Camille Paglia’s first major work since “Sexual Personae,” the 1990 bestseller that cracked a bullwhip over the heads of dogmatic feminists and a p.c. academe and turned its author into our favorite provocateur, appears, at first glance, to be a surprisingly demure offering. “Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World’s Best Poems,” in fact, was almost titled something as modest as “Readings”; she says she didn’t want anything to overshadow the poems (from Shakespeare to Plath) that she chose to honor.
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!
Salon readers — and the world! — have been deprived of the political opinions of our favorite cultural channeler/critic, Camille Paglia, for a year, since she last spoke to Salon. During that time Paglia, university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, has been at work teaching and putting the finishing touches on her five-year book project “Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems” (March, Pantheon).
On the eve of the election, she agreed to break her silence and talk to Salon about this political moment — from the “devious and Machiavellian” Dick Cheney to the “unethical and grotesque” manipulation of his daughter by Democrats; from her respect for Jon Stewart and that “dynamo” Sean Hannity, to her pity for Bill O’Reilly, the “blowhard” with a bad case of “psychosexual paralysis.” And she explains how, despite her concern over his “poorly managed” campaign and terrible TV skills, she believes Sen. John Kerry is the only viable option for president.
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.
Camille Paglia is a rarity in the increasingly polarized world of public intellectuals, a high-profile thinker and writer who is not readily identified with any political camp or party line. She burst onto the scene in 1990 following the publication of her book, “Sexual Personae.” Paglia was a rough-trade feminist not afraid to challenge the orthodoxy of the women’s movement or its reigning sisterhood; a professor from a small college with no qualms about torching the Parisian academic trends then enthralling Ivy League humanities departments; a self-proclaimed “Democratic libertarian” who voted twice for Bill Clinton and then loudly denounced him for bringing shame to his office.
Given Paglia’s originality and unpredictability, we had no idea what to expect when we phoned her earlier this week for her opinions on the Bush administration’s looming war with Iraq. Paglia proudly describes herself as a Dionysian child of the ’60s, a generation not known for its martial spirit. And yet, during her long run as a Salon columnist, she developed an enthusiastic following among conservatives, including retired and active military personnel, for her eloquent tributes to family, tradition, country and uniformed service, as well as her stop-your-blubbering take on modern American life.
Paglia retired her Salon column last year to focus on teaching — she is university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia – and to finish her fifth book, a study of poetry that will be published by Pantheon Books. She returns in the Salon Interview to reveal her opinions on Iraq for the first time. “The foreign press has asked me repeatedly to comment on Iraq, and I’ve said I don’t think it’s right as an American citizen to do that. I said I should reserve my criticisms of the administration for home consumption,” said Paglia. “That’s why I’m talking to you now.”
What is your position on the increasingly likely U.S. invasion of Iraq?
Well, first of all, I’m on the record as being pro-military and in insisting that military matters and international affairs were neglected throughout the period of the Clinton administration — which partly led to the present dilemma. The first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 should have been a wake-up call for everyone. However, I’m extremely upset about our rush to war at the present moment. If there truly were an authentic international coalition that had been carefully built, and if the administration had demonstrated sensitivity to the fragility of international relations, I’d be 100 percent in favor of an allied military expedition to go into Iraq and find and dispose of all weapons of mass destruction.
But most members of the current administration seem to have little sense that there’s an enormous, complex world beyond our borders. The president himself has never traveled much in his life. They seem to think the universe consists of America and then everyone else — small-potatoes people who can be steamrolled. And I’m absolutely appalled at the lack of acknowledgment of the cost to ordinary Iraqi citizens of any incursion by us, especially aerial bombardment. Most of the Iraqi armed forces are pathetically unprepared to respond to a military confrontation with us. These are mostly poor people who have a profession and a dignity within their country, and they’re not necessarily totally behind Saddam Hussein’s ambition to dominate his region. There’s just no way that Saddam’s threat is equal to that of Hitler leading up to World War II. Hitler had amassed an enormous military machine and was actively seeking world domination. We don’t need to invade Iraq. Saddam can be bottled up with aggressive surveillance and pinpoint airstrikes on military installations.
As we speak, I have a terrible sense of foreboding, because last weekend a stunning omen occurred in this country. Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas — the president’s home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they’re doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was “weeks, not months” away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.
From the point of view of the Muslim streets, surely it looks like the hand of Allah has intervened, as with the attack on the World Trade Center. No one in the Western world would have believed that those mighty towers could fall within an hour and a half — two of the proudest constructions in American history. And neither would anyone have predicted this eerie coincidence — that the president’s own state would become the burial ground for the Columbia mission.
Including one small town where the debris fell called Palestine, Texas.
Yes, exactly! What weird irony with an Israeli astronaut onboard who had bombed Iraq 20 years ago. To me this dreadful accident is a graphic illustration of the limitations of modern technology — of the smallest detail that can go wrong and end up thwarting the most fail-safe plan. So I think that history will look back on this as a key moment. Kings throughout history have been shaken by signals like this from beyond: Think twice about what you’re doing. If a Roman general tripped on the threshold before a battle, he’d call it off.
The Bush administration is not known for thinking twice — they pride themselves on their certitude, a certitude that strikes many as arrogant.
