Camille Paglia

At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him — a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday’s news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama’s staffing problems are blatant — from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another — from the president’s tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady’s over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama’s sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.

Video: President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah during the G-20 summit

Enough already! These slips are worsening the anti-Obama backlash, which began with the administration’s bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package. Conservatives seem deliriously drunk with their cartoon picture of Obama, to whom is glibly attributed every pathology in the book. Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama’s educational records remains troubling. But I am still waiting for hard evidence about the host of other charges that are continually being hammered against him — from his alleged fidelity to the crypto-tactics of Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky to the questions raised by right-wingers about the production of Obama’s two memoirs. Out of respect for the presidency, conservatives need to put up or shut up about these issues.

I still strongly believe in Obama’s promise as a world leader. I was thrilled, for example, by his call this week for an end to nuclear weapons — a goal that he frankly admitted would not be attained in his lifetime. We have waited a long time for an American president who dreams big. Yes, there are bitter cells of fanatics everywhere who hate America and want a repeat of 9/11. And yes, there will always be petty dictators who covet the bomb and conspire to get it. But the mass of people around the world want to be inspired to a higher good. Whether the Obama presidency succeeds or fails will depend on his ability to sustain his ideals in the face of the testing crises that will inevitably erupt in far-flung regions where ethnic or religious strife has been a way of life for thousands of years. And closer to home, Obama will need to cut the umbilical to his hometown posse, whose inefficiency and poor decision-making took the shine off his honeymoon and brought the dispirited Republicans back from the dead.

As a former lover of talk radio, I too have wondered why programs with a liberal bent have fared so poorly in the free market. There are two specific factors that may be responsible for the disparity.

1) The vast majority of the talk radio audience listens in their car or from home. People driving around during the day and listening to the radio are probably demographically skewed toward the self-employed or people in some sort of sales. Admittedly, there are a large number of service jobs that require drive time, but I would bet those people are not interested in politics. The entrepreneur or six-figure sales professional is far more likely to be a conservative. People listening from home would either be stay-at-home parents or people working from home. These groups would also tend to be much more likely to listen to Laura Schlessinger than Al Franken.

2) The liberal talk shows I’ve listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh’s program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.

Marty Grant
New York City

Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture — the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington’s tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.

However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).

Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: “The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves.” How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They’re doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea.

Why do you and others in the press keep misattributing this “magic Negro” comment to Rush Limbaugh? My understanding from listening to his radio program is that the phrase you are referring to from Rush’s parody song was first brought to light in an article by David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Why didn’t you mention this in your column? Rush merely ran with it in one of his many parodies, which he is notably famous for. Often he takes comments made in the press or by politicians and parodies them — most often to expose their hypocrisy.

The press has tied Rush to “magic Negro” as if he were the originator or instigator. Thus Rush is unfairly and routinely condemned for it.

L. Bryan
Columbus, Ga.

“Barack the Magic Negro” was a song parody by a longtime contributor to the Rush Limbaugh Show, Paul Shanklin, whom I consider to be one of the most brilliant satirists of our time. Shanklin has an analytic erudition about popular music, a genius for mimicry, and an astounding gift for creative rapid-response to hard news. The widespread and vitriolic misjudgments about what goes on during Rush’s show could and should have been dispelled a decade ago had Shanklin’s fiendishly clever parodies been released into general circulation. Yes, they can be purchased in CD collections, and they are also available online to subscribers to the Limbaugh Web site, but that draconian limitation has unfairly confined Shanklin’s work to conservative partisans. My all-time favorite in the Shanklin oeuvre is “I Can’t Recall,” a parody of “Try to Remember” (from “The Fantasticks”) with an air-headed Hillary on the witness stand claiming that she just can’t remember a single darn thing about that silly old Whitewater deal because her mind has turned to Jell-O … Jello-O … Jello-O (fading off in echoes).

When I first heard “Barack the Magic Negro” shortly after the March 2007 publication of the Ehrenstein article (which was partly inspired by a term used by director Spike Lee), I found it very daring and funny. It was timely and had the shock of the new — exactly like Lenny Bruce’s violation of conventional proprieties. But Rush kept playing it and playing it well beyond its shelf date, and after a while it felt gratuitous and dismayingly oblivious to racial realities and sensitivities in the U.S. Although I’m a longtime fan of Rush’s show, I started turning the radio off when this skit came on.

