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Dear Camille:
What do you think of David Brock's apology to President Clinton in the new Esquire?
He was the reporter who exposed the "Troopergate" story in the American Spectator, which kicked off the whole Paula Jones fiasco. Now he says the troopers were slimy and his own
get-Clinton vendetta helped create a media Frankenstein. What do you make of Brock's twists and turns?
Dizzy in D.C.
Dear Dizzy:
"Twists and turns" certainly says it.
Behold, the writhing snake pit of amoral media ambition! I haven't been so
revolted since -- well, since the first news flash that the president of the
United States may have been foolishly monkeying around with a big-busted,
juicy-lipped intern.
I am personally furious with David Brock's recent "slimy" behavior -- to apply
to him the word he now uses for the working-class Arkansas state troopers he
once touted as sources -- because I went out of my way to defend his solidly
researched 1994 book, "The Real Anita Hill." It was then under vicious attack
by those cozy media insiders, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, whose own 1994
book, "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," was in my view a
shallow piece of PC crap, grossly overpraised by reviewers and commentators
in thrall to the feminist establishment, for whom Hill was a reincarnation of
Mary, Mother of Jesus.
Indeed, on my book tour for "Vamps & Tramps" that year, I stormed out of Spago
restaurant in Los Angeles after a huge scene with a book editor of the Los
Angeles Times, when he blithely insisted there was no ethical problem in the
Times having assigned its review of the Mayer-Abramson book to Nina
Totenberg -- who as a National Public Radio reporter was an early, active
principal in the entire Anita Hill affair on Capitol Hill. This was, I loudly
maintained, an excellent example of the cronyism and corruption that distort
book reviewing in the United States.
As a reform feminist, I have struggled to bring the totalitarian excesses of
sexual harassment regulations before the American public, whose schools and
workplaces have been invaded by the nightmarish sexual delusions of Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. (See my article on sexual
harassment, "A Call for Lustiness," in the March 23 Time.)
Hill's charges against Supreme Court nominee Thomas were grotesquely
overblown, and I protested them from the very start.
Unjustly vilified by Mayer and Abramson, the conservative Brock should have
been concerned only with patiently proving his professionalism and ethics as a
journalist over the long haul. As a libertarian Democrat, I respect anyone
whose thinking is genuinely systematic and principled -- which is why I continue
to admire conservative talk-radio host and political satirist Rush Limbaugh
(despite his soft spot for the narcissistic Newt Gingrich).
Brock's lurid, wickedly entertaining exposés of the Clintons for the right-wing American Spectator, which were based on his own investigations in Little
Rock, helped break the hammerlock that the liberal major media then had on
political discourse in this country. Since many of Brock's findings were
paralleled by those of the Los Angeles Times (which sat on the story for
months), his current mea culpas ring a bit hollow.
Brock's desire for mainstream media respectability -- or rather for acceptance
among the socialites and schmoozers whose cocktail parties and soirees are the
incestuous meeting ground for the Washington-Manhattan power elite -- became
clear in his wooden 1996 book, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," which
reportedly made him persona non grata at the conservative high table. Brock's
nicey-nice treatment of Hillary Clinton -- utterly devoid of psychological
insight and truly dumb about the political scene in the late 1960s and early
1970s at Yale University (where the Clintons and I were separately doing
graduate work) -- was just as putrid with covert self-interest as the Mayer-Abramson screed that canonized Hill.
Brock's PR stunts -- posing as a semi-nude St. Joan in Esquire; offering a
fulsome "apology" to the president in the same glossy lifestyle magazine -- are
hardly going to help him win journalistic credibility. A sincere person would
have published a reserved, factual article in a serious, issues-oriented
periodical, without these effete, maudlin gestures. Brock's recantation
has all the moral gravity of a gin fizz.
Watching Brock make his slippery, unctuous, Stephanopolous-like talk-show
rounds last week (Geraldo Rivera stomach-churningly called him "a brave man"),
I thought: This pomaded little creep, like Osric the sycophantic courtier in
"Hamlet," is now the leading out-of-the-closet gay in the media, after the
whiny Ellen DeGeneres and her birdbrained gal pal.
Oxygen, please!
Dear Camille:
I am a black, conservative female. I am proud to say that you are
one of my heroes. I would like your opinion
of the following press release, which I am forwarding
to you. It's regarding the Gay Youth Pride Day. Now, according to
some, I may have no right to have an opinion about this, because
of my heterosexuality. However, I think some in the so-called "gay community" take this pride thing a bit too far. As a 19-year-old, openly
straight female, I really don't understand the need for the self-anointed leaders of the
gay rights movement to draw gay youngsters into their self-indulgent politics. Am I
misguided or insensitive in my approach to the "young gay dilemma"?
Your conservative admirer in Va.
Dear Conservative:
The psychological turmoil of adolescents at sexual awakening cannot be
underestimated. Everything is in flux -- impulses, fears, dreams, with
simultaneous longings for independence and for protection by adults. What I
dislike about the push of organized gay activism into high schools is that it
imposes a rigid political paradigm on a stage of life that is in rapid,
painful transition for everyone, gay or straight.
As an equity feminist, as well as an open lesbian, I oppose special
protections for any group, including my own. Teachers and administrators
should obviously not permit physical harassment of any kind on school
property, but verbal epithets, however offensive or hurtful, have First
Amendment protection. The PC thought police, having been defeated on
college campuses after the court-ordered banning of the fascist speech codes,
are now oozing their way into high schools. "Hate" cannot be stopped by
authoritarian manipulation but by slow social change, which may take
generations.
The Internet has been a boon to lonely gay teens in geographically remote
areas -- but, of course, computers still remain largely a white middle-class
luxury. I find very suspicious the statistics about teen suicides with which
gay activists badger the media. If gay teens are indeed attempting suicide at
a higher rate than straight teens, perhaps more questions need to be asked
about the genesis of homosexuality. The intolerable sense of isolation may
precede the homosexuality, rather than vice versa.
I have written repeatedly about my theory that homosexuality is an adaptation,
rather than an innate trait, and that it is reinforced by habit. With its
cant terms of "oppression" and "bigotry," gay activism, encouraged by the
scientific illiteracy of academic postmodernism, wants to deny that there is a
heterosexual norm. This is madness. We need more art and history and less
politics in primary education. Art gives the young the psychological and
spiritual tools for authentic self-discovery. And art is where sexual
dissenters have contributed the most to the human record.
In short, I agree with your concern about the Trojan Horse of gay activism,
which is being dragged into high schools under the false flag of compassion.
Young people who oppose homosexuality for any reason have a constitutional
right to express their views, in or out of the classroom. Whatever they may
privately believe as individuals, educators have a professional obligation to
remain ideologically neutral in their treatment of students.
N E X T_P A G E | Madonna's ravishingly beautiful "Ray of Light"
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