I’d call them parochial rather than arrogant. Last summer, Bush’s tone was certainly arrogant, but he’s quieted his rhetoric since then. I don’t know who got to him, his father or the elders around him. Talk about destabilizing the world! “Regime change” and “You’re with us or against us” and so on — impatient, off-the-cuff rants that tore the fabric of international relations. You don’t unilaterally demand the overthrow of a government of a sovereign nation, for heaven’s sake. It turns our own presidents into targets. As for [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, I think he’s some kind of hot dog. It’s as if he’s trying to pump up his testosterone, to operate on some constant, hyperadrenaline level, to show “I can still hack it, man!” I was of two minds about Rumsfeld’s snide comment about “old Europe.” On the one hand, I love to see France put in its place, because of course it no longer is the center of the world but keeps insisting that it is. On the other hand, this is yet another example of the ham-handedness of this administration in world relations.
I think that Bush administration officials are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their positions, although their biblical piety is cloying. I think they do intend the best for the American people. It’s not just a covert grab for oil to placate corporate interests. But I also think that their current course of action in Iraq is disastrous for long-term world safety. After 9/11, what should have been perfectly clear is that we need a long, slow process of reeducating the peoples of the world, to try to convince Muslims of the fundamental benevolence of American intentions. And we had most of the world behind us in the days after 9/11, except for the Muslim extremists. We desperately need the world’s cooperation, from police agencies to informers. Above all, we need moderate Muslims to turn out the homicidal fanatics in their midst.
Do you think the Bush administration’s focus on Saddam is a diversion from this global campaign against terrorism?
The real diversion is from other global hot spots. If we get bogged down in Iraq, China might think it’s a good moment to retake Taiwan. Saddam is an amoral thug, but he’s not the principal danger to American security. The real problem is a shadowy, international network of young, radical Islamic men. And we have played right into their hands since last summer by coming across as a bullying world power, threatening war with Iraq and acting completely callous to the resulting human carnage and death of innocent civilians. What privileges American over Iraqi lives? Why does the chance of American casualties through random terrorism outweigh the certain reality of Iraqi devastation in a crushing invasion?
But don’t you think if Saddam were to succeed in his longtime goal of building an operational arsenal of doomsday weapons, that he would then provide an umbrella for this network of terrorists to carry out its plots against the West?
But how are we going to counter that threat? Are we going to bomb laboratories and facilities storing dangerous chemicals and release them in the air near population centers? Are we going to poison Baghdad? This is as barbarous as what we’re opposing in Saddam. We need to be going in the opposite direction — to lower global tensions. This constant uncertainty is bad for everyone. It’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for people’s psychic health, and it’s going to endanger Americans around the world. How are we ever going to do business around the world and function in a global market, when any American traveling abroad is subject to assassination?
We know so little about Iraq in this country. It’s enormous, and yet most Americans can’t even find it on the map. I love to listen to talk radio and have been doing it for years. But I’m frightened by what I’m hearing these days from commentators like Sean Hannity, whose program I listen to when I’m driving home from school. He’s conservative, but I’m not — I’m a libertarian Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader. These days I can’t believe what I’m hearing, the gung-ho passion for war, the lofty sense of moral certitude, the complete obliviousness to the world outside our borders. How many people has Hannity known who aren’t Americans? Has he ever been anywhere in the world? His knowledge of world history and culture seems thin at best. This is increasingly our problem as a nation — we can’t see beyond ourselves. It shows the abject failure of public education.
But there are a number of people with a more sophisticated view of the world who also endorse war with Iraq — people like Christopher Hitchens or New Yorker editor David Remnick, who just came out in favor of attacking Saddam.
I do believe that Saddam is a menace and that he must be confronted. But the Bush administration is operating under an artificial timetable. There’s no reason not to give diplomacy and expanded inspections ample time to work. We need the support of the world community, not just for this crisis but the next one.
I tried to be open-minded about Bush’s case for war. I waited for him to present the evidence for an imminent threat to the U.S. But months passed, and they hemmed and hawed. It was words, words, words. Do they think the American people are fools? That we can’t be trusted to understand a casus belli? There was a shiftiness, a sleight of hand, a kind of blustery bravado and smugness: “Well, we know, but we just can’t tell you, because it would compromise national security.” Give me a break — we’re about to go to war and kill or maim thousands of innocent people. Americans will die too. And they couldn’t lay all their cards on the table?
[Rep.] Charles Rangel is quite right that the burden will be borne by a lower social class. The American elite don’t view military service as prestigious for their sons and daughters, whom they groom for white-collar professions. In England, however, serving in the military is part of aristocratic and royal tradition.
Rangel and others in the Democratic Party have raised sharp objections to Bush’s war plans, but what do you think in general of the Democrats’ response on this issue? Have they presented a coherent alternative?
I’m disgusted at the Democratic Party — what a bunch of weasels. The senators laid down flat in the weeks before the fall election and voted without a full debate over Iraq. That was the moment for a searching national discussion, no matter what the outcome. And since the Democrats rolled over, of course Bush was right to proceed — they gave him carte blanche.
The Democrats should have provided the geopolitical analysis that the Republicans were avoiding. In countries like Turkey that have reluctantly agreed to let U.S. forces use their territory as a staging ground, for example, there’s a sharp disconnect between these government decisions and what the mass of people think and feel. And we don’t need that — a situation where moderate governments are overthrown by a rising tide of Islamic radicalism.
I have a long view of history — my orientation is archaeological because I’m always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt. People are much too complacent in the West — though their comfort level has been shaken (as I predicted long ago in Salon) by the stock market drop. Most professional people in the West do not understand the power of Islamic fundamentalism. Westerners dismissed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini — “Oh, how medieval; our modern culture will triumph over that!” But guess what: Ever since Khomeini, Islamic fundamentalism has been spreading and spreading right to our front door.
