Camille Paglia

You had concerns about how “strained, dead and aloof” Kerry seemed on the stump, and how his handlers had turned him into a “prissy” figure. But he’s your choice this year. Why?

First of all, I think Kerry will be a far better president than he is a campaigner. This is a man with gravitas who is totally prepared to be president. He has national political experience, historical knowledge, and personal contact with the wider world — unlike Bush. Where he lacks information, Kerry will inform himself — unlike Bush. I think he will make good appointments — unlike Bush. And Kerry will repair our alliances: He will win back respect for America abroad. He speaks other languages — unlike Bush. And Kerry’s wife, Teresa, despite her current excessive candor (reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s arrival at the White House), is a truly international personality who speaks many languages and understands world cultures.

Kerry will build bridges again to the outside world. He will be someone whom America can be proud to represent us. In the age of terrorism, we cannot simply withdraw into our fort the way Bush has and imagine all will go well. There are no walls any longer. Our walls are absolutely porous to infiltration by terrorists. Thus we cannot have a world poisoned by anti-Americanism the way it is now, thanks to the clumsiness and arrogance of the Bush administration.

Secondly, on Iraq: I still say, as I told Salon before the war, that it was despicable that most of the Democratic senators lay down flat and voted for the Iraq war resolution. So Kerry is trapped in that. He really does blow with the wind — as the Republicans satirized in one of the greatest political ads ever, which showed him wind surfing back and forth across the screen. Nevertheless, Kerry’s in a much better position to get us out of this damned war. Reelecting Bush just mires us in the same failed policies: Bush will just go on and on to prove he was right in the first place. He never fires anyone! And so we’ll only have a stubborn continuation of the same blinkered strategies — and maybe more foolish incursions. Iran and Syria may be next. We’re throwing billions of dollars down the drain.

Third, this entire administration needs to be replaced. There’s not a single one of them that I respect. I used to think Condi Rice was a great role model for women, but she’s shown that, as a Sovietologist, she had no feel for the religious sectarianism and roiling animosities of the Mideast. And Colin Powell is craven. After those intelligence wonks sent him before the U.N. with crappy evidence of WMD, he should have resigned in protest. The obedient good soldier has lost his soul.

And yet you’ve had your frustrations with the Democratic Party this election cycle …

As a registered Democrat, I’m depressed about the mediocre field that the party was able to launch. It’s really amazing. One would think that the Democrats, energized by the progressive principles of my 1960s generation, would at least have a flair for political theater. But it’s incredible how poorly Kerry’s team has managed this campaign. A good example is that fiasco of a midnight rally after Bush’s hyper-cinematic acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. It was painful to watch — disorganized, rambling and graceless, with atrocious visuals.

I’m definitely voting for Kerry, however. I voted for Clinton twice and then Nader the last time around. But I wouldn’t dream of voting for Nader this year, and not because he doesn’t have a right to run — any American does! But Nader exposed himself as a narcissist by being an invisible man for the past four years. Where the hell was he? I was eagerly looking to Nader to launch the Green Party, an authentic third party movement in this country that could challenge the ossified two-party system. I’m bitterly disillusioned with him.

At any rate, Kerry, I feel, is a genuinely thoughtful character — perhaps too much so for in-the-trenches political warfare. As a campaigner, however, he seems to lack the kind of managerial ability and decisiveness that one expects in a president. For heaven’s sake, if you’re not even able to manage your own campaign without going backwards and recycling Clinton retreads, then there’s something seriously deficient that doesn’t bode well for your ability to appoint a Cabinet and referee disputes among them. Kerry sometimes seems like this sepulchrally isolated figure floating out there without the ability to make instinctual gut decisions the way Clinton always could.

Another thing is Kerry’s total lack of facility with modern media communication. Clinton’s genius for this — for good and ill — is becoming clearer and clearer. Kerry can’t even work with a camera — he doesn’t understand it; he doesn’t feel it’s there. In speech after speech since the convention, he’ll be delivering some sober, substantive policy address, and his eyes are going from left to right to left again, his head swiveling like a kewpie doll on a spring. He looks from one teleprompter to another and never lets the camera see him frontally. With those heavy lidded, hooded eyes, he rarely looks toward the lens. It’s no wonder people feel as though they don’t know him! By the third debate, he finally looked directly into the camera, and it was fantastic. It was the one debate where he finally started to connect with the American people. But as soon as he went out on the road again, it was gone again.

When we look back at Clinton’s town hall debate with the first Bush, we can see Clinton’s shrewd media skills. In fact, it practically makes you sick — Clinton is so blatantly turning his face and body to get in full camera range, when even Bush is talking. There’s one classic moment when Bush is standing and giving an answer, and Clinton is practically falling off his stool as he tries to get into the picture! So we had this preening parrot in the White House who would squeeze out fake tears at funerals as soon as the cameras turned on. It’s incredible that Kerry seems to have learned no lessons at all from Clinton’s mastery of mass communications. On the contrary, for months, Kerry as an unknown quantity, let himself be defined in the media by his right-wing opposition.

Like with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth –

Exactly! As a veteran listener of talk radio, I can tell you the conservative shows were strongly airing the Swift Boat issue in April. Now how in the world didn’t the Democratic strategists still have any response ready for this in August? Was it such a big surprise? If so, the superstructure of the Democratic Party is totally divorced from reality. It evidently has no sense whatever about the real dynamics of political thought among the electorate at large. If Kerry loses this election, the entire Democratic Party establishment needs to be torn to pieces and built up again, because it won’t just be his failure, it will be the party’s failure. Kerry’s weakness as a personality became clear when he wasn’t able to dislodge [Democratic National Committee chairman Terry] McAuliffe from the DNC. He wanted to get rid of McAuliffe — that servile water boy of the Clintons — and he choked. Kerry didn’t have the balls to get rid of him. Every time that yapping buffoon McAuliffe is on the air, the Democrats lose the votes of the undecided.

