Camille Paglia Dogma days
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Religion is becoming an endless political distraction -- but cultural
secularism is not the answer. Plus: The amazing Obamas! The return of
Gennifer Flowers! And the lamest duck of all
By Camille Paglia
Dec. 12, 2007 | Is there a lamer duck than George W. Bush? Bumbling
and fumbling even more than usual in his inability to finesse the
embarrassing release of an intelligence report on Iran's stand-down of
its nuclear program four years ago, Bush has seemed moody and unnerved
by his marginalization in the news, which is swamped by sharp primary
skirmishes in both parties.
With Vice President Dick Cheney, our Styrofoam iron chancellor, having
been rushed to the hospital the prior week for yet another heart
scare, the U.S. government seemed to have an ominous vacuum at the
top. But America's enemies shouldn't relax: Nothing is more dangerous
than the reflexive lashing out of a regime in decline. Iran is still a
mighty big target for an inept administration desperate for a legacy.
Never mind the innocent Iranian civilians who will be slaughtered in a
"surgical" aerial bombardment. Nameless, faceless, they don't matter
in the White House craps game of high-stakes Mideast strategy.
If the "surge" is really working in Iraq, all my fellow Democrats
should rejoice, because it's one more step toward getting U.S. troops
the hell out of there. Let Bush have his face-saving claims of victory
-- who cares? Just bring this stupid, wasteful war to an end. Our
brave soldiers and their families have suffered enough. And the toll
in death, mutilation and trauma among hundreds of thousands of
ordinary Iraqis is obscenely high and will never be fully documented.
I remain skeptical about long-term political prospects in Iraq, whose
nationhood was a convenient British fiction after World War I and
whose border territory may eventually be devoured by its neighbors,
including Turkey and Iran.
Meanwhile, the thundering horses in the presidential sweepstakes have
been neighing and nipping at each other as time grows short. Mitt
Romney may have been breathtakingly presumptuous in commandeering the
flag-bedecked forum of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library for
his long-anticipated speech on religion, but on balance, I think the
event was a success for him merely by demonstrating his idealistic,
bouncily upbeat character. Rudy Giuliani, dogged by tacky ethics
questions, seems in contrast like a shadowy, hard-bitten wheeler and
dealer, like Hillary Clinton a ruthless pursuer of power for its own
sake. True, Romney's had a million positions on any question, but
who's counting?
Romney's move may have been tactically necessary to counter
evangelical Protestants' rejection of Mormonism as a cult, but the
speech wasn't as conceptually developed as it should have been. As an
atheist, I wasn't offended by Romney's omission of nonbelievers from
his narrative of American history. On the contrary, I agree with him
that the founders of the U.S. social experiment were Christians (even
if many were intellectual deists) and that our separation of church
and state entails the rejection of an official, government-sanctioned
creed rather than the obligatory erasure of references to God in civic
life.
But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of
secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In
my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at
Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the
avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the
impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young.
Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God
-- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.
But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to
great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic
exercises in self-esteem. Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant
and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has
waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are
masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the
siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and
shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social
problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in
some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs --
including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-
addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.
Europe, which has settled into a comfortable secularism, is no model
for the future. The great era of European achievement in arts and
letters seems to be over. There are local luminaries but no towering
figures any longer of the stature of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso,
Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Ingmar Bergman. Europe is becoming a
museum and tourist trap, as people from all over the world flock to
see the remnants of Europe's royal and religious past -- the
conservative prelude, in other words, to today's slack liberalism.
Next page:
Searching, for example, for online news about Italy in recent years,
I've been dismayed by its near-total domination by soccer, with
archaeological discoveries and the restoration of Old Master paintings
coming in second. The pope flits hither and thither, but that's it. Is
there nothing new in post-Fellini Italian culture? It's as if Europe,
struggling to incorporate massive Muslim immigration, has retreated
into a bubble where the beautiful artifices of the past float like a
mirage. Secularism evidently cannot stimulate creativity as profoundly
as religion does -- whether in the artist's soaring affirmation or
angry resistance.
Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of religion in American politics is
becoming a tedious distraction from urgent social problems like
healthcare. I detest sanctimony in any form -- from the unctuous piety
of smarmy televangelists to ostentatious badge-wearing (such as the
gold-cross necklace that Hillary Clinton was regularly flaunting
around Capitol Hill). Religious protestations are now a rote formula
for asserting family values and opposing moral relativism, with which
the Democrats have been tagged since the hedonistic '60s. One reason
religion is so intrusive in the United States is because of the
mammoth institutional power of our mass media, which is unparalleled
anywhere else in the world. Religion has become a prophetic voice
crying in the wilderness against our Hollywood Babylon.
Meanwhile, my pessimism about the Democrats' chances in next year's
presidential election vanished for an ecstatic moment when I laid eyes
on a photo posted last week on the Drudge Report of the Obamas
standing with Oprah Winfrey. I was electrified by the relaxed, genial
Obama coupledom -- what a vision of a future White House! It flashed
through my mind that Michelle Obama would be the most graceful,
stylish first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy.
And she's fierce! Michelle in combat goes straight for the jugular.
There's none of that bitter, self-pitying feminazi irony that Hillary
indulges in........ MORE> > >
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/12/12/bush_flowers/index.html