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Feinstein for president! Buchanan for emperor! | page 1, 2, 3
Speaking of the House of DeGeneres (where the ever-teenybopper closets are lined with matching Hush Puppies), I was tipped off by an old friend that at a "queer month" event at the Syracuse University Student Union several weeks ago, the visiting Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche kvetched about my saying two years ago that Anne has "the mental depth of a pancake." "We hate her," announced the blonde Bobbsey Twins -- a tellingly childish locution from outspoken proponents of hate crimes legislation. Dear, dear, I guess I struck a nerve. But as long as that exhibitionistic duo keeps courting cameras at glitzy Hollywood events and as long as Ellen keeps draping herself over her mom's lap for the cover of gay magazines, I'll go on lobbing my Amazonian darts. Speaking of dizzy photo hogs, Brad Pitt doubtless thinks he's very clever by posing in a Pop Art mini-dress and a gay-anal cut-off rubber garden glove for the cover of the Oct. 5 Rolling Stone, but I feel very sorry for his putative girlfriend, the talented Jennifer Aniston, whose once very appealing fleshiness has been manically stripped off until she is now nearly unrecognizable. I'm tired of hearing what a great relationship Pitt and Aniston have. His gay-twitting stunts (such as posing bare bum up for W magazine this summer) have become ostentatious acts of aggression toward her and women in general. I hope Aniston gets her kit out of there before obsessive anxiety consumes her promising career as a character actress. Another actor, Matthew McConaughey, was arrested for drug possession this week when police, responding to a noise complaint, invaded his Austin, Texas, home in the middle of the night and found marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Alison and I were instantly outraged and were relieved when the drug charge was dropped. Though we have no interest in drugs (we favor the ancient Dionysian tradition of alcohol), we believe that the government has no right to interfere in an individual's choices about his or her body. The international drug war is a colossal waste of precious resources that should be diverted to social services. Given the massive drug pushing (Prozac, Ritalin, etc.) by pharmaceutical companies, there is no rationale for banning the sale of natural substances like marijuana. I am on the record as supporting the legalization of drugs, consistent with government regulation of alcohol. Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
Employers are justified, however, in imposing weekly drug tests on those who operate heavy machinery or who, like train engineers, are charged with the public safety. As a professional actor whose work is psychological, Matthew McConaughey has a perfect right to take whatever drugs he pleases in the sanctity of his own home. But please spare the poor neighbors! They have a right to privacy too. A foreign exchange student signing himself Mark reports his impressions of the University of California at Berkeley: "I am all too often flabbergasted and disappointed by the extraordinary ignorance and mediocrity I find among the students here. With all due respect, the level of awareness and international, cultural, and historical perspective of the average American seems to be about as high as those of a remote jungle tribe. I thought I was coming to an elite educational institution. Don't get me started on the teachers. What is your view?" Mark concludes: "What hope is there for an empire that has grown so powerful its citizens are becoming increasingly detached from the rich world around them, and what may happen if conflict forces them into cultural interactions with others?" This account from a visitor to America should shake the complacency of the academic establishment. It certainly corroborates what I have been arguing for years, beginning with my 1991 Arion manifesto, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," and my 1992 TLS essay, "The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S." Graduates of even our elite schools know less and less, as the acquisition of hard knowledge has been de-emphasized in favor of "critical thinking" (which sounds good but melts into sloganeering sophistry). In the long run, the security of this country is at risk, as its most highly trained citizens lose the will to defend it. Paul Ehrlich of Washington, D.C., kindly alerts me to the invocation of my name on the Oct. 4 episode of NBC's "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" -- about which I'd heard only a vague rumor. This was my second prime time epiphany of the season, the first being in the Sept. 20 premiere of NBC's "Suddenly Susan": Brooke Shields as a fired reporter defied boss Eric Idle by vowing to follow my example of publishing in Playboy when Ms. wouldn't have me. According to Ehrlich, a "Law and Order" detective investigating the murder of a young model makes some "scathing comments about teenage girls in the modeling world", to which another character retorts, "Well, Camille Paglia calls them modern-day Greek goddesses." Ehrlich asks, "Did this distort your views?" Since childhood, I regarded fashion models as works of living sculpture: the flamboyant images from women's magazines merged in my mind with the statues of Greek goddesses in the Louvre and at Fontainebleau that were pictured in large portfolios that my father brought back from studying Romance languages in France in the early 1950s. The haughty attitudes and iconic gestures of fashion models mesmerized me: as a scruffy tomboy, I had no desire to wear fashion, only to contemplate it. This early veneration of the fashion model, which I shared with so many gay men but no American lesbian I ever met, is one reason I went hammer and tongs against the anti-fashion, sex-phobic ideology of the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin school that dominated feminism in the 1980s -- when the dreary, pedantic, visually inert style of now-defunct Lacanian feminism was also flourishing on campus. The worship of beauty may be innate in my pagan genes. It's no coincidence that two Italian-American women (to return to Maggie Balistreri's earlier point) were instrumental in restoring respect for fashion and beauty to feminism: In a 1991 interview with me, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera headlined my militant prophecy, "Io e Madonna faremo fuori Lacan in USA" ("I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America"). On Nov. 10, I will be lecturing on "The Romance of Beauty" at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, part of a series accompanying the exhibition "Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century." When the massive museum catalog arrived last week, I was surprised and pleased to see, emblazoned across a dramatic photo of Madonna ripely bursting out of an 18th century corset, a line from the 1990 New York Times op-ed piece where I fired the first shot in the pro-beauty insurgency: "Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure." Italian-American women get it done!
Got a question for the Oracle? Ask Camille.
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