I think a lot of people wonder how anyone can take the Swift Boat Vets seriously. How did they build any cachet?

Early on, the Republican strategists showed their wit and cunning in labeling Kerry a “flip-flopper.” It was the kind of prankishness I would have expected from Democrats, a 1960s Yippies style. As soon as Kerry went out after the Democratic convention, there were these little groups of Republicans in the first rows holding rubber flip-flop sandals above their heads and flapping them like undulating waves of tideland grasses. It was hilarious! If that stuck in the public mind, it was for a reason. Kerry was far too professorial with his answers on TV, “On the one hand this, on the other hand that.” Now, it’s absolutely true that complex times call for complex answers. But Kerry’s difficulty in speaking plainly to the mass audience has been a major problem in this campaign.

From the start, the right wing tried to tag Kerry with Jane Fonda; one of the earliest images flying around the Web during the primaries showed him sitting on the ground a few rows back from Jane Fonda at an antiwar protest. They weren’t together, but the two were definitely in each other’s presence. That was the first attempt to tar Kerry with Fonda. And I think we Democrats owe Jane Fonda a tremendous debt by the way she cannily, shrewdly held back. Many another diva actress would have leapt into the spotlight and made herself a focus. But because Fonda wisely stayed in the shadows, she didn’t add energy to this peripheral issue of the Kerry-Fonda connection. It never got traction.

The problem, however, is that there really is ambiguity about how Kerry won his medals. There was a story there. And the gross failure of the major media, with their bias toward the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, was not to let that story be fully examined early on in a fair and impartial manner. By their silence they simply empowered this story and made it worse and worse. I heard about the Swift Boat vets’ claims on a late-night radio talk show in April, and believe me, my eyes popped open! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing — it seemed so preposterous. Yet the story had legs and grew and grew.

There were legitimate questions, but it was months before the major media addressed them in a systematic and responsible way. And then they did a good job, with maps and graphs that ultimately reinforced Kerry’s credibility. But all that should have been done in April or May. To delay it until late summer allowed the issue to become a tsunami — and at a time when the Kerry campaign seemed dead in the water. The impact of that story on talk radio was indescribable — because it turned out that there really was ambiguity about the events surrounding Kerry’s medals. I absolutely believe Kerry was injured, but I was certainly very surprised to learn that he won three Purple Hearts for wounds that never required hospitalization. He had minimal medical treatment and never missed a day of work. Compare that to other veterans who lost limbs or, like Sen. John McCain, can’t even lift their arms and need help to put on a jacket.

Look, Kerry was there — he put himself in danger and could have been killed or mutilated at any moment on those tiny boats. Kerry deserves credit for that, and he deserves medals for any wounds suffered. But it’s his inability to handle this issue from the start that injured his candidacy. He should have said, “This is outrageous! I don’t need to tolerate it! How dare you?” Show some emotion and conviction! Defend yourself! I don’t want to hear that, oh, Mary Cahill or Bob Shrum told him to hang back and let it all blow over. It’s his reputation. He should have had the guts to step forward and defend his honor.

So then the Democrats had to use their convention — which should have been an intergalactic platform to attack Bush and the war — for this ridiculous, necrophiliac stage show, with Kerry giving a lame salute and telling us he was “reporting for duty”! If that wasn’t the stupidest, most lame-brained way to introduce yourself to the American people — he looked like an idiot! And of course it conveniently laid the groundwork for all the trumped-up Vietnam exposés that followed. The convention should have rained down abuse on Bush and the Republicans over Iraq! But no, the resident airheads — McAuliffe and company — told them to play nicey-nice so as not to alienate independent voters. What dolts!

Do you think that’s been a consistent problem — the Democrats not willing to criticize hard enough?

Well, there’s the stellar example of John Edwards sitting there at his debate with Dick Cheney and not landing a glove on him! Instead Edwards is going off into this fulsome aria about how much the vice-president loves his gay daughter. What a chickenshit! I mean, Dick Cheney is one of the most devious and Machiavellian individuals in American politics in my entire lifetime. He’s the one who pushed Bush into this terrible, no-exit war. And Edwards is tippy-toeing around him? What is it that the Democratic strategists fear? That Cheney has a huge popular base? He’s a shadow figure — the original Mr. Sneak. Attack him! But it’s too late now.

And yet the debates did seem to shift momentum toward the Democrats. What did you think of Kerry then?

I was very pleased with Kerry’s performance because the image he had on the radio talk shows was a joke: he’s a flip-flopper; he’s wishy-washy; he’s a weak-kneed Massachusetts liberal; he has a French haircut and is a gigolo who marries money — on and on for months. And then in that first debate, which I thought was his best, Kerry just stood there in a very poised, dignified manner and seemed absolutely like a man who could be commander in chief. And interestingly, we watched Bush fall to pieces — he seemed to spin off into some weird psychic maelstrom.

He was much more at ease in 2000.

The pressure of the war on Bush has been enormous — all those deaths, which he has to steel himself not to feel. I actually thought he was having a nervous breakdown this spring, when he would get morose and teary-eyed in front of the cameras. I think the turning point for him was Reagan’s death — that whole massive ceremonial event, a national rite of passage that he had to preside over. It allowed him to become presidential again. It gave him the sense of a conservative legacy beyond his own father.

This is someone who, as a former alcoholic, can’t have a drink. But the leader of the world’s one remaining superpower should be able to have a nice glass of Pinot Noir at dinner — especially when he’s running a war! Relaxation gives perspective. The pressure of the presidency is crippling. Bush is a person who became born-again midway through his life. He’s a new personality trying to live the right way — but he’s dragged the nation into his private drama. The consequence of his exhausting push for day-by-day certitude is a brittle tightness and puritanical inflexibility.