It’s similar to early Christianity. Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed — farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There’s a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor — the discipline, the call to action. There’s a kind of rapturous idealism to it. No one thought in the first century after Christ that this slave religion would triumph over the urbane sophisticates of the ancient Roman world. Taking the long view, I think Islamic radicalism is the true threat, not Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. At the worst, Saddam’s biological or chemical weapons could take out a neighborhood or send a drifting poison cloud through a city. But what I’m talking about is a movement so massive it could bring down the West — the entire civilization of the West. No one thought that imperial Egypt or Rome would fall — but they did.
So do you agree with Oriana Fallaci’s characterization of the war on terrorism as a clash of civilizations?
Before 9/11, I would never have believed it, but I do now. For years I was saying that the study of world religions in higher education will lead us toward mutual understanding and world peace and so on and so forth. Well, the attack on the World Trade Center opened my eyes. After a decade of government neglect of this issue, we now face an entire generation of ruthless young Islamic men who have been radicalized. The solution is not to bomb Baghdad but to win over the Muslim center, which has been alarmingly passive. We need a cultural war — one certainly enforced by targeted military strikes and espionage directed at terror cells and leaders, like the Predator attack on that jeep in Yemen. Boom! Perfect — out of nowhere comes a missile that takes them out. Fantastic! We need small, mobile units of special forces deployed everywhere, stealth operatives — kidnapping terrorists and debriefing and neutralizing them. Undercover activity is the way to go. But this kind of conventional war that Bush has planned for Iraq won’t get to the root of the problem. All Bush is doing is shifting moderate Muslims in sympathy toward the radical extreme.
There may be an apparent immediate victory in Iraq, but we’ll be winning the battle and losing the war. The real war is for the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. We don’t want a world where Americans can’t travel abroad without fearing for their lives — or even within our borders, where a small cell of fanatics can blow up a railway station or bridge or tunnel.
You mentioned that you don’t think much of Rumsfeld — how about the other members of the Bush foreign policy and national security team. What do you think about Condi Rice, for instance?
I’ve been a longtime admirer of Condoleezza Rice, because I like her articulateness and style — her toughness and rigor. However, she might be a great national security advisor, but I’m not sure she has the touch and finesse that are needed for international relations. I like how she huddles with Bush to watch football and hash out strategy. She’s got a military mind. I love her steeliness, but there’s something a little harsh in her view of the world. She lacks the human touch. There’s something a little off-putting about someone who has no evident romantic relationships, who sees life as basically a chessboard. One of the great moments in American politics would be if Cheney is out as V.P. the next time around, and Bush puts Rice — a black woman — on the ticket. That would put Hillary in her place! [laughs]
What do you think of Colin Powell’s role these days?
It’s not very clear, is it? It goes back and forth. He’s caught in the middle, so that his public image has become blurred. His language is usually so bland and vacuous that he’s drowned out by Rumsfeld. By the time Powell made his presentation of hard evidence to the U.N. Security Council this week, he had a credibility problem. His words no longer had the weight they once had. The administration should have been publishing reconnaissance photos six months ago. After all this buildup, I was hoping to see something more formidable than amateurish peekaboo games by Saddam’s underlings.
It doesn’t seem that Rice or any other member of the Bush inner team has spent any real time in the Mideast.
No, they have no visceral feeling for the people of that complex region. The Middle East has been a seething crucible for thousands of years. All the border lines there are provisional — they’re always being drawn and redrawn. So this is madness — even trying to sustain Iraq as a national entity after destroying Saddam’s tyranny. Iraq is just a self-serving idea that the British had at the end of the Ottoman empire. It’s a cauldron of warring tribesmen. Clinton never understood this either — about the Mideast or the Balkans. He just wanted everyone to get along. What naiveté! The fierce animosities, the blood memory in those parts of the world. I understand it from my family background in Italy. We have long memories: Things that happened decades or centuries ago are as vivid as today — it’s tribal memory. That’s what the Bush administration is missing about Iraq. They think that destroying Saddam will create a nation of happy Iraqis.
Another thing is that Saddam thinks of himself as the heir of Babylon and Assyria. Most Americans don’t understand the pride that he and his people have in that history. They want to revive it. It’s exactly the way Americans take pride in our roots and our founding fathers and want to spread American values around the world. It looks illogical to the Arab world when we say, “Well, of course we have thousands of nuclear weapons, but you can’t have any.” They don’t see why the U.S. thinks it can decide which sovereign nations should have nuclear weapons and which cannot.
What do you think of the ambitious scenario put forth by many intellectual hawks in and around the Bush administration, who predict that by destroying Saddam, the U.S. can reorder the entire Middle East chessboard, making it a haven for Western-style democracy?
It’s a utopian fantasy that will have a high price in bloodshed. We already have one democracy over there, Israel — and it’s being shattered by wave after wave of atrocities. War on Iraq may destabilize pro-American regimes there. Who knows how long the Saudi regime can survive the aftereffects of a war?
Of course some of these hawks would say, “Who cares if the Saudi regime falls — they’re corrupt and their society breeds terrorism and they’re not trustworthy allies.”
Yes, but who’s going to take over Arabia — the strongest alternative is the radical Muslims. What if Egypt goes? The dream of the radical Islamic movement is to topple all of the secular, pro-West governments in the Middle East. Americans may say, “Oh, that can never happen.” Well, yes it can — because of the discipline and rigor of these radical, self-contained belief systems.
