To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > People Sept. 8, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/1999/09/08/camnew What I thought about for my summer vacation Janet Reno blew it; Al Gore's a shaved terrier; Ricky Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow are tedious; Harper's Bazaar kicks Vogue's ass; and a few words on opera. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Camille Paglia Greetings, Salon readers! My column returns after summer hiatus with a new format, which will allow greater flexibility as we move into the 2000 political season. I will continue to respond to questions, however, and the column will as usual cover the full range of contemporary issues, from culture to politics. My summer report begins with my enormous sense of satisfaction and relief over the renewal of public attention to the Waco disaster, which was so foul an affront to American civil liberties. The abortive investigation into the 1993 incident, in which more than 80 members of cult leader David Koresh's Branch Davidian religious sect died in a fire at their Texas compound, is currently being blamed on the FBI's withholding of crucial information from Attorney General Janet Reno, who had just assumed office. But the major media, with their strongly liberal bias, are equally guilty, for in trying to protect the new Democratic president, Bill Clinton, they let Reno get away scot-free with her blatant mismanagement of the Waco standoff. At the quickly convened congressional hearing into Waco in 1993, Reno's self-righteous invocation of the child-abuse card deserved to be derided and rejected by the media, who were already in a state of collective amnesia over the appalling spectacle of government tanks knocking down the buildings of a private citizen. Where were America's leftists after Waco? Diddling their thumbs in their urban and campus coteries, as usual. The shocking absence of protest about this incident drove the issue underground. It reemerged two years later on the lunatic far right, in Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco, at the cost of 168 lives. This is a good example of what I have described as the principle of rightward drift in populist thought (a phenomenon also germane to the endless blunders of insular gay activism). When authentic critique is silenced or censored by the left, issues drift subliminally to the right, where they burst out again full-formed as fascist violence. Government authority was illegitimately used at Waco -- and one fascism begot another. A side effect has been the destruction of yet another female professional reputation: Janet Reno's mishandling of Waco, like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's folly in leading us into a senseless, hideously expensive war over Kosovo, shows that women, when placed in high office, can be just as incompetent as men. The summer's major political news was the inability of anointed crown prince Al Gore to get any traction in his campaign for next year's Democratic presidential nomination. Gore's much-vaunted image makeover -- a leaner physique and casual polo shirts -- has actually reduced his viability even further. His old relaxed portliness gave him mass and authority, à la Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, with a hyped-up, barking manner and a suspiciously freshened look around the eyes, Gore has lost his soft, slow and Southern sensual appeal. He looks pasty and petty, like a shaved terrier. Bill Bradley's tiresome, phlegmatic monotone has begun to seem more and more substantive, but his candidacy remains a blank slate to most people outside of New Jersey, which he represented in the U.S. Senate for 18 years. I saw a striking sign of Bradley's potential bipartisan appeal at a family wedding in upstate New York in August: A recently televised Bradley speech was being praised by my older Italian-American relatives -- the very voters whom the Democrats lost in the chaotic late 1960s, when Richard Nixon rode the "law-and-order" issue into the White House. "Bradley seems presidential," they approvingly remarked -- implicitly acknowledging that the untested Gov. George W. Bush, the likely Republican nominee, does not. If a Bradley nomination can pull these long-disaffected FDR Democrats back to the fold, the Democratic Party will have triumphantly revitalized itself at last. Another news tidbit from the summer: the preposterous trial balloon of a Warren Beatty presidential candidacy. Much as I adored Beatty in classic films like "Splendor in the Grass" (1961), "The Parallax View" (1974) and "Shampoo" (1975), his track record as a political analyst is pretty dismal, and the evidence of his commitment to public service, or to any group outside his Hollywood coterie, is nonexistent. "Bulworth" (1998), which Beatty directed and starred in, is an awful film, clumsy and manipulative and betraying a grotesquely condescending view of "the people" that is typical of armchair leftism. Warren, please refocus! We need better movies, not gassier politics. Hillary Clinton's quixotic flirtation with a senatorial candidacy in New York hogged press attention this summer, eclipsing the Gore campaign (perhaps fatally) as well as the pioneering presidential run of Republican Elizabeth