But if Bush wins this election, he did it on his own. Ever since the Republican Convention, he’s been on fire, with a dynamic energy that makes him look like the underdog. He’s cast off his paternalistic mentors and has come into his own as president. Going out to rallies really energizes him. And the crowds, who adore him, have truly made a turnaround, because for a while, the Republican base was a bit apathetic.

What energized the base?

The real turnaround may have been the Michael Moore movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11″ — which opened in the U.S. with a French imprimatur (the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival). People keep carrying on about how wonderful that alleged documentary is, how it will bring young people in droves to the polling booth. Well, we’ll see. If that movie, with all its fictions and distortions, really does put Kerry over, then we Democrats will all owe Michael Moore a debt, and I’ll revise my low opinion of him.

But for Moore to turn a sitting president of the United States into a joke, and to use his position abroad to foment anti-Americanism, has had a huge backlash: the massive, indulgent publicity about the Moore film was when the Republican passion for Bush really began — the passion to defend him, fed by a longstanding scorn for the liberal major media and for Hollywood. That’s when everything seemed to gel for Bush, who had alienated conservatives with his big spending and slack immigration policy.

On talk-show call-ins, I started to hear real love for Bush, a protective desire to defend him against the smug liberal hyenas. It was a pivotal moment in the campaign. And the righteous fury of the Bush crusaders started to sway the undecideds. For months on Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or other conservative radio shows, I really didn’t hear such great enthusiasm for Bush. But then all of a sudden, there was a turning point. I remember sitting in my car in April listening to Hannity — who has become a major force in American politics and whose talents as a broadcaster just keep getting better and better (though I’m always wishing he had more respect for other cultures and a broader understanding of our place in the world). He was talking slowly and thoughtfully after hanging up with a like-minded caller, and I got really alarmed. I said to myself, wow, here it is. It was a whole, comprehensive geopolitical picture: the only way we can win the war against terror is to take the fight to the terrorists abroad, America must be a beacon to the world. America has a divine mission to bring liberty to the world. It was a view of destiny that had a staggering clarity and simplicity.

Now if the Democratic consultants had any brains, they would have viewed all this as an important system of ideas that needed to be logically addressed, instead of just sneering at it. This is a war of ideas! But too many Democrats rely on a juvenile Al Franken level of discourse — sneer, sneer, sneer at the benighted ones. We are all so superior in our little elite enclaves. So even if Kerry wins the election, the Democrats have lost this war of ideas.

It’s as if we have no eloquent speechwriters any longer. The Democratic Party has become a p.c. wallow over the past 20 years — a sinkhole of unctuous, bleeding-heart liberalism and emotional manipulation, always using seniors or “disenfranchised” African-Americans as convenient straw men. We’re supposed to be in a constant state of empathy, on high alert to a cosmos of injustice. And always there are the aggrieved — and those nasty people in high places who are doing awful things to them! It’s become a tedious soap opera removed from reality.

The Democratic operatives, chummily clustered in their Northeastern drinking holes, are missing the fact that most Republicans are not the top execs of Halliburton but hardworking small-business people who lead orderly lives and try to be good citizens. There’s been a slow shift: What used to be the Democratic base — plain, unpretentious people going about their business and just trying to do the right thing — is shifting toward the Republican Party. Republicanism is becoming populist. Republicans believe that tax cuts to large and small businesses help growth, encourage spending and investment, and create jobs. The Democrats have no answer to that except hysterical rhetoric. Rush Limbaugh rightly calls it the tired old “Democratic playbook” — more than 25 years old.

But we’re living in a new era — it’s post-9/11. The world will never be the same again. The Democrats have got to get out of their preoccupation with grandstanding, divisive, self-interested domestic issues and come up with idealistic rhetoric that could inspire and draw people. Why aren’t they saying: This isn’t America — to keep people under lock and key in Guanténamo Bay without legal representation. Nor are the staged humiliations of Abu Ghraib or the police sweeps of Muslim citizens and their detention without indictment, contrary to our Bill of Rights. America should not endorse unilateral warfare — since that will simply empower every thug and brigand to wage war on his neighbors. America must embrace international law — which embodies the highest ideals of humanity. The U.N. may be imperfect, but it’s the best forum we have for international dialogue. The Democrats have lost the ability to appeal and to inspire.

You’ve especially been a critic of comedy on the left, of the “jejune style” you associate with David Letterman, and others. And yet this year, there seems to have been a real renaissance of political satire — especially on “The Daily Show.” Have you become a fan?

I have friends and colleagues who are big Jon Stewart fans. I respect him — especially after that fabulous ass-kicking he gave to those empty suits Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” — but in these troubled times I just don’t want to listen to a comic refraction of the news. I’ve been obsessed with hard news since the yearlong buildup to the Iraq war. Every day’s been agonizing — in imagining not just our forces dying and being mutilated over there but also the thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens — who barely get any press here at all — who are suffering and dying under our bombardment. So I’m in no mood to watch comedy infotainment shows — just as I can’t bear to watch the late-night show monologues, whether it’s Leno or Letterman.

My worry is that young people aren’t being encouraged to explore and absorb hard news. They haven’t been raised in an era of news as I was as a child during the Cold War 1950s. Daily newspapers used to be a central medium of delivery of hard news. If young people prefer to get their news mediated through comedy, is this a prelude to a state of passivity or ironic detachment from the pressing events of their day? Young people may feel they can’t do much to change the world — as if the world is something that happens to them. So they want a patter or commentary on it that allows them to laugh at it. Everyone and everything becomes small and ridiculous. Politics is no longer a noble cause, as it was for John Kennedy, whom I campaigned for in Syracuse when I was 13.