How will war with Iraq affect the volatile Israel-Palestine powder keg?
For years in my Salon column, I questioned the automatic way the American government gave billions of dollars a year to Israel without putting pressure on Israeli policy toward the displaced Palestinians. The American major media were cowardly in avoiding the issue. The best time to have created a Palestinian state was 20 years ago. But at this point the situation is probably too inflamed. So the American media’s inertness “enabled” the Israeli government, allowing it to stay addicted to our profligate funding. Hence compromises were not made when peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians were possible. The suicide bombings of the past two years have disillusioned me with the Palestinian cause. Now I believe we have an ethical obligation to support Israel.
If our incursion into Iraq succeeds, it will clearly strengthen Israel. But if it doesn’t, and there’s a domino effect of destabilized Mideastern governments, then Israel is in mortal danger. It’s so foolish to add more negative energy to that explosive chemical mix in the Mideast. Why give Islamic militants one more major grievance against us? This one will be even more massive than the U.S. leaving military bases on Saudi soil after the Gulf War, which added fuel to bin Laden’s crusade to radicalize young Muslims.
What do you think of the antiwar movement that is taking shape in the U.S.?
Well, I had great hopes for it but am discouraged. I turned on C-SPAN with great excitement to watch the big march in Washington last month. But talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Several speakers were good, but most of them tried to drag all sorts of extraneous issues into it — calling Bush a “moron,” accusing America of imperialistic ambitions, “No blood for oil” — all these clichés. When fringe, paleo-leftist voices take over the platform, it drives away the moderate, mainstream people in this country who have nagging doubts about this war. I just don’t believe the polls claiming overwhelming public support for the war. I’m skeptical about the way the pollsters are asking the questions. I don’t know anyone who’s wholeheartedly for this war.
Whatever support the administration would have going into the war might prove fleeting if there are significant casualties, or the occupation proves costly and messy, don’t you think?
Yes, but I don’t want it ever to get to that point. You know, we’ve been bombing Iraq for years, because of the conditions imposed on Saddam after the last Gulf War — the no-fly zones and so on. In effect, we’ve been in a state of war for over a decade there. It’s not like we’ve been ignoring Saddam and merrily letting him do whatever he wants.
If we do go to war, I pray it’s a brief incursion. But this idea of occupying Iraq! When we need those billions here. Our medical care system is staggering, inner-city education is still a mess, the elderly are in straitened circumstances, and Social Security is in jeopardy, and we’re going to spend all this money not only in bombing Iraq but then building it again from the rubble and governing it? This is madness!
Why aren’t more public figures speaking out about the war, both pro and con, outside of the usual circles? I mean, on the antiwar side, of course, we have some high-profile Hollywood liberals like Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon …
Yes, that’s one of the problems. Of course actors have a right and even obligation to speak out. But so many of them — not Sarandon, whom I respect — come across as witless or knee-jerk. They question Bush’s intelligence, or they sneer and snort. They don’t sound fully mature; they don’t sound like they’ve fully considered the complexity of the positions that any president and his administration have to take. The infestation of the issue by posturing celebrities and the usual suspects on the fruitcake far left make people think, “I don’t want to be one of them.”
And then there are the intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky who’ve made a career abroad out of anti-Americanism. Sontag’s made no secret of her lifelong adulation of all things European. My take is different: My immigrant family escaped poverty in Italy, and so I look at America in a very positive, celebratory way. So I’m reluctant to become part of this easy chorus of anti-Americanism.
I also don’t want to do anything to undermine national morale, if we are indeed going to war. It’s wrong to be divisive when families have parents or children in danger on the front lines. I don’t want to add to their grief.
Do you think war is a certainty at this point?
I’m still hoping against hope that somehow backstage pressure on Saddam from Arab regimes will finally force him to accept exile in some plush pleasure spot. It’s so late in the day now. The media should have been focusing six months ago on who the Iraqi people are, on the history and dynamics of the region.
If I could, I would assign everyone to watch “Gone With the Wind” — which is dismissed these days as an apologia for slavery. But that movie beautifully demonstrates the horrors of war. Everyone is so wildly enthused for war at the start, but Ashley Wilkes says, “At the end of a war, no one remembers what they’re fighting for.” It shows the destruction of a civilization, the slaughter of a whole generation of young men, and people reduced to squalid, animal-like subsistence conditions. And that’s what’s missing right now, as we prepare to march off to Baghdad — a recognition of the horrors and tragic waste of war.
In a surprising announcement on Thursday, the Ford Motor Company publicly acknowledged what many people have known for a long time: Sports utility vehicles contribute more to global warming, emit more polluting exhaust and endanger other motorists more than standard cars.
In a report to company shareholders, Ford Chairman William C. Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, said that the company recognized the environmental impact of SUVs, which account for one-fifth of the company’s sales, and was seeking technological solutions to address it. But he said that the company would continue to build SUVs to keep up with the strong market demand.
Ford told reporters he did not want his company to end up in the court of public opinion being linked with tobacco companies, which continue to manufacture a product that causes serious health damage (and have suffered enormous financial judgments against them). He pointed out that Ford had voluntarily kept tailpipe pollution emission well below legally permitted levels, and had voluntarily put bars below the bumpers of its Ford Excursion — which weighs twice as much as a Jeep Grand Cherokee and gets 10 miles to the gallon in the city — in order to diminish harm to other cars in collisions, though safety laws did not require the bar.