Dole -- who, despite her retchingly saccharine persona, deserves a lot more credit for her gritty, sweaty, rumpled take-it-to-the-streets approach, a marked contrast to the cloistered, royalist tour that Secret Service-pampered Hillary is making at taxpayer expense. As a now-disillusioned early admirer of the Clintons, I contributed a few darts to the Hillary melee via a May interview with Charlotte Hays, editor of the Women's Quarterly of the Independent Women's Forum. The most unexpectedly popular of my remarks seems to have been my description of Hillary's shadowy male cabal -- Harold Ickes, Ira Magaziner, et al. -- as "eunuch geeks," a term Liz Smith seized on to lead off her syndicated column. (With his satiric gift for capturing American speech patterns, Rush Limbaugh did a great imitation of my Brenda Vaccaro-on-a-rampage delivery as he read this extended passage from the interview twice on his radio show.) My most serious charge against Hillary, however, was that she is an "authoritarian" who does not understand how democratic government works. My favorite TV moment of the summer was philosopher-warrior Christina Hoff Sommers telling the terminally vapid, chokingly mop-tressed rocker Sophie B. Hawkins on the Aug. 16 "Politically Incorrect," "Mother Nature is not a feminist" -- to which Cybele, Astarte and Kali undoubtedly sent up rousing cheers. Mother Nature certainly spoke with a bang in Turkey, site of so much troubled and glorious ancient history. It gave me the shivers when the first reports about the inconceivably catastrophic Aug. 17 earthquake located it along the "Anatolian fault" -- since Anatolia was the provenance of the bloody cult of the Great Mother, with her sacrificial, pretty-boy son-lover and her castrated, transvestite priests. The Drudge Report flagged a fascinating Aug. 20 account from the Times of London about a giant tidal wave that hit a coastal resort on the Sea of Marmara in the quake's aftermath, replaying a geologic scenario that may have produced the biblical description of the parting of the Red Sea that drowned Pharaoh's army. Human vulnerability to nature's caprices was also dramatized by this summer's severe drought, which affected many regions of the United States, including my own. Safe in their affluent enclaves, members of the major media seem to have been virtually untouched by this disaster, except as it hampered the watering of their lawns and golf courses. The superb, invisible efficiency of our capitalist distribution system (which I celebrated in my first book) ensured that the food supply has remained uninterrupted in the Northeast, to which produce is trucked from California. But the horrifying absence of rain, week after week, should have unnerved every sensible person. It showed how quickly famine struck in the pre-industrial era -- and how quickly climate can change, bringing down even the proudest and most powerful of cultures. If you don't believe me, go ponder the desert map of Iraq -- once-fertile Mesopotamia, where Babylon ruled. Pop conundrum of the summer: Are Ricky Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow the same person? Their tight, artificial, paper-doll smiles look like they were etched by the same syrupy fantasist -- Kathie Lee Gifford with PMS. God, I'm so sick of that pair! The post-Tilberis, visually reinvigorated Harper's Bazaar, with its dynamite cover photo of a stylishly lounging Lauryn Hill, kicks Vogue's ass this month: Vogue's stale September cover girl is the ever-awkward Paltrow, all pointy elbows and empty smirks, as if she's running for spindle queen. It was a tepid summer in music. Jennifer Lopez's album, "On the 6," with its sophisticated blend of Madonna and Janet Jackson, had real staying power. My partner Alison's favorite song on the disc is the hit "If You Had My Love," while mine are "Waiting for Tonight" and the rhythmically complex "It's Not That Serious," whose bouncing, thumping bass line reminds me of the raucous Italian-American mass festivities of my youth. I don't approve, however, of Lopez's increasingly bleached-out Anglo look or that shortsighted reduction of her very ripe Latin booty. My music study for the summer was devoted to three operas: the 1960 Teatro alla Scala recording of Bellini's "Norma," starring Maria Callas (whose 1954 "Norma" is of course canonical); the 1952 RCA recording of Verdi's "Il Trovatore" with Jussi Bjoerling and Zinka Milanov (my late friend Jim Fessenden's favorite soprano after Callas); and the 1982-83 Decca recording of Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" with Luciano Pavarotti (as the "Governor of Boston"!), Margaret Price, Christa Ludwig and Kathleen Battle, in fine voice in her travesti role as Oscar. Our valediction comes from "The Passion of Ayn Rand," a 1998 Showtime program that was just released on video and that stinks in many ways but hits the mark in others. Confronting two tremulous visitors, Rand, played by the surprisingly effective Helen Mirren (never a favorite of mine but here as campy as Tallulah), demands, "Tell me your principles." They dutifully respond with Rand-speak that sounds like vintage Paglia: "To think for myself. To reach my own conclusions. To seek truth wherever it might lead." See you in two weeks! salon.com | Sept. 8, 1999