A more interesting question than political satire remains: Why can’t we get strong talk radio on the left? What is it about AM radio — a medium which I’ve loved since the Top 40 1950s? The dominance of AM radio by right-wing shows has been incalculably damaging to the Democrats in this campaign cycle because the anti-Kerry fusillade goes on all day long.

Air America?

I can’t get it even in Philadelphia. I’ve heard a little swatch of it on the local African-American station, and I found it totally soporific. What a bore! It lacks the propulsive energy of someone like Sean Hannity. Liberal pundits underestimate Hannity because they see him on his Fox TV show, and he’s just not that good on TV. But he’s a dynamo on the radio. Even though I don’t agree with his politics, I find him riveting. He’s funny, he’s ebullient, he has endless energy, and when he gets going on a tirade, he has the rhythmic passion of generations of Irish-Catholic priests! If anyone is in doubt about Hannity’s talents as a radio man, just listen to his commercial for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. It’s a classic of American advertising — his mellow, succulent description makes you want to RUN to the nearest Ruth’s Chris! It’s like pop opera. But the limitations of Hannity’s global worldview upset me deeply. Nevertheless, this is a guy who’s not acting — he’s speaking from his profound core values.

But it’s a terrible cultural problem that liberals these days can’t produce a decent AM radio voice. Al Franken is moribund — that horrible sleepy, whiny, infantile voice! Michael Moore is bouncy and playful, but he’s not a radio personality. To do AM, you have to love the microphone. Moore does visuals — he has a real gift for editing and montage. I have problems with his films, since he plays fast and loose with facts. But he can be a brilliant prankster, as when he came onstage at a Nader rally in 2000 (I saw this on C-SPAN) and threatened to nominate “Ficus” — a big potted plant which he picked up and shook next to the podium. Or that classic moment when he brought a squad of squealing, cavorting girls dressed up as Puritans to reenact the Salem witch trials in front of Ken Starr’s house one morning! Why isn’t he doing more stuff like that? As a teacher and writer, I can’t laugh off the fabrications and exaggerations in his films — like the phony staging of the shotgun he carried out from a bank in “Bowling for Columbine.” I’m sorry, I cannot respect people who deliberately try to fool the public.

Let’s do a quick lightning round of recent events. The Mary Cheney hoopla.

I was absolutely sickened by the use of Mary Cheney as a political gambit by both Kerry and Edwards. My partner disagreed — she thought it was fine. Many of our friends also thought it was OK. I did not. I found it utterly offensive and manipulative. I don’t care whether Mary Cheney worked for Coors as a gay liaison. I don’t care that she works for her father’s campaign office. Mary Cheney has made her own rules and has not thrust herself into the national spotlight to speak publicly. It is unethical and grotesque to tag and stereotype her as “the lesbian” of this presidential campaign.

What gets me is that this was so clearly a Democratic strategy to avoid actually confronting Dick Cheney head-on. What rank cowardice! Come on! This shows you what’s happened to the Democrats — everything is I-feel-your-pain psychology; everything is melting emotion and ostentatious empathy. What the hell do you know, John Edwards, about what’s going on in that family? Oh, the wise father so loves the gay daughter: What is this– Betty Crocker, “Father Knows Best” politics? We’re back in the 1950s?

And for Kerry to glibly invoke Mary Cheney as the archetypal lesbian in a nature-vs.-nurture dispute when he had other ready examples on his political side — Dick Gephardt’s daughter or Barney Frank — just makes the whole thing look obviously calculating. And then the idiocy of that as a tactic at the climactic third debate — in the following days, instead of all the media attention being focused on Bush’s failings, air space was sucked up by this dopey soap opera.

And as a lesbian, I strongly object to the Democrats’ amoral use of sexual orientation as a wedge issue. The Democrats are supposed to be pro-gay, and yet they’re using an assertion of gayness to unsettle the Evangelical followers of the Republicans. They’re deliberately fomenting and reinforcing hostility to gays! What the hell’s the matter with the Democratic consultants? I’d like to kick their asses up and down the Eastern seaboard for this Mickey Mouse episode.

Teresa.

Teresa Heinz Kerry obviously speaks her mind. To all reports she had a good rapport with women in small groups on the campaign trail during the primaries. But the Democratic consultants wore both Kerrys down with overbooking. They’ve looked exhausted and punch-drunk half the time. Teresa’s not ready for prime time, but neither was Hillary. Any first lady learns how to be bland and neutral — Laura Bush has it down, and without losing her humor and spunk.

Teresa will be a sophisticated, issues-oriented hostess in the White House. Lately, however, she’s been making some serious gaffes — as when she said that Laura Bush never had a real job and then apologized for forgetting that Laura had worked for 10 years as a teacher and librarian. This left Teresa wide open to the charge that she doesn’t value the role of a homemaker. Unfortunately, that’s true for a lot of affluent, upper-middle-class liberal women. That slip of the tongue was all too revelatory — especially when there’s a recent movement among women disillusioned with the workplace and returning home to spend more time with their children. So it was cringe-making. But it’s because they’re overworking her.

Bill O’Reilly.

Laff riot! I honestly couldn’t stop laughing when I saw the news (thanks to Matt Drudge) that Bill O’Reilly, one of Fox TV’s biggest conservative stars, was being accused of making lurid phone sex calls to his woman producer. It was just too hilarious to believe. O’Reilly is such a blowhard. He’s bizarrely arrogant and politically all over the map. I never watch him since he talks right over his guests — he’s a boorish host. That show is such a waste of time, unless you have low testosterone and want to get jacked up by a squinty-eyed dork pretending he’s John Wayne.

