A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Hanging is too good
for Timothy McVeigh
Dear Camille,
If you were on the jury in Denver, deciding Timothy McVeigh's fate, would
you vote to kill him? Or would sitting in a cell every day for the rest of
his life thinking about those kids who died in Oklahoma City be a better
punishment? Do you think McVeigh ever thinks about them? Also, I heard on
the radio some historian say how McVeigh wasn't so different from Americans
who considered themselves "patriots" in the past. Is that fair?
Conflicted in Colorado
Dear Conflicted:
As an advocate of capital punishment, I unequivocally support putting that
butcher, Tim McVeigh, to death. I don't care whether the death penalty is a
"deterrent" or not. I believe in Old Testament-style justice and
retribution, exacted as swiftly, dramatically and publicly as possible.
Premeditated mass murder like the bombing of the Murrah Building or serial
rape-murders, particularly those involving children, deserve worse than
execution, in my opinion. I think torture should be brought back. (When I
asserted this in my lecture at West Point in April, there was the biggest
roar of approval I have ever gotten from an audience. "My kind of crowd," I
said to myself.)
Unfortunately, the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
specifically prohibits "cruel and unusual punishments," as were liberally
used by authoritarians of church and state in the pre-democratic age. As a
vigilant civil libertarian, I must respect constitutional protections against
capricious and arbitrary force.
However, I feel in my gut that any person who inflicts such atrocious
physical suffering on so many innocent victims deserves to have a taste of
his own medicine. My philosophy as an archaic Italian goes beyond that even
of the Israeli Air Force: I believe in 10 eyes for an eye, 10 teeth for a
tooth. I wish that every person maimed by McVeigh, or any relative of a
person killed by McVeigh, could have at him with a sharp weapon of choice,
the aim being to maximize long, lingering pain.
McVeigh's initial motivation has always been quite understandable to me. The
Northeastern liberal media, acting like a herd of sheep after the first
inauguration of Bill Clinton (for whom I voted twice), were guilty of a
serious coverup in the way they ignored the fascist abuse of federal
authority in the siege at Waco, Texas. Cult leader David Koresh was clearly
loony-tunes, but I was shocked at how film footage of government armored
tanks knocking down citizens' walls was played on the network news without a
peep of protest or critique from anchormen or correspondents.
Koresh's right to religious freedom and his right to be secure against
"unreasonable searches and seizures," guaranteed under the First and Fourth
Amendments respectively, were both violated by the federal government at
Waco. Where were all the authentic 1960s liberals when this was going on?
I'm very fond of Attorney General Janet Reno, but she screwed up big, and her
explanations -- she had to send in the assault unit, she claimed, because of
rumors of child abuse at the Koresh ranch -- didn't hold water. She seemed to
get off the hook, but then came the explosion on the anniversary of Waco two
years later at Oklahoma City. It's no wonder that people are reluctant to
enter politics, when sober, well-intentioned decisions like Reno's can lead
to such disaster, which surely must weigh on the conscience for a lifetime.
But Tim McVeigh has no conscience. He is a sociopath who, like the Nazi
commandants, elevated abstractions above persons. His affable, boyish manner
is reminiscent of two other notorious monomaniacs, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey
Dahmer, whom I have repeatedly used as warning examples of the mystery of
human perversity in my writings and lectures on rape.
As for that historian's remark about McVeigh not being much different from
early American patriots -- ridiculous. Better parallels might be found in the
history of the French and Russian Revolutions, with their extremist cliques
of nihilists and vandals who dragged their nations into barbarism.
Dear Ms. Paglia:
Recently here in Toronto a law was passed that allows women to go topless
in any place where it's legal for a man to do the same. Much controversy
has resulted, including one entrepreneurial fellow who now has a topless
patio bar, where, for a change, the waitresses are wearing tops, and the
customers aren't. What do you think about mammary display, for either
gender?
Regards from the Great White Riviera
Dear White Riviera:
I am delighted to hear that Canada seems to be edging back toward the
cosmopolitan pleasure principle after its recent years in the ice grip of
MacKinnonite censorship. (Point of information for Americans: Catharine
MacKinnon's totalitarian anti-porn measures, which were twice struck down by
the courts as unconstitutional in the United States, were foolishly adopted
in Canada and led to tremendous trouble for gay bookstores, whose shipments
were seized at the border. Ironically, the writings of MacKinnon's fanatical
anti-porn cohort, Andrea Dworkin, were also seized.)
When I flew into Toronto for a lecture at the Winter Garden Theater in
November 1992, I was the only person on my flight who was abruptly flagged to
report to the immigration office for questioning before being permitted to
enter the country. Why? When the customs officer checking my passport asked
my profession, I said, "Writer," and when he asked my subject, I replied,
"Sex." As I remarked to the laughing Winter Garden audience that night, "The
mere mention of the word 'sex' seemed to threaten to bring down the Canadian
government!"