“If we did not provide that vehicle someone else would,” Ford said, “and they wouldn’t provide it as responsibly as we do.”
Salon asked a number of people involved in transportation and environmental issues for their reaction to Ford’s announcement.
Ron Harbour is president of Harbour & Associates in Detroit, which tracks the automobile industry.
It’s kind of surprising [Ford] would make this kind of comment because SUVs are
very important to the company. They make up more than 20 percent of Ford’s U.S. sales. Bill Ford has been trying to put a green face forward, but it’s a little
contradictory because the company keeps introducing new SUVs. The whole issue
about emissions and fuel economy is relative to size. Ford could make smaller
SUVs, but that’s not what people want. You can’t blame Ford for building them,
because that’s what consumers are buying. Ford has built smaller SUVs and no one buys them. As long as fuel is relatively inexpensive, SUVs will remain affordable and people will still want them. Companies have a choice not to make them, but they’ll be dramatically less profitable. So I guess they’ll just apologize for them. But it’s not like they’re doing some dastardly deed. They’re just
satisfying customer needs.
Daniel Becker is director of global warming and the energy program for the Sierra Club.
The auto industry has denied for years that anything is wrong with these
vehicles. But [Bill Ford] told my boss that if Ford
doesn’t improve emissions from its vehicles, the Sierra Club will turn it into
the tobacco industry of the 21st century.
Ford has a long way to go. They make the Excursion, which we’ve named the Exxon Valdez of vehicles. It only gets 12 miles per gallon. It’s the most polluting vehicle ever made. It creates 134 tons of global warming pollution over its 124,000-mile life expectancy. We’ll watch and see what they do. We’re very hopeful. I hope what they’re doing is giving shareholders and analysts advance notice that they will put cleaner technology on their vehicles. If they’re blowing smoke, we’ll find out soon enough. This could have tremendous impact on the industry because if Ford makes cleaner vehicles, everyone else would follow. Auto companies are responsible for the SUV problem because consumers haven’t had a chance to buy cleaner SUVs.
Jerry Taylor is
the director of Natural Resource studies for the Cato Institute.
The Ford announcement is awfully weird. It seems really odd to me. This is just
an example of corporate spin and P.R. For whatever reason, the company feels
like they need to throw a sop to the environmentalists. The fellow from Ford
basically said “Our products are really bad and harmful, but we’re going to
keeping selling them anyway.” What the hell was that?
It’s not entirely clear that fuel consumption has hurt the environment. Petroleum is growing more abundant, not more scarce, and auto emissions are not a real threat to public health. We’ve had massive gains in urban air quality at the same time so many SUVs are on the road. If Ford, however, feels that by all objective measures, their vehicles are harmful, then they have every right to say so.
But I disagree. If the environment is becoming cleaner and not more dirty, then
I don’t see a problem with SUVs. Even if SUVs did have an impact on pollution,
there’s no reason to stop driving them if that impact is marginal.
Environmentalists say that we don’t really pay the true cost of fuel. What costs
of gasoline aren’t borne by consumers? It’s nonsense. It’s not true. The Clean Air Act put $30 to $50 billion of regulations on the oil industry, and that’s passed right on to consumers. Ask an environmentalist, “What is the cost of a cubic foot of clean air?” and they answer: “I don’t know.”
Camille Paglia is a Salon columnist.
If I had the cash and the driveway space for two cars, I’d definitely buy an SUV
(I’ve been ogling the gunmetal-silver, leather-lined, deluxe Nissan Pathfinder
for years). But it’s not a very practical vehicle for negotiating the mad congestion and pretzeling ramps of the Northeastern corridor.
As a gas-guzzler, the SUV is a cultural throwback to the grandiose, shark-fin
Cadillac battleships of the 1950s, when pumped-up, fetishistically buffed
American cars lorded it over the puny ladybugs (Volkswagen, Fiat, Renault) of
economically pinched postwar Europe.
My quarrel with the SUV is that 75 percent of East Coast owners don’t know how the hell to drive it. I go white with fear a dozen times a week as some white,
middle-class soccer mom in a trance rockets past in an SUV with one hand on the
wheel and the other on a cell phone pressed to her ear: She can neither signal
nor safely steer through turns, which the massive, high-held weight of the SUV
makes especially tricky.
Monica Lewinsky’s embarrassing wipeout on a California highway last year shows that the problem is not the SUV; it’s ditzy owners of both sexes who need primers on how to handle a quasi-military vehicle. I blame auto companies not for making and selling the SUV but for their failure to educate the public about the difficulties and dangers of driving an armored tank on the open road.
James
Barrett is an environmental economist for the Economic Policy Institute.
It isn’t news to anyone. Everybody already knows that SUVs are horribly damaging
to the environment, and Ford hasn’t done anything to change that. If my memory
serves correctly, Ford makes one of the highest-polluting vehicles on the market.
Talk is cheap. Until they do something about it, I can’t see how this announcement makes any real difference. The technology is available for car
companies to make vehicles of the same size and characteristics that are more fuel-efficient and less polluting. But every time we ask them to do something about that, they say they don’t know how.
Currently, the problem is that American consumers are not required to pay the true cost of the gasoline. Nowhere else in the Western world are prices so low.
They pay four times more in Europe, twice as much in Canada. Americans
should understand that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline isn’t just the fuel.
There’s the pollution, global warming, urban sprawl, the destruction of the
wilderness, even the cost of our protection of the oil supply in the Middle East.