I think that, in uncertain times, people like the sound of confidence, even when that confidence is mimed, which is the case with Bush as well as O’Reilly. Unlike Rush or Hannity, O’Reilly doesn’t really have core values. And now we know why! Thanks to the wonders of the Web, we have learned that O’Reilly’s fantasy life is a high-school orgy of loofah gloves and tropical palms. It’s pitiful, in a way — O’Reilly needs phone sex because he’s trapped by his Catholic code. He’s in psychosexual paralysis — he doesn’t have the confidence in his low-down desires that Clinton does!

Anything else we should touch on?

Yes. Was I the only person in America to suspect that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about his WMD? The pharaohs and kings of the ancient Near East loved to thump their chests and boast to intimidate their neighbors. Evidently, there was a lack of historical perspective among the feckless advisors who persuaded George W. Bush to rush to war in Iraq.

But, true to Paglia’s form, there’s an incendiary call to arms inside “Break, Blow, Burn” (a phrase taken from John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV”). Her celebration of these poems — each reprinted and electrically interpreted — is paired with a blistering critique of what she sees as the cultural and academic forces that have conspired to undermine our enjoyment of poetry, lessening its importance in the process. She demands reform and believes it will be up to graduate students and poets themselves to lead the way. “In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education,” she writes.

We caught up with Paglia, a founding Salon contributor, as she commenced her book tour. Our talk covered a range of topics, from lazy college elites, poets who didn’t make her cut (sorry, Ginsberg, Bishop, Eliot, Ashbery) to raising a son while refusing to act like Rosie O’Donnell.

This is your first big book since “Sexual Personae.”

Well, there was my 1998 book on Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Birds.” And I did always write original material within my two essay collections. But writing requires time, and I do give it time. This one took an exorbitant amount of time, to the extent that, as you know, I had to resign as a columnist from Salon to work on “Break, Blow, Burn.” The problem really wasn’t the time required to write the column. It was the amount of filtering I had to do of other people’s columns to keep the Salon column fresh.

And you had to absorb a lot of it. I mean, a week like this — Terri Schiavo, the pope — would have been tough.

Yes, exactly. And of course I was always in competition with the other big-name columnists — who would shamelessly rob from me. You know, it’s like I would be in Salon on Thursday, and something from it would show up in Maureen Dowd’s weekend column, and so on. But I had to make sure that when people went to it that it didn’t just seem to be a rehash of someone else’s column. And that’s the problem now, of course. I’m a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I’m an evangelist of popular culture, but when there’s only media, then there’s going to be a slow debasement of language, and that’s what I think we’re fighting.

The blogs, for example, are becoming so self-referential. If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words. Nowhere in blog pages does anyone pay attention to the individual word — things are moving too fast. Someone like Emily Dickinson was working with the dictionary and looking at the etymology of the word, so that you have all this tremendous stuff going on within a single word!

My publisher forwarded this amusing thing from Gawker.com the other day — it was reporting on the review of my book in the New York Times Book Review. It really was quite revealing. It was written by a young woman who said she was a recent graduate of Yale. And she said that as she was reading that long, three-page review by Clive James, her eyes glazed over because it was about poetry. And I thought, Oh, my God — if this isn’t a testament to what’s gone wrong in the Ivy League!

Here you have a smart young aspiring writer who’s saying that somehow she has not been educated in a way that allows her to appreciate poetry. She’s never been shown that you can become a better prose writer through reading poetry. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore — tracking words down to their roots. It’s hopelessly old-fashioned. But that’s the whole basis of the power of English as a literary language.

I say in my introduction that I’m in love with English — it’s a phenomenal instrument. People who like my work recognize that I have many styles as a writer — the high academic style, the newspaper style, the conversational style. My sense of English comes from the fact that I was born into an Italian immigrant family which was still discovering America.

I read where you said you tried to make yourself as invisible as possible for this book. To most of your readers, the idea of rendering yourself invisible sounds like quite a feat.

I felt it was important that I submerge myself because in the four-year period from “Sexual Personae” to “Vamps & Tramps” in the early ’90s I had as much publicity as any person could ever want. You have to remember, my first book wasn’t published until I was 43, and that book had been rejected by seven publishers and five agents. I came on the scene without any publicity. But when “Sexual Personae” started to get publicity, which was almost a year later after it was published, it started to get viciously attacked. And I counterattacked!

And so there was a period there — when I had three bestselling paperback books from Vintage in a row — that represented a whole uprising by a very repressed wing of feminism. When my work was criticized, people went: “Oh, she’s antifeminist! She’s a neocon.” For heaven’s sakes — I had just voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 primary! An insurgency was going on — a major conflict with smug and self-satisfied and exploitative feminist leaders. We were just coming out of the era ruled by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and so I was in battle for years. But that was it — after 1994, I went back to my usual private ways. People say, “She’s everywhere!” But I’m not — it just seems that way because of the Web and the many documentaries I’ve been interviewed for.

When you were doing this book, it’s clear you felt you needed to ratchet back that persona.

Yes, because it’s irrelevant to this book. The people who were really reading me seriously would recognize the real me — I’m a classroom teacher, and I’ve never changed my lifestyle. People nagged me: “Oh, you should quit that job.” Are you kidding? This is my vocation! And I never let media into my classroom, ever. And because I never let any reporters into my classes (and they were demanding it), that professional life has remained invisible. Some people think I must be some sort of a flibbertigibbet, running around the world in front of cameras. But if film crews want to interview me, they must come to Philadelphia and meet me after my classes are over for the day. That’s my life, and it will continue to be my life.

Though you have had one major personal development in your life while writing this book — I’ve heard you’ve become a mother of a young boy. There’s advice of your own that I wonder if you’ve heeded: “Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”

My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 — Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien’s adoptive parent — but certainly NOT his mother! Alison is Lucien’s one and only mother. That “Heather Has Two Mommies” business gives me the creeps! — and it can only confuse a kid.

I’m completely against that two fathers, two mothers stuff. I think it’s gay activism gone horribly awry — people making political points without regard for a child’s realistic social and developmental needs.

