Slaying the Mother

I have been a tremendous fan of Camille Paglia's ever since, during Christmas break of my senior year, my grandfather gave me a copy of Sexual Personae. To say that it blew my mind would be to use the only cliché that remotely conveys what this book did for me. For the first time, I was reading an intellectual who feared no idea, from any source, who thought of the past in terms of the rythmns of the earth, and though thoroughly feminist, wrote about men and the male psyche with understanding, even sympathy. She gave voice to thoughts I had hesitated to express. Naturally I read her two essay collections, and her Salon column, and ate up every word. She has a sense of humor and a depth of learning that amazed me then and still impresses me. She was my guru.


I am far from her today. This is not because she is less funny, less learned, or less able to skewer the deserving on her blood-guttered pikes. It is a function of time. I'm older, and quicker to recognize a thinker's words as the product of someone else's inner monologue. I am not betrayed by disagreement. And I find much to disagree with her about today. They are as follows:




1. The War. Let us begin with her first words, when asked by a Salon's Kerry Lauerman about the war: "This Iraq adventure is a political, cultural and moral disaster for the United States." Is it now? How a political disaster? We haven't lost yet. How a cultural disaster? American culture hasn't yet been changed by the war, and I think the war has, contra the declamations of the chattering class, merely brought to light the cultrual differences between ourselves and the rest of the First World, rather than created them. How a moral disaster? In what perverse ethical calculus does removing Saddam Hussein from power and putting a democratic government, one less susceptible to using terror as a foreign policy tool, one less willing to build and trade in weapons of mass destruction, a moral disaster? Does Camille really want to compare the Iraqi deaths with those suffered at oh, Hiroshima?


This kind of yippy, contentless carping is precisely the kind of thing Paglia has been so good at denouncing in the past, and still makes a show of doing. Ah, yes, the CIA just didn't get that Saddam was acting out of Arab machismo, pretending to have WMD's. And all those Kurds obliglingly died because that's their culture! Or so I might be erroneously reading, because the old girl obligingly flip-flops and says that "Of course it was worth trying to get rid of Saddam -- but not by an obsessive-compulsive distortion of American foreign policy." So we can do it, as long as we aren't too interested in doing it. Or something. She goes on: "It had to be done through the slow, patient process of international diplomacy, to show that our interests weren't simply selfish, that it wasn't just a naked grab for oil."


That loud rythmic pounding you hear is me hitting my head against my desk. Leaving the annoyingly undead canard about blood for oil aside, has Paglia been sleeping underneath the University of the Arts library for the past twelve years? International diplomacy has had it's chance to dispose of Saddam, and they've preferred to let him stay, to placate the tyranny of the status quo and to keep the Arabs focusing their hatred on the "shitty little country" (Israel). Paglia makes no mention of the French motivations of French intransigence or the numerous historical failures of the UN to enforce international peace. It must all be our fault. Whose got the tunnel-vision again?




2. The Media. I'm going ease off the vitriol now, because Paglia's much better when she gets to the subjects of her competency. She's long been an appreciator of Rush Limbaugh, and sums him up justly, as a media critic, giving notice to his central skill as a commentator and his seeming slipping of late (it sounds a bit apocryhpal to me, but she's been listening to him with a great deal more diligence than I have. She gets the benefit of the doubt). It's safe to say you won't find any other Democrat treating Limbaugh as anything other than a hornèd beast deservingly cast down into the depths of the Inquirer with Bat-boy and J-Lo's secret fling.


I even felt the old thrill of recognition when she lambasted Sean Hannity, a blaring radio jackass who gives me a headache, whom I can't even say I agree with because he never says anything that has substance to be agreed with. While obviously I find nothing wrong with someone who offers a conservative Catholic voice, Hannity is not the man to do so. There is no gentility in him, no sense of fair play, no treatment of all men as his brothers (I'm pretty sure that's in the Catechism somewhere). Plus, he's a master of monotony. If you're looking to spice up a late-afternoon party, have your guests play the Sean Hannity Drinking Game. Whenever Sean says "typical liberal," drink once. Whenever Sean says "liberal media" drink twice. Whenever Sean has a rude shouting match with a liberal caller, chug. First one to pass out and be freed by unconsciousness from his nasal, AV-club voice wins.


But Paglia misses her true chance here. She portentously refers to Sean as Beaver Jr., it's-the-50's-all-over-again ("typical liberal" Hey, who said that?). She blames all this polarization on Clinton, and says he should have resigned (never mind that she joined the chorus of Clinton's-a-bad-boy-but-Ken-Starr-is-Torquemada crowd, as if that was going to convince Silly Billy to resign. If you want someone gone, you need to sound like you mean it. That's as true of Presidents as it of Third-World dictators).


From a woman who once came to an understanding of why the 50's were so protective (World War II, that is), I expected a bit more than an I-despair-for-the-future routine, which has become de rigeur for rabble-rousers of all political persuasions. So, let's see, what can possibly have come along to convince the American people that morality should be stricter, clearer, less weighed down by nuance...Gosh, I don't know. Have we been attacked recently? Denounce Hannity and his spiritual fellows on the left all you want, but understand that you need to address the issue that has helped him rise. We're still waiting for the complex, culturally nuanced response to 9-11 that the Left keeps assuming is obvious.