The way to remedy this is the “T” word: “Taxes.” If we were serious about
fighting the effects of these vehicles, we’d raise taxes on the price of gasoline. In that way, we’d align the market to account for the environmental cost
of fuel consumption. But everybody screams bloody murder when the gas prices go up even a little bit.
The thing is, yesterday, everyone knew this was a problem, and nothing has
changed. The Ford announcement is a drop in the bucket, but only that. Still, we
probably shouldn’t discount it 100 percent. Admitting that it’s a problem is the first step in recovery in A.A., but after that, there are still 11 steps to go.
David Healy is an auto analyst at Burnham Securities.
Ford is probably a couple steps ahead of the competition in terms of
environmental friendliness. SUVs are still gas guzzlers and emitters of a lot of
pollution, and they’re probably less safe to be in a collision with, but Ford has
maintained higher standards on environmental issues and crash protection. Ford
is probably just making a statement that they’d like to do better.
I don’t know why it did this. You’d have to ask Billy Ford himself. The statement is a surprise, but this doesn’t mean in any way that Ford is getting out of the SUV
business. I think this might have some impact on the industry by ratcheting up
environmental standards. It might speed up the pace. But the fact that this issue was raised is no surprise. Anybody who didn’t know that SUVs are gas guzzlers and emitters of pollution is probably living on another planet.
Dave Snyder is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
Surprise, surprise. Of course they’re not going to cut back on SUVs. In fact,
the environmental irresponsibility of building SUVs is just slightly different
from the environmental irresponsibility of building cars, period.
Ford and other car companies and oil companies and tire companies have yet to even come close to atoning for the dismantling of urban transit systems across the country, which they undertook in the ’40s and ’50s. Back then transit
companies were privately owned; very few were publicly owned. A consortium of car-related interests essentially bought them all up and ran them into the ground,
shut them down, basically to trap Americans into having no choice but to drive
cars. And look where that’s gotten us. They got us addicted to cars back when
there was more room on the roads. Now I think everybody wishes we had the choice again.
Whether it’s an SUV or a hatchback, it doesn’t make much difference if you have
no choice but to drive. It’s understandable people want SUVs, because if you
have no choice but to drive on crowded, busy streets, you can’t blame them for
wanting to be in the biggest car, so that if they crash another car, they’re more
likely to survive. You can’t blame the people for it, you have to blame Ford. And
I don’t for a second accept their apology, if they call it that. I want them to return their investment into public transit so that people have choices.
David Horowitz is a Salon columnist and author of “The Fords: An American Epic.”
This is not a problem that has easy solutions. Of course there are a lot of
people who think they can rearrange the world according to abstract ideas. But
it’s very practical: Americans want SUVs. The left has an easy solution, which is
to deny people what they want, but if you really believe in freedom and choice,
then you have to face the fact that there can be conflict between what people
want and other interests — for example, the environment.
One of the virtues and problems of the market system is that it answers to
people’s demands. And if you believe in democracy and freedom, then you have to recognize that the people have voted: they want SUVs. It would be the height of arrogance and, in my view, an ominous precedent to say we ought to override what people want and give them what we think is good for them. That is the
totalitarian mentality.
An awful lot of environmental problems have been solved by technology, something the environmental movement doesn’t always want to recognize. So I noticed in the Ford statement that they’re looking for technological solutions, and I think in the long run that’s probably the best path. I don’t know that Bill Ford is
either a Republican or a conservative, but in a year when compassionate
conservatism is becoming fashionable, it’s interesting to see a kind of corporate
compassion announced by one of the world’s premiere corporations.
I actually own an SUV. If you have a family, you understand why people want SUVs. Safety is really important. My wife feels a lot safer — she’s higher up over the road, and it’s harder to carjack. A lot of people use it to get out to the countryside, a lot of people who have kids.
SUVs are probably saving lives — if you get into an accident, you’re much safer.
It’s not like SUVs cost twice as much as a normal car; you can get an SUV for
less than you can get a normal car. People make their choices.
Kevin Berger, the executive editor of San Francisco magazine, is the author of “Where the Road and the Sky Collide,” a book about automobiles and the environment.
I have the cynical response: It’s greenwash because they’ve known about the problems with SUVs for quite some time. The greenwash campaign on SUVs is pretty old. The automotive manufacturers started a campaign in 1993-94 called “tread lightly” that promoted conscientious use of SUVs in the outdoors and told drivers things like “drive slow when crossing river banks” and so on At the time I interviewed a botanist on what SUVs do to the countryside and he said that if you drive your SUV off-road, you’re absolutely decimating river banks and the forest.
It seems to me just another whitewash. Especially if you’ve seen the 5-ton Ford
Excursion — they’re like Mack trucks. It’s like Ford said: “We just have to make a
bigger Suburban.” They’re really going to cause problems because other cars don’t fare well in collisions with the Excursion.
An insurance industry group, the Institute of Highway Safety, did their first report on SUV safety in 1995 or so. They did the first side crash tests outside of the ones done by automotive companies. The automotive companies issued this huge public statement that said “The Institute’s tests were really skewed.” Now they’re acknowledging that the Institute of Highway Safety was right. So how can you believe them?
But I also think that Ford’s statement is really cool, because it shows that all the
grass-roots efforts by the Ralph Nader group and the Union of Concerned
Scientists have made this a huge issue. All the gains in fuel efficiency made by small cars in the 1980s have gone completely backwards since SUVs took off. It’s almost like they’re saying, “We here at Dow chemicals think that it’s terrible that we’re pouring chlorine into the rivers, but we’re making a lotta paint here.”