I kept Lucien’s birth completely out of the public eye because I absolutely detest the circus that Rosie O’Donnell made of her children. Kids should not be subjected to the glare of the spotlight. However, now that I’m back in public after the five years of writing this book, it’s perfectly legitimate information.

Going back to “Sexual Personae” for a minute, and that battle with the feminist establishment. What’s happening with that now, would you say?

It’s over. It’s completely over. I won that war! — or rather, the wing of feminism that I led into the light won the war. Madonna made it possible. In New York magazine’s cover story on me in 1991, it was reported that a Yale faculty member had marched with her graduate student in New Haven to return “Sexual Personae” because it was “ideologically unacceptable.” A Yale faculty member would return a 700-page Yale Press book by a woman author on the basis of its not passing some p.c. litmus test — that shows you what was going on!

But things have changed — at least in the media. The media has moved on, the media has realized that the pro-sex side has won, and it has seen all the anti-porn maniacs as what they are — fanatical Puritans. When it did a profile on me in 1992, “60 Minutes” sent a woman producer and a camera to the 92nd Street Y when Gloria Steinem was appearing on a panel. The producer stood up at the end and asked a question about me. And they caught Gloria Steinem saying something like, “We don’t give a damn what she thinks!” — at which the audience loudly applauded. They caught her and her entire Manhattan elite in action. But then Steinem learned, once she’d been burned, so that a year later she was saying things about me like, “She has a right to express whatever she feels.”

Still, I was systematically excluded and ostracized. When Vanity Fair did a cultural-icons issue a little later, they asked to photograph Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me together — like the different generations. But Steinem refused to pose with me! So Vanity Fair had an inspired solution — it simply commissioned a full-page caricature. What great revenge — there were the three of us, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me, posing amicably together in cartoon form!

The point is, this hostility to dissent had been going on for decades in feminism. If they were doing that repressive stuff to me with a bestselling book, what were they doing to ordinary women just trying to open their mouths? So it’s great that my side has won so resoundingly. However, the universities are still in the hands of the feminist ideologues. Nothing has changed at the major universities, nothing. The same professors are there, but they’re really mad now because they know they’ve lost! So over the last decade, they’ve spent a lot of time trying to be me!

They made contracts with trade presses. They wrote Op-Ed pieces. Before me, only poli-sci or history professors would write Op-Ed pieces. You just didn’t do that if you were in humanities. In the early ’90s, some Harvard woman snob actually said to a reporter about me: “Oh, we don’t consider anyone serious who writes articles for the newspaper.” That’s where things were back then. They all tried to write books directed toward a general audience, and none really succeeded until Stephen Greenblatt’s book on Shakespeare — which as far as I’m concerned is ultimately a product of my pressure on the profession in the early ’90s, when I called for literary critics to address the general audience.

As someone who teaches Shakespeare, however, I don’t think it’s a very good book, even though the New Yorker and the New York Times laid down flat in front of it. Greenblatt’s Shakespeare isn’t one I recognize from my own study of the plays, and the connections posited between the life and the art aren’t particularly sophisticated. The TLS [Times Literary Supplement] reviewer wrote that Greenblatt is “innocent of English history,” which of course is just a devastating thing to say about the leader of new historicism whose specialty is Renaissance England and who is head of the Norton Shakespeare editions. But too many books coming out of the Ivy League tend toward the trendy and shallow — even though the New York media eats them up.

They do get great press. Why?

It’s media sycophancy toward the brand-name schools. Because a lot of reporters in the mainstream media went to those schools and want their children to go to those schools, they don’t want to disrupt their brand-name value. The alternative press has been completely, cowardly negligent, including the Nation. The leftist press has been out to lunch on this for 25 years — it’s outrageous that this matter hasn’t been vigorously pursued. Because these academics mouth leftist sentiments — even though their lifestyles are ones of ostentatious materialism — the alternative press has been afraid to appear to take the side of the conservatives who have justifiably been berating the politicization of the campus since the ’80s.

Come on, let’s look at reality. What important, essential works have come out of American humanities departments in the last 30 or 40 years? The important book just isn’t there. Where is the great American scholar that poststructuralism has produced? When Harold Bloom goes, he’s the last of the line. These people aren’t great scholars — they have no deep erudition. They just do gimmicky manipulations of other people’s research. The people at the top with the power positions and the huge salaries are flashes in the pan — their work isn’t going to last.

Like who, precisely? Henry Louis Gates is frequently mentioned as among the new public intellectual…

Gates is a pivotal figure, a very shrewd handler of people. He knew how to work college administrations to guilt-trip them for their exclusion of African-American studies and thereby to win a huge investment of money for the expansion of faculty and facilities. He put African-American programs on the map. But as a group they still do not have a high reputation because so many of them are rife with ideology. Beyond that, the problem is there are too few African-American scholars to go around — everyone wants them. There are simply not enough who have entered the profession. Thus many schools have had to reach further and further down and hire people who are really marginal in scholarly terms.

Look at the Ward Churchill case, this guy who was the chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and who didn’t even have a Ph.D. He had absolutely no scholarly training in anthropology or in anything in ethnic studies — his M.A. was in communications. He had no business being rocketed to a tenured position literally overnight in the early ’90s, when he had just been teaching adjunct courses as a staffer there. All of a sudden, he was earning $94,000 a year. There’s something deeply corrupt in American academe that was rewarding, in this case, not the color of your skin but a claimed Indian heritage that Churchill can’t prove — and that one American Indian group long ago called fraudulent.

The whole American academic system — which Europeans can’t quite understand — is shot through with this p.c. stuff that administrations are promoting. It’s a marketing tool. “We are for affirmative action, we’re for diversity, we give a rainbow education.” And so there’s been a slow decline in respect for genuine scholarship. Gates’ department hasn’t yet produced as much high-level work as it should have, but I’m confident that it will because it is grooming the next generation of young scholars. They will presumably fan out into the profession, and then we will see the true fruits of what Gates achieved.

