senator Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me—and certainly not in her bland and over-praised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

  Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War—long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did—which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern Seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

  It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism which cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.

  Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farmwomen of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation—agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and who had trumpet-like voices that could pierce stone walls.

  Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”

  Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism—a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

  Here’s another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto’s Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

  ABIGAIL BECKER

  Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

  A tall, handsome woman “who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all,” she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

  Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

  * [Salon.com column, September 10, 2008, eleven days after Sarah Palin was introduced by Republican presidential nominee John McCain.]

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  DONALD TRUMP: VIKING DRAGON*

  Zap! If momentum were a surge of electromagnetic energy, Donald Trump against all odds has it now. The appalled GOP voters he is losing seem overwhelmed in number by independents and crossover Democrats increasingly attracted by his bumptious, raucous, smash-the-cucumber-frames style. While it’s both riveting and exhilarating to watch a fossilized American political party being blown up and remade, it’s also highly worrisome that a man with no prior political experience and little perceptible patience for serious study seems on a fast track to the White House. In a powder-keg world, erratic impulsiveness is far down the list of optimal presidential traits.

  But the Democratic strategists who prophesy a Hillary landslide over Trump are blowing smoke. Hillary is a stodgily predictable product of the voluminous briefing books handed to her by a vast palace staff of researchers and pollsters—a staggeringly expensive luxury not enjoyed by her frugal, unmaterialistic opponent, Bernie Sanders (my candidate). Trump, in contrast, is his own publicist, a quick-draw scrapper and go-for-the-jugular brawler. He is a master of the unexpected (as the Egyptian commander Achillas calls Julius Caesar in the Liz Taylor Cleopatra). The massive size of Hillary’s imperialist operation makes her seem slow and heavy. Trump is like a raffish buccaneer, leaping about the rigging like the breezy Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, while Hillary is the stiff, sequestered admiral of a bullion-laden armada of Spanish galleons, a low-in-the-water easy mark as they creak and sway amid the rolling swells.

  The drums had been beating for weeks about a major New York Times exposé in the works that would demolish Trump once and for all by revealing his sordid lifetime of misogyny. When it finally appeared as a splashy front-page story this past Sunday (originally titled “Crossing the Line: Trump’s Private Conduct with Women”), I was off in the woods pursuing my Native American research. On Monday, after seeing countless exultant references to this virtuoso takedown, I finally read the article—and laughed out loud throughout. Can there be any finer demonstration of the insularity and mediocrity of today’s Manhattan prestige media? Wow, millionaire workaholic Donald Trump chased young, beautiful, willing women and liked to boast about it. Jail him now! Meanwhile, The New York Times remains mute about Bill Clinton’s long record of crude groping and grosser assaults—not one example of which could be found to taint Trump.

 
Blame for this fiasco falls squarely upon the New York Times editors who delegated to two far too young journalists, Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, the complex task of probing the glitzy, exhibitionistic world of late-twentieth-century beauty pageants, gambling casinos, strip clubs, and luxury resorts. Neither Barbaro, a 2002 graduate of Yale, nor Twohey, a 1998 graduate of Georgetown University, had any frame of reference for sexual analysis aside from the rote political correctness that has saturated elite American campuses for nearly forty years. Their prim, priggish formulations in this awkwardly disconnected article demonstrate the embarrassing lack of sophistication that passes for theoretical expertise among their overpaid and under-educated professors.

  When I saw the reporters’ defensive interview on Monday with CNN anchors Kate Bolduan and John Berman, I felt sorry for the earnest, owlish Barbaro, who seems like a nice fellow who has simply wandered out of his depth. But Twohey, with her snippy, bright and shiny careerism, took a page from the slippery Hillary playbook in the way she blatheringly evaded any direct answer to a pointed question about how Rowanne Brewer Lane’s pleasantly flirtatious first meeting with Trump at a crowded 1990 pool party at Mar-a-Lago ended up being called “a debasing face-to-face encounter” in the Times. The hidden agenda of advocacy journalism has rarely been caught so red-handed.