_______________ TOM CRUISE IS NO CRUISER BY CAMILLE PAGLIA (05/12/98)
	It's been a couple of years since I read Camille Paglia's "butt-kicking feminism." Having renewed efforts recently, I have no doubt that many will continue to see her as "take-charge feminism's" strident varsity coach. But I found her recent response to Tony initially interesting, but in the end, unfortunate. I celebrate Paglia's idea that a virile, thrusting masculine sexuality is essential to men, and hence culture, but Paglia's theories assume too much that all connected with that which throbs will be therapeutic for culture. Sure, it's important for men to feel sexually vital, as the run on Viagra shows, but getting it up isn't sufficient for defining mature masculinity, and there are so many toxic avenues for the release of male sexuality that we'd all be better served if Paglia helped name a few of the relevant ones outside bedroom satisfactions, instead of just seeming to assume that culture will be somehow naturally renewed by omnidirectional male vibrations. It's the end of the undergraduate academic year where I live in West Philadelphia. Last night while taking out the garbage at 12:30 a.m., I heard an uproar of caterwauling male voices in the garage of the frat house on the other side of the urban alley behind my house. Exam week had finished and the Greeks were finishing up with their plebes -- the yearlings. The chant was call and response: the leader screaming a sequence of indecipherable obscenities interspersed with the Greek letters of the house, and the plebes screaming back, "Yes sir," and more Greek letters. A couple of the elder brothers ran outside and banged on the metal garage doors synchronously with the screaming inside -- a kind of makeshift rhythm section. After about 10 minutes, the screaming ended. Well, I suppose the plebes now knew the letters of their fraternity and could scream, "Yes sir," but I couldn't imagine much else happening with their churning reservoirs of flowing male virility (which both Camille and I celebrate), except that it was being drained off into a poorly executed pagan ceremony, the origins of which I'm sure would be unknown to most of the brothers. Yeah, you can uncork the male firehose, but who's manning the direction of the spray? If Ms. Paglia is upset that men are so wimpy they won't be able to defend the fatherland against its next invaders, whomever they might be, then let her go ahead and kill a few of the bad guys herself. She can have my rifle. I have participated in the ready-making of weapons of mass destruction and have seen them used to deadly effect, and I wonder about the interior mental constructions of those who speak so easily of warfare. In my area of the city, innocent people are regularly killed by bullets shot from the guns of boys whose repressed sexual energy is acted out through violence. Until Ms. Paglia does more in her commentary to separate destructive male violence from liberating male sexual power, many will continue to lament that such a needed self-help advocate seems unable to untangle the beauty of male power from the horror of male violence. Orgasm and war are not the same thing. The world cannot learn this soon enough. -- Kip Leitner With her typical and tired out-of-nowhere attack on Leonardo DiCaprio, Camille Paglia proves, once again, that she is the queen of truly desperate columnists. Her strategy: Say something outrageously offensive (and irrelevant to the question asked) merely for outrageously offensive's sake. Her embarrassing and pointless verbal assault on DiCaprio, currently the world's easiest target by virtue of his teeny-bopper popularity, isn't the cutting-edge commentary I've come to expect from Salon. It is, however, just the kind of crap I've come to expect from Paglia: Stupid. At least she's consistent. -- Darren Kissinger Baltimore
_______________ NEWT TO THE RESCUE BY DAVID HOROWITZ (05/18/98)
	David Horowitz's recent anti-Clinton rant was full of misrepresentations and mischaracterizations. He at once dismisses the failures of the Republican Whitewater, Foster, ticket-gate, etc. investigations, and focuses on virtual conspiracy allegations about sex, lying to protect your marriage -- nationally irrelevant topics at best. Horowitz is obviously trying to absorb the flak for those who label this as the "Do Nothing, Investigation Congress." This guy ought to get a materially relevant subject upon which to opine and narrow his focus on nationally important matters such as nuclear proliferation, down-home family issues (family leave, gender discrimination), tax policy, environmental legislation and so on. When Horowitz decides to shed his mantle as a partisan in the virtual right-wing conspiracy and offer constructive criticism on materially relevant subjects, he may gain some credibility. -- Robert Shafer Regarding David Horowitz's claim that Kenneth Starr's investigation into the president is not about sex, I agree to a point, though Starr's puritanical upbringing should arouse (pardon the pun) some suspicion in that regard. As should Starr's insistence on hauling Secret Service agents before the grand jury. Starr says, accurately, that these agents are law enforcement officers and therefore should be required to testify about illegal deeds, regardless of who commits them. But he wants the agents to testify about whether the president and Monica Lewinsky were ever alone together in the White House. That, in and of itself, is not a crime. The alleged crime was Clinton's lying under oath about the existence of such a meeting (if there was one) long after it supposedly occurred. But Starr doesn't care about this cavernous difference. Nor does he care that forcing the agents to testify could, according to the Service and, not insignificantly, fellow Republican George Bush, endanger the life of this and future presidents. Surely Horowitz, and perhaps even Starr, doesn't believe that anything President Clinton may have done warrants a death sentence. -- Todd J. Sanders You use Newt Gingrich as an example of "Republican conservative values"? In 1980 and 1984, I was proud to call myself a conservative, and voted both times for a TRUE conservative, Ronald Reagan. Newt Gingrich is a phony would-be conservative pretender who doesn't deserve the right to lick the mud off Reagan's boots. He's a bigger liar and crook than Clinton ever could be, and is one of the biggest hypocrites to ever crawl out from under a rock. Why else are his poll numbers as to trustworthiness even lower than Clinton's, and why are two prominent conservatives, Arianna Huffington and Gary Bauer, saying on ABC's "Nightline" that he should step down? David, you've hitched your wagon to a loser. Pure and simple. -- Ross Sauer
_______________ REVIEW OF "Rat Pack Confidential" BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS (05/11/98)
	The review of Shawn Levy's "Rat Pack Confidential" contained a generalization or three about the so-called Cocktail Nation movement and its adherents. Far from being a former grungeoid, I'm a 38-year-old man who grew up listening to the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, the Ramones, Tom Jones, Muddy Waters and Frank Sinatra among others. No martini has ever passed my lips willingly, and outside of a slight fetish for Shriner fezzes and leopard-skin jackets, I've never had any marked desire to dress up and play a cigarette-swaggering, dame-pinching cocktail swinger. All popular music, and music nostalgia in particular, contains as much interest in the style that surrounded a particular genre as it does in the music itself. Most lounge lovers I know are well aware of Frank's questionable mob ties and Lawford's Kennedy connection. As for the alcohol abuse and womanizing, please point me to one musical movement outside of gospel singing that hasn't involved one or both. Granted, America's glamorization of the mob is inexplicable, but it should come as no surprise that this simply adds to the Pack's considerable cachet of retro-hipness. Leaving all of the unsavory cultural detritus aside, the songs of Dino and Frank were simply fantastic: great tunes, well-sung, performed with a style and polish that's rare in today's music. The pop-cultural pendulum swings and so does the music. -- Matt Marchese SALON | May 20, 1998