Cornel West, an early Gates’ recruit at Harvard who has now left, is someone mentioned with you as an academic interested in engaging in popular culture.

Well, Cornel West is definitely a major American public intellectual. He and I are certainly parallel phenomena. We emerged strongly in the ’90s. We have a wide range of interests from popular culture to traditional scholarship and philosophy. We are entertaining presences on the lecture circuit; we are performers — on TV as well. I myself have questions about Cornel West’s work.

His rap album?

No, the rap album doesn’t bother me in the slightest — I like the idea. But I’ve sometimes noticed what I feel is too big a gap between the writing of his major books and writing I see him doing elsewhere. I sometimes wonder how much editing has been done of his best work — even before it got to the publisher. I’ve occasionally seen in articles by him a kind of hasty, careless, demagogic, nearly ungrammatical use of language and a pretentious, jumbled jargon that I find peculiar compared to the lean, finely honed writing of his most acclaimed work.

My work is never edited in that sense. My excellent editor will make a suggestion or a request here and there, but there is never wholesale rewriting or reorganization of my prose or alteration of my voice. What you’re getting from me is entirely my work.

Another thing that I object to, and the media seems to really ignore, is how many books by prominent academics have been supported by graduate assistants and research assistants, often paid for by the university itself. They’re the ones doing all the book-running: checking quotes, accumulating examples, assembling the footnotes and bibliography.

As a scholar, I can see it in people’s work from major universities. I can tell who are the professors who actually did the reading and gathered the quotes, as opposed to people who are so busy running this or that and exercising academic power that they have to have examples and evidence supplied to them. And what gets me is when a reviewer says in awe, “This is a very erudite person — there are so many pages of footnotes!” I want to laugh! Well, pages and pages of footnotes in the back of a general interest humanities book usually indicates weakness. You don’t need all that if your scholarship is solid. And the idea that the trendy professors of the elite schools have actually read all those books is usually false. Not only haven’t they read them, they haven’t even gone to the library to get them.

I have no research or clerical assistance whatever. I teach at a small college where I must do every single thing myself. But that is what, I believe, that sympathetic readers are sensing: quality control.

West, of course, left after an infamous blowup with [Harvard University president Lawrence] Summers. What have you thought of the controversy up there?

What many observers felt about the Cornel West incident was that Cornel West was so used to being pampered, idolized and coddled that to have any aspect of his academic performance questioned came as a mortal blow. It’s pretty obvious that Lawrence Summers has very few people skills and that he is not suited to be the president of a major university. You have to bring groups together; you can’t be a person who divides groups from each other. But I am sympathetic to Summers’ desire to insert some reality into the knee-jerk, monolithic, Jurassic Park liberalism that passes for political thinking at that university. Talk about diversity — there’s hardly a conservative or dissident voice at that place. It’s bad for the faculty, it’s bad for the students, it makes a travesty of Harvard’s claims of education — which students are bankrupting their families to pay for.

I think that affirmative action in the way it has been applied does need to be questioned, but not in this ham-handed way. The issue that Summers is broaching in the most recent incident, whether there are genetic sex differences, is an enormously important one for academe to address. But for 30 years, the social-constructionist dogma has become entrenched in humanities departments from coast to coast. That’s why, when “Sexual Personae” came on the scene, people went ballistic. They weren’t used to hearing anything about nature. And they were saying, “Oh, she’s an essentialist. She’s using the no-no word ‘nature.’” But I said that sex is the “intricate intersection of nature and culture,” so it’s a combination of the two.

But you have people who are getting enormous salaries for being gender-studies experts who have never studied biology or endocrinology, who know nothing about hormones. They’re ignoramuses. Where the hell are they getting off saying that we’re born blank slates and become male or female only through society’s pressures — what is this crap that they’re teaching? But it’s absolutely routine.

To open this debate is crucial, since there are very few dissident voices discussing this issue in the humanities. But Summers seems to be a dope. I applaud him for raising the subject — the question of biology and its relation to gender. But I have to condemn him for his unscholarly approach to this matter and the sloppy way he handled it.

I wanted to know if there was a particular poet you were really excited to put in this anthology, who you felt never got the right amount of critical attention. Throughout the book, you mention how poststructuralist theory has managed to diminish essential poetry.

Well, yes, the Roethke poems. I can’t remember the last time I heard his name mentioned anywhere. “Cuttings” and “Root Cellar” are about dirt! They’re about the body and the body’s responses. That’s what has been totally excluded from poststructuralism, because poststructuralism sees the body as a passive victim to the forces of power “inscribing” their agenda on us. Poststructuralism is stupidly oblivious to the relationship between the body and nature — our bodies are subsets of nature, not society. It should be rather obvious, but no. The body-centered approach, the speech-centered approach, to poetry was from the ’60s, my era. It was partly coming from the Beats. For some reason it has been dissipated. I thought it would be a revolution in American culture.

The primary reason was drugs; the people most impacted by this radical view of life were destroyed by drugs. The solid academic poets just churned along, drinking alcohol, but everyone else was brain-dead. So it thrilled me to see Roethke depicted in the wonderful illustration accompanying my review in New York Times Book Review. Then when Matt Drudge put the picture up on the Drudge Report, I thought, “Hooray! This is Roethke’s first appearance on a major news Web site!” My college teacher Milton Kessler was a graduate student of Roethke’s at the University of Washington. I feel a particular thrill about that, because I believe in lineage, you see. This wonderful lineage — it goes from Roethke to Kessler to me — and from me to the young people who will read “Break, Blow, Burn.” You never know who’s going to be inspired.