3. Ze Rock. Shifting gears once again, Paglia is better still when going after her favorite subject, pop culture. I've never been a Madonna fan. In fact I've always found her a tediously self-involved public figure who made idly pleasing but otherwise forgettable music. Reading Camille, who's one of Madonna's great hymn-writers, hasn't changed my mind, but it has made me think about how art and sound and commerce mesh. Madonna, to my mind, has become a star far more for her videos than her songs, which are pleasant enough on the first listen but irritating on repetition. And repeated they were. I grew up in the 80's, the period of Ms. Cuccone's ascendancy, and basically spent second through seventh grade watching MTV. Madonna was everywhere. Michael Jackson was everywhere. Hair metal was everywhere. Punk fire and blues soulfulness were nowhere. Camille still doesn't get grunge. Like many boomers, she thought it was a rebellion against the 60's, when it was against the 80's. And she still can't see anyone in the music industry today that is worthy of the true status of "star," as though this were an objective standard. She can only see Britney and company, when nobody except Britney ever believed her to be more than a Barbie doll. I would love to read Camille's take on a band with the influences, image, and pyschosexual internal dynamic of the White Stripes. But Camille wouldn't take them seriously, or just see them as a gimmick retro-act. Stars are made, not born. There's plenty of bands and artists that deserve stardom, Camille. Get to work.


Of course, she's far more interested in stars than I am. I'm a punk by loyalty, and punks prefer anti-stars. Camille never got this either; she's said the Velvet Underground was her punk band, and never saw anything in the Sex Pistols that wasn't in the Velvets. The disdain of first-generation punk towards the entire idea of pop stardom (Lou Reed was never hostile to that) seems to have passed her by, or been dismissed as unworthy of comment. Being as how most punk bands ended up either becoming pop stars or self-destructing (or, in the case of the Pistols, both), it's easy to say that this disdain was juvenile or false. But it doesn't dismiss the question of why a culture should have a role for humans to transform themselves into the kind of monsters that Paglia claims Madonna has become.




4. The Blogosphere. "Words, Words, Words!" So Hurricane Camille describes the majority of blogs, as though she were Hamlet surrounded by a sea of noisy Polonii. No flair have they, no style, no pop! They do not command the eye. They engage in incessant circles of meta-commentary, which has quickly disintegrated into bipartisan name-calling rather than arguments about ideas. Most bloggers aren't good writers, and no "major figure" has emerged from the blogosphere


She's right. And once again, she's missed the point.


The problem lies in the fact that Paglia cannot stop showing her colors as a "pop-culture baby". Television is her medium of choice, her connection to the world at large. She's done well in her writing to put forth the idea that television is a narrative shared by society at large, that it is the incessant womb-tomb of American culture. Where she and I part company is when she insists on making judgements about people based on television appearances. Television is our most powerful voice, that's true. It's also an incredibly superficial and myopic voice. Sophisticated folk can find powerful subtext in it. But most folks can't, or won't bother, and the fact that the intelligent have to refer to the subtext of television means that there can't be much to the main text.


Paglia doesn't recognize this as a flaw in her reasoning. She doesn't think that George W. Bush can possibly be a good president, because he looks bad on television. She sized up Bill and Hillary based on pre-packaged prime-time spots, and then was shocked (shocked!) when they turned out to be different people in real life. Likewise, I suspect her opinion of Rumsfeld is based on a superficial reading of his televised press conferences (he's "out of control"? Why? Because he believed the war should happen? Was Henry Stimson "out of control"?). Well, I may admit that television is "America's kingmaker," as Paglia put it long ago, but that doesn't mean I think it should be so.

The blogosphere is not about producing major figures. It's not about about producing high-level scholastic thought. It's about creating an alternative voice to television, which hypnotically induces a passive, one-way information flow. The blogosphere is two-way, three-way, every-way. There are no major figures; there are no voices that rise to prominence except by the power and intellect of the voice itself. There's a great deal of stupidity that passes itself off as clever in the valley of the blogs. But there isn't any that gets a free pass. Here's a perfect example of a pagan realm of combat and honor; "no law in the arena," as her last book, Vamps & Tramps, proclaims. Sure, it isn't a palace of wisdom yet. We have to traverse the road of excess first. Let's not give up before the genesis is over.




Sexual Personae states that every generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead. There is truth to this, and one central to Paglia's entire view of the universe. We must remember the reality that spawned us, or that reality will make us suffer for it. Paglia's generation, that saw everything through the lens of the the same flickering light, will one day be pushed aside by their children, who saw more than they ever wanted to see through a thousand openings. This will not happen because my generation is stronger, wiser, or deeper than hers. It will happen because they have had their time, and we must have ours. The Earth so demands. Reading Paglia today with a critical eye makes me think of how unfair this process is. But it isn't my process, and it will destroy me as pitilessly as it profits me now. So I must move on from my once guru, admire though I do. I have plowin' to do.