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Imagination unleashed in all its perverse glory | page 1, 2, 3
Whatever Giuliani's relatively minor misjudgments in his handling of the police shooting of the unarmed Patrick Dorismond outside a midtown bar on March 16, the real problem is the New York Police Department's over-reliance on covert sting operations in the drug war. Despite its deplorable strong-arm tactics toward sex shops, the Giuliani administration deserves great credit for the reduction of crime and the general upgrading of quality of life in Manhattan. But undercover officers should be used very sparingly in a democracy. Systematic entrapment of citizens is a fascist exercise. Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
A far better deterrent to street crime, drug trafficking, and gang shootouts is more police in uniform walking a beat, mingling with the people and establishing warm relationships of mutual respect. Officers sealed off in their flashy cruisers or cantering by like Cossacks on horseback end up feeling and acting like an occupying army. As for Hillary's run for a Senate seat in a state where she has never lived (and where she ruthlessly drove out the hardworking, local pro-choice candidate who had earned the nomination, Rep. Nita Lowey), Brad Anderson sends this nifty contribution: As a scholar (and fan) of decadence, I'm surprised you haven't highlighted the kinship between Hillary Clinton and Diocletian's horse. In his last act as emperor, Diocletian appointed his favorite horse to the Roman Senate, in the same way that Clinton is now appointing his favorite steed to our own Senate. Thanks, Mr. Anderson! When I saw the subject line of your message ("Hillary as Diocletian's Horse"), I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Let the imperial games begin! I certainly had a chuckle at the screaming headline of the March 28 tabloid Globe: "Hillary's List of Gay Lovers -- What her rivals are threatening to expose." Inside, amidst much heavy breathing, were butch photos of Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and New York lawyer Susan Thomases but little else aside from an improbable tale of a female model's in-and-out "tryst" with the first lady in a "posh L.A. home." As I told the New York Post two years ago when these old rumors surfaced (thanks to smarmy former White House advisor Dick Morris), my gut instinct as a lesbian is that Hillary may well have experimented a bit in college, but everything about her since then screams Refrigerator Woman, cut off at the neck except when her faithless husband plays Huck Finn penitent and turns up the heat in the sugar shack. Like McCain with the melting, simpering, tittering reporters, Hillary does know how to work and pump the homoerotic game to bind breathless, dazzled flunkies to her breast in the political pecking order. It's an opportunistic art as old as the buzzing court of Darius. Jennifer Wise reports an interesting epiphany about "Our Lady Hillary": My friends and I may have stumbled across a clue to her personality on New Year's Day, while watching her and President Clinton offer televised New Year's wishes to the nation. We noticed with horror that Hillary wasn't blinking. At all. Yes -- an android programmed with bureaucratic clichés of exquisite banality, falling like interstellar cinders on the hapless voters of New York. One of the worst cases of campus censorship in years may have occurred last week at Georgetown University. I am grateful to the Independent Women's Forum for alerting me immediately on the day that Robert Swope, a 21-year-old senior and government major from California, was summarily fired from his position as a columnist on the Hoya, the university newspaper. The immediate cause was Swope's attack on Eve Ensler's femi-nazi extravaganza, "The Vagina Monologues," which had just been performed on the Georgetown campus. The Hoya's editors refused to print the column while it was still timely and gave a series of feeble excuses about why publication had to be deferred. Swope, whom I contacted, allowed me to examine the record of his exchanges with the editors, including their contradictory and shifting responses leading to his dismissal. I conclude that the newspaper, probably reacting to multiple outside pressures, caved in to the forces of political correctness and violated Swope's academic freedom. While I haven't reviewed all his prior columns, I did find Swope's Feb. 11 critique of women's studies on the Hoya Web site. "Women's studies is a disaster," he declared, calling it an "intellectually bankrupt academic fraud" that has been propped up by "cowardly"and "weak-willed" campus administrators. (Sounds right to me!) Asserting that women's studies creates "an industry of professional victims," Swope daringly called on alumni to protest by withholding donations from the university. On Feb. 15, the Hoya published a lengthy rebuttal from a female associate dean, who accused Swope of purveying "misinformation" and complained that "20 inches of Hoya space" had been wasted on his views. Nothing could be clearer: The Hoya should grant ample space only to voices conforming to orthodox feminism.
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