Ford’s response is pretty savvy marketing responding to the backlash. It’s not
as if they’re going to stop building them. I’m glad to see that the backlash has
made it to the mainstream.
It’s not just that Excursions themselves are a joke, it’s a purely market-driven
model. The Ford people do this tremendous market research where they get all
these people in focus groups and then they realize the importance of SUVs, and
somewhere along the way they realized that they’re not big enough so they built
the Excursion, and now they’re going to apologize for it? It’s insane.
Prime-time
propaganda
BY DANIEL FORBES
(01/13/99)
and
Propaganda
for dollars
BY DANIEL FORBES
(01/14/99)
In the words of Nell Carter, give me a break! I
have never seen such an egregious example of hopelessly naive reportage on the
salon.com Web site. To accuse the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) of “mind control” for working with
broadcast networks to include anti-drug messages in programming is
ludicrous. To be shocked by the implication that someone other than the creative
geniuses who came up with “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” have been
influenced by something outside their bubble worlds is absolutely hilarious.
Do you really believe that making network TV programs is an exercise in
democracy and free speech? Why not point your finger at the advertisers
who threaten shows like “Ellen” with lost advertising revenue for
expressing gay-positive themes? What about product placement in prime-time
TV? What about inserting digital advertisements in sports
broadcasts? These things impinge upon free expression
and blur the lines between entertainment and propaganda much more than a
little tweaking of existing drug-related story lines.
And as far as encouraging anti-drug messages in programming, at least the message being
promulgated by federal officials is slightly more responsible than the
advertisers’ mantra of “Consume, Consume, Consume.”
– Amanda Holm
Maybe I’m a little dense or naive, but I thought part of the good things government did was to work toward solving the drug epidemic in our country that is our modern plague. The terms used by Salon to describe the “deal” make it sound underhanded and illegal. So far
I as can tell, the deal was neither. In fact, I would say it was admirable that the government took steps to use the media for positive goals in contrast to what seems to be the destructive
and inane purposes of many popular TV productions.
For years the popular media has indirectly espoused violence, uncontrolled sex, drugs and immorality that have brainwashed the people into being a society without values or good judgement. Why shouldn’t the government use the same power of the media for a good
purpose?
– Stan Kotajarvi
It seems to me that the righteous indignation reflected in Daniel Forbes’ articles is somewhat misplaced. If the “guvment” was involved in real propaganda activities, like promoting racist or sexist stereotypes, or police-state tactics against civilians, or imperialist military activity in
other countries, then I would agree with his concerns. But influencing children not to harm their lives and others by getting addicted to alcohol and drugs? Ridiculous. I think the networks and the “guvment” should also have targeted smoking cigarettes and tobacco, besides alcohol.
– Ron Buckles
The deliberate guiding of content by the ONDCP, however
admirable its intent, is troubling when you consider who else could have been doing it, such as a large tobacco company. I for one would welcome disclaimers at the end of a TV episode such as “Production assistance by the U.S. ONDCP,” but I think the same type of disclaimer
should be used for consumer product placement in a TV show or movie.
This issue actually is very similar to the current debate about campaign finance reform. The American public needs to start being much more vocal and curious about who’s funding whom and what in this country, and what agenda they’re trying to advance. It isn’t easy to tell anymore.
– Nancy Finch
The idea that any governmental agency can foist its morality onto the public via TV programming is thoroughly appalling and equally frightening — and to make me pay
for this “indoctrination” with my own tax dollars is the
ultimate insult! I’m sick to death of this administration’s attitude that
it must “save” me from myself — whether it’s tobacco products, drugs, or handguns, my personal freedoms are being subtly eroded at every opportunity.
This latest interference with creative freedom only proves how far
the government will go in its subliminal, stealth campaign to destroy our
individual rights and warp our perspectives. As for the network executives
who co-conspired to promote this propaganda, I hope a smart lawyer for the
FCC finds some way to sanction you for your reckless disregard and
willful, malicious breach of the public trust.
– B. Morris
Thank you for publicizing the federal government’s
attempts to control content on network TV. This
action by the ONDCP is reprehensible at best, and is a clear violation of
FCC content regulations. How long did our “drug czar” intend to
keep the public in the dark on this issue? McCaffrey should be
fired immediately and prosecuted for spreading lies and half-truths about
drugs and America’s drug users, and using our airwaves to do so. The “war
on drugs” is clearly a war on ideas, as evidenced by this latest pathetic
attempt by the ONDCP.
Have NORML (The National Organization for the Reform
of Marijuana Laws) and similar organizations been allowed equal time to
confront the charges against drug users made by the ONDCP? I don’t recall
seeing the “Pot just might be harmless” commercial in prime time.
– Robert C. Cook
The government’s efforts to control drugs during the
past two decades has been a total fiasco. And now, the shadow of
“Big Brother” controlling the minds of the country truly comes to
mind.
The idea that the networks and media have given up our
First Amendment rights by secretly assisting the government in its
publicity campaign is frightening. How can a free society exist if the
people do not know that the government is spewing its rhetoric in an insidious
manner to undermine the very freedoms which we hold dear?
The only way to stop the drug problem is to treat the issue as a social — not criminal — problem! Legalize it, tax it! Don’t put good people in prison for exercising the same rights that women enjoy under Roe vs. Wade — the right to do with their bodies as they see fit. After all, if you can
legally have an abortion, why can’t you get high?