It’s like the movie “The Turning Point” when the old teacher says to the aging ballerina played by Anne Bancroft, “You are passé. You must be a teacher now. I learned from the great so-and-so in Russia. I passed it on to you, and now you must pass it on to her!” — the ditsy young dancer who has to be waved away from the pastries. I just love that idea of lineage and transmission from generation to generation — and those connections are precisely what I think have been broken in the domination of French theory in the last 30 years.

Right, because even though this book might not be as immediately, obviously contentious as “Sexual Personae,” it’s a shot across the bow of the academy.

Oh, yes, and I’m also trying to inspire an insurgency movement of embattled teachers everywhere. I want to say to the adjuncts who are working so hard, going from school to school, without benefits: Your love of literature and art and your teaching students who are not going to be big-shot Manhattan executives but who are just going about their workaday lives — you belong to a real American cultural movement, and here’s a manifesto for you. The way you approach things directly and honestly, that too is a theory! All these people who claim to be so superior to you because they “do” theory — they’re fakes. And they’ve destroyed the prestige of humanities departments.

You are trying to pass this on to the adjuncts, the grad students. But you’ve also mentioned that the poets should do this themselves. How can they do that in a culture where the poetry that does exist comes out through pop music, hip-hop. How do the poets assert themselves?

Well, first of all, they better stop talking just to each other in those small groups of the like-minded. I used to like John Ashbery, for example, but he got addicted to critical adulation. Too many people want academic idolization. They want the prizes. I want the poets and all artists to address the general audience again: Stop addressing the like-minded true believers, cut out the partisan politics, stop thinking that the only people you can speak to are those who agree with you already. Writers and artists need to start addressing those who don’t agree with them.

That’s certainly what I do. I’ve won a very wide audience in that way. I listen to or monitor a huge range of opinion, including on talk radio, which I love. I want to understand how most people think! That’s why I can communicate with large numbers of people. What’s the secret? The secret is I cannot stand the coterie mentality, whether it’s in downtown Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in L.A. I cannot stand the cool in-group — “We are the special people, we are the best people, everyone else is just rubes and hayseeds.” Get over that! People who claim they’re leftists and who have contempt for ordinary people and how they vote. I voted for Kerry and Clinton, but I don’t look down on people who voted for Bush. I try to understand it.

The most recent poem in your book is the last one, Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.” Is there anyone more current who you look at and say, “There’s a poet”?

No.

But hasn’t there been a true revival of the spoken word since then? In rap and hip-hop…

Rap is not transferring well to the page — though if I ever write a book on song lyrics, rap would certainly be in it. To get into this book, the lyrics had to transfer well. I invented this course at my school for musicians to develop their lyrics. I often would be disappointed when I would transfer lyrics from my favorite songs onto the page. My criterion for this book was that there has to be a kind of shapeliness to what a poem looks like on the page; there has to be a kind of visual that the reader gets. None of the arts are separate for me: They all feed each other. Visual arts, literary arts and music — they’re all mixed together for me. I think we’ve kind of lost that sense that there’s a pleasure at looking at something on the page. For a poem to survive the cut in my book, it had to be pleasing every time I returned to it. Every time I went back to it, I had to see a visual vitality, I had to be drawn into it visually — not just in terms of the content.

The controversial thing in the book is that many of the contemporary choices are completely unknown. I did not anticipate that when I started doing the book. The most famous poets of our time were listed in the original proposal for the book given the publisher, but when I actually gathered the material, I did not find the strong poems I was looking for.

Is there anyone you’re surprised did not make the cut?

A whole series. Poets I heard reading in college who I thought would naturally be here — A.R. Ammons, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, John Ashbery, James Merrill — just name after name. I couldn’t get Ginsberg in, unfortunately; what I would have had to do was excerpt “Howl,” and I just didn’t think it was going to work. Auden — I found virtually nothing that would work, and it astonished me. I didn’t find an Auden poem that I felt I could endorse for the general reader and say, This poem will repay your constant rereading. Example after example — Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov. I was looking for sports poems, animal poems, war poems, antiwar poems. I was bitterly disappointed.

At the end of the introduction, you write: “I am uncertain about whether the West’s chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it. Hence it is critical that we reinforce the spiritual values of Western art, however we define them.” It has a markedly a different note than “Sexual Personae,” which is largely celebratory and optimistic about Western culture.

But no, actually. “Sexual Personae” is about decadence! — the beautiful decadence of Western civilization. There I say I am a decadent, and I celebrate it, but I don’t know how long the West is going to last. If our popular culture is equivalent to Hellenistic culture during the Roman republic and empire, I have no idea if we are going to last 50 years or 500 years. But there is no doubt that there is an end to every civilization, whether it’s from some climatological disaster or invasion or something else. I mean, last December’s tsunami showed everyone that my vision in “Sexual Personae” of nature was right — that we just huddle here on the thin, brittle skin of the globe. Civilizations rise and fall. I’m saying it’s time for us to reassess our conceptions of the West. In all its failings, the West has produced a great art tradition.

So I’m saying to the left: Stop bad-mouthing your own civilization; get over it, you little twerps. I’m saying to the religious far right: If we are defending Western civilization, as you claimed in the incursion into Iraq, then you’d better realize it’s much more than Judeo-Christianity and the Bible. You’d better get real and accept that we have a Greco-Roman tradition of literature and art that started in 700 BC. And yes, some of it deals, quite frankly, with sex and the body; you must deal with it and allow students to deal with it, because that is part of the brilliant strength of our arts. I’m demanding that conservatives support the arts and that liberals stop being so snobby about art and quit celebrating art that is simply cheap sacrilege of other people’s beliefs.

Artists have got to get back to studying art history and doing emotionally engaged art. Get over that tired postmodern cynical irony and hip posing, which is such an affliction in the downtown urban elite. We need an artistic and cultural revival. Back to basics!