Camille Paglia - September Salon column
Tully Albrecht
which was in Q&A format. This is what she wrote last month, the piece to
which the readers were responding.
Sept. 09, 2009 |
What a difference a month makes! When my last controversial column
posted on Salon in the second week of August, most Democrats seemed
frozen in suspended animation, not daring to criticize the Obama
administration's bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and
comfort to the GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident
Democrats found their voices, and by late August even the liberal
lemmings of the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically
altered their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall
insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare
bills as well as of Obama's declining national support.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an
Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with
which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators
publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic
missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all
along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have
-- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug
in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had
more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less
arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs
have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the
gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough
to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major
cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the
malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to
destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely
to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first
laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal
point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens
to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the
situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this
week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has
been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential
election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble
candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot,
that may well happen.
This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from
the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster -- as witness
the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones
last week -- but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial
amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's
innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support
materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the
president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even
worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the
busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have
their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New
York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to
revamp national healthcare?
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea
party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread
public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and
conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that
network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national
debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from
talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals
have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees
in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking
shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence
I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the
deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute
of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring
around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the
passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall
meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national
sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged,
manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary
Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed,
Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class
professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers
(one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the
healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly
individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are
as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions
to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government
authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a
stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment
principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives
rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin's
book "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," which was No. 1 on
the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without
receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that
the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the
nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made
famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience
at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967
song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto
for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place
or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile
toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell
them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product
of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and
logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in
the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college
application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic
that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down,
promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a
style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism,
sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The
Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clich�s that it's
positively pickled.
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the
self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in
the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles
and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media
and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative
articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and
practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by
Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed
with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most
Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be
the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of
services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of
a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as
large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian
dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of
organization and management.
But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a spiritual dimension that is
long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time. Here's a
gorgeous example: Bob Welch's song "Hypnotized." which appears on
Fleetwood Mac's 1973 album "Mystery to Me." (The contemplative young man
in this recent video is not Welch.) It's a peyote dream inspired by
Carlos Castaneda's fictionalized books: "They say there's a place down
in Mexico/ Where a man can fly over mountains and hills/ And he don't
need an airplane or some kind of engine/ And he never will." This
exhilarating shamanistic vision (wonderfully enhanced by Christine
McVie's hymnlike backing vocal) captures the truth-seeking pilgrimages
of my generation but also demonstrates the dangerous veering away from
mundane social responsibilities. If the left is an incoherent shambles
in the U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on
drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois
liberals are left. (I addressed the drugs cataclysm in "Cults and Cosmic
Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" in the Winter
2003 issue of Arion.)
Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about
to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It
lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the
national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical
emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of
marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the
truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference
in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly
needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so
very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring
thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our
national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the
illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick
Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless
war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.
Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let's get the hell out! While I
vociferously opposed the incursion into Iraq, I was always strongly in
favor of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan to smithereens in our
search for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps. But committing
our land forces to a long, open-ended mission to reshape the political
future of that country has been a fool's errand from the start. Every
invader has been frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like
mountain terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a
larger sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the
roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been
disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for 5,000
years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian acrimony for a
tranquil solution to be possible for generations to come. The presence
of Western military forces merely inflames and prolongs the process and
creates new militias of patriotic young radicals who hate us and want to
take the war into our own cities. The technological West is too
infatuated with easy fixes. But tribally based peoples think in terms of
centuries and millennia. They know how to wait us out. Our presence in
Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or
treasure.
In response to persistent queries, I must repeat: No, I do not have a
Facebook page, nor am I a "friend" on anyone else's Facebook. Nor do I
Twitter. This Salon column is my sole Web presence. Whatever
doppelg�nger Camille Paglias are tripping the light fantastic out there
(as in the haunted bus-station episode of "The Twilight Zone"), they
aren't me!
-- By Camille Paglia
--
the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected
what the United Nations is to marginal states:
it offers the illusion of empowerment
and community (Ralph Peters)