American lesbian feminists on the East and West Coasts have sporadically
pressured local authorities to permit women to go topless on beaches, a
longtime custom of chic Mediterranean and French Caribbean resorts. In many
American towns that depend on a lucrative summer trade, police have stopped
harassing gay tourists who want to go nude, as long as the latter stick to
remote, segregated strips and avoid the central town beaches where families
congregate.
Big, fat leather dykes on motorbikes have been hanging out their pumpkin-like
mammaries for two decades in gay parades. In the general world, except for
Rudi Gernreich's 1960s experiment with a see-through plastic dress and
Jean-Paul Gaultier's runway stunt with a nipple-flashing Madonna, things
haven't really progressed that much since the arrival of the scandalous
bikini in the 1950s.
I basically sympathize with the desire to challenge puritanical rules about
display of the body. Nearly all "public indecency" laws, with their
Judeo-Christian bias, are ripe for reform. In a secular society, there is no
longer any real logic to laws controlling what we wear or don't wear in
public spaces. Private facilities, however, should be free to set whatever
dress rules they wish -- from the formal and traditional to the naughtily
avant-garde.
The problem is that there are genuine biological differences that make strict
gender equity difficult. A man's chest, no matter how impressively sculpted,
is not a secondary sex organ in the sense that a woman's is after puberty
(although as I pointed out in "Sexual Personae," Michelangelo sure did his
homoerotic best with the sensuously bulging chest of the "Giuliano de'
Medici"). The radical feminist claim that laws governing public exposure of
the female bosom are prima facie discriminatory is a bit reductive, stripping
woman of her unique, nature-endowed erotic aura.
A "topless patio bar" sounds like a most interesting place indeed -- like a
James Bond film directed by Russ Meyer. Mammary-gazing has become quite the
rage in the States, thanks to the strip-club boom of the 1990s. Canadians
now seem to be leading the way in pagan fantasy. More power to them!
To my most highly esteemed Camille:
Am I the only one who thinks that the most dangerous weapon in existence is
the cell phone? On my daily commute, I feel like my life is routinely
threatened by yuppies who care more about their conversation than highway
safety. If I were president, anyone who caused an accident while talking
on the phone would never get their license back! I'm sure you
agree. (Please don't
tell me you're a one-hander, too!)
Existential in Elmhurst
Dear Existential:
I totally agree with you: Yuppie drivers on cell phones are birdbrained
nincompoops who don't deserve those fine automobiles they treat only as
status symbols.
"Driving is the American sublime," I declared in the Lord Byron chapter of
"Sexual Personae." The car and the television have ruled American culture
since World War II, and I am religiously bonded to both. People who use
their cars like phone booths -- to stay in breathless touch with home or
office -- have no understanding of the modern driving experience. And just as
you say, they sometimes recklessly endanger others as well as themselves.
No, I do not have a cell phone in my car -- perish the thought! I have been a
devotee of talking on the telephone since I was a gossipy adolescent, but the
car is no place for it, except in emergencies. Driving (with music blasting)
is my vehicle of perfect mental and physical freedom. I shudder at the idea
that one's movements can be easily traced via the cell phone -- even that
brilliant open-field runner, O.J. Simpson, fatefully forgot this, leading to
the lugubrious, carnivalesque, slo-mo White Bronco Chase.
My style is the high-speed pit stop -- a blur of phone, fuel, toilet and
Nathan's hot dogs. Driving for me is densely, robustly physical; it's not a
boring vacuum to be filled with careerist nattering. Actually, this
intrinsic physicality is one reason, I've concluded, for the inability of so
many members of the Northeastern literary and media establishment to
understand my ideas. A lot of them are nerdy, droopy urbanites who don't own
cars or who have no feeling for driving -- by which one discovers America. Try
to imagine Susan Sontag, for example, behind the wheel of a car!
Actually, road safety is probably more gravely compromised by careless,
pushy, speeding truckers on pep pills; drunken teenage boys showing off to
gals and pals; and wobbly, elderly folks with slow reflexes and bad vision.
Two of the closest calls I've ever had involved not ditzy yuppies but what
looked like 80-year-old drivers obliviously zooming at full speed through a
red light or stop sign, nearly smashing everything in the intersection.
Driving skills in general seem to have declined in America. Public
education campaigns would make a lot more sense if they were aimed at
catastrophe-causing bad drivers rather than at cigarette smokers pursuing
private vices. Stop for directions. Ask Camille.
Fly girl as cry girl (05/27/97) Is Anne Heche another vampirish Yoko Ono? (05/13/97) Why I Go For Women With Big Beaks (04/29/97) The Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love (04/15/97) The Heaven's Gate castrati community (04/02/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