– Don Ewing
Mutant
food
BY KRISTI COALE
(01/12/00)
Thank you for the excellent article by Kristi Coale. First, it is one of the most
well-written, comprehensive articles on the topic of genetically engineered foods. Second, at long last someone has the guts to disclose the Food and Drug Administration’s shameful bias toward industry, and outright corruption. It is long overdue that the agency be
reprimanded and overhauled. Sadly, the problem goes beyond the FDA,
EPA and USDA. I’m afraid that many of our politicians in Washington –
via soft money contributions and political action committees (PAC)
– have become controlled by industry at the cost of public health
and enlightenment. I hope Salon will continue this type of investigative
reporting which looks more deeply into issues. Thanks for your great story.
– William Crist
Boone, N.C.
Ms. Coale complains that the companies who have produced genetically mutated (GM) seeds have been unable to “prove” that the organisms are safe. Such proof is, of course, impossible. One cannot “prove” a negative. To limit the development of new technology to such a standard is a Luddite notion at best.
It is also obvious that Ms. Coale has not spent much time on a university campus. On mine, you can get nine professors to sign onto nearly anything. The fact that Druker could dredge up only nine unknowns as co-complainants says more about the weakness of his suit than the
strength. The idea that said nine are taking great personal risk by supporting
the suit is absurd. What does she think tenure is for? These are all
tenured faculty members who will quite likely occupy their positions until
they die, and perhaps well beyond. We who are lucky enough to have tenure
are granted it precisely so that we can take unpopular positions
without fear of repercussions. How many other people can say that? Courage indeed!
Finally, one has to ask, “Where’s the beef?” Genetically mutated crops have been around for nearly 10 years, and to our knowledge, there is not a shred of evidence of any actual damage. In the words of Commerce Undersecretary David Aaron, “not one sneeze, not one cough, not one rash.” If the religious wackos and neo-Luddites object to GM organisms, that is their right. Let’s just recognize them for who they are.
– George Pfeiffer
Coale overstates the case against genetically modified
foods. Nearly all foods are GM foods and they have been since the birth of
agriculture. Genetic modification was achieved in prehistoric times by
selection. Then came cross-breeding. Now we use gene splicing. In the
future we will use artificial genes. The real issue is not whether we
label a food “GM” or not; it is how we determine a food is safe and
nutritious. Coale and her ilk would be well-served to focus on the big question
and to eschew the labels of ignorance.
– Jim Hershberger
The flap about GM food is
overblown. The unstated, but obvious, assumption of pieces like Kristi Coales’
is that natural equals good and GM equals bad. Of course there will be people who have allergic reactions to GM food. So what? Shellfish allergies are fairly common, but I can still buy shrimp and lobster at the supermarket. In recent months we have even been informed that surprising numbers of people react badly to the common peanut. Skippy and Jif were still on the shelves the last time I looked.
– Dick Eagleson
“Punch” Bradley, “Judy” Gore and the injustice being
done John Rocker
BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
(01/12/00)
Camille Paglia writes: “The massive Secret Service bills for this escapade
(the Clintons moving to N.Y.) are coming out of your taxes — which would be
better employed in upgrading inner-city schools or providing free
prescription medicines to senior citizens.”
What’s the alternative? Disband the Secret Service and have our leaders and their family members assassinated as an annual ritual? I’m sure Ms. Paglia would find a way to defend ritual assassination with some off-handed reference to the Greeks. For the rest of us, we’ll
take the Secret Service as an unfortunate, but necessary, institution in the
defense of free elections.
And since when is a lame-duck president and his family
moving from the White House an “escapade”? I don’t think the next
president would be too happy if the Clintons decided to settle into the
Lincoln bedroom in 2001. So they moved a year early, either way they have to
move. It’s amusing to watch the darts that are thrown by people who hate the
president. Alan Greenspan might call it an “irrational exuberance” of
hatred toward the Clintons. Can we raise the interest rate on Ms.
Paglia to cool her expansion?
– Brian King
San Francisco
In her column, Paglia writes: “Athletes are warriors, not diplomats, and
they shouldn’t have to conform to genteel p.c. codes.” This is precisely
the moronic attitude that creates the John Rockers and [Arizona relief pitcher] Bobby Chouinards of
the world. As long as she and others are around to reassure them their behavior is perfectly fine, this sort of nonsense will continue.
She also writes: “Football, which I have repeatedly described as my pagan religion, is the key to understanding American business and politics.” In other words, being loud, stupid, and violent is how we should be. Perhaps Camille should stop the silly chest-thumping.
– Tracy Mohr
My goodness, Ms. Paglia writes long columns. Regarding her
snide remarks on the cost to taxpayers for security measures at the
Clintons’ new home, granted, we’ll pay through the nose. But protection is a
necessary guarantee we must make as a nation to all our ex-presidents. I’m
sure we’ll be hearing about the cost for the next year but I’m making a vow
right now to ignore all articles that don’t also include what we do for
other living presidents and/or their families. Be fair now.
– Diane Wagner-Price
As a former ’60s liberal and now a 49-year-old Ronald Reagan/Rush Limbaugh conservative type, I have found Camille Paglia to be
one thinker I would vote for in any capacity. Her razor sharp no-nonsense
lucidity combined with boundless creativity has proven to be the
consistent haven of agreement between me and my fairly liberal democrat
girlfriend. That is to me the true benchmark of superior rationality and
idealism. Thank you for showcasing her awesome talent.
– R. Pier
West Orange, N.J.