Here’s the main point: The vocal in “Barack the Magic Negro” mimics grandstanding black activist Al Sharpton, while the namby-pamby melody is borrowed from “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a children’s song that when originally performed by folkies Peter, Paul and Mary was widely assumed to be an allegory for marijuana smoking. So the Shanklin parody went well beyond the Ehrenstein article in what was being implied about Obama as well as the turf wars of African-American politics. There are so many other wonderful parodies in the Shanklin collection that more richly deserve repeated airplay. And for heaven’s sake, they all belong on YouTube. Unlock the vaults!

Regarding your observations about the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin and the insufferable snottiness of Dick Cavett and other good liberals: Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? Because of your open-mindedness and your “real feminism” (as opposed to faux leftist feminism).

In the meantime, the torching of Sarah Palin’s church in Alaska (children were inside when the fire with accelerant was set) evokes a collective shrug in the mainstream media and other liberal precincts (if you can find any reference to the event at all). Why the all-too-frequent and downright nasty face of contemporary liberalism?

Timothy Condon
Tampa, Fla.

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, “Berkeley in the Sixties,” chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I’m not kidding — there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It’s a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don’t get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!

Friends of mine and I have found ourselves at the crossroads of the Washington, D.C., media, gay press and the murder of a straight man at the home of a noted gay rights and marriage attorney. Print may be morbid, but maybe citizen journalism/investigation may fill the void. There is a three-year-old unsolved murder of a straight man who was drugged, incapacitated, sexually assaulted, suffocated, then stabbed in the home of three gay men, one of them being an old college friend. One of the defendants — not charged with murder, however — is noted K Street attorney Joe Price, who is active in Lambda legal circles.

The crime scene in Dupont Circle is just a few blocks from where I, my partner and two close friends live. The murder of Robert Wone had all the ingredients of a D.C. scandal: sex, drugs and murder. Yet there is almost zero buzz on the streets about this. The D.C. mainstream print media gave minimal coverage, and you can guess how few column inches or how little airtime the TV guys gave it. The four of us launched a blog, and we’ve broken news.

Why does the death of a straight man in the home of three gay guys not become “news” à la Chandra Levy? The four of us gay Washingtonians are all plugged into the media in some capacity, yet we can’t figure this out. Another question is why the gay media avoids this crime and issue. Some coverage, yet only a little.

The Web site dc.bilerico gave us space for a guest post. A recent Fox 5 / WTTG piece. And finally our site.

Craig Brownstein
Washington, D.C.

From your description of the appalling news blackout on this crime, it appears to be a blatant case of politically correct censorship. The 11th commandment of the liberal mainstream media is that no evil shalt be spoken of any gay persons, who have been sanctified by their precious victim status, without which liberalism would implode. You and your gay friends are to be congratulated for your passionate truth-seeking. I am very glad for the opportunity to publicize the facts in Salon. Please keep me informed of future developments.

I’m confused. You say you are an atheist. It seems to me that if there is no God, then we are all simply pieces of animated dirt. To pieces of animated dirt, on what basis can something be considered right or wrong, ethical or unethical? Of what value is life except that which animated pieces of dirt place on it? What would it matter if some place absolutely no value on life?

Abortion is “murder”? That has moral connotations. What is wrong with the “murder of a child”? All pieces of animated dirt eventually become lifeless. What does it matter when or how? Morality is just an invention of animated dirt. What if humans managed to destroy all life on earth? What would it matter? Surely, some other form of animated dirt would evolve to replace us. I certainly don’t know there is a God, but I choose to believe there is, because, for one, I don’t want to believe that I am just animated dirt.

Bob Ryden

The ancient Greeks, whose art and thought deeply influenced me in my youth, created ethics as a branch of secular philosophy, detached from religion and its moral imperatives. Like artworks, codes of law and ethics are uniquely human constructs — conceptual environments that separate us from animals, who are governed by biological instinct. It is rational to debate and define the rules by which any society exists. As a cultural relativist and atheist, I believe that values change over time and that there is no transcendent God who generates and enforces them. But societies have a right to require reasonable compliance from those who enjoy their material benefits.

Your vast panorama of “animated dirt” rising and sinking is actually closer to the Buddhist view of the cosmos — which I also find inspiring for its contemplative acceptance of things as they are. The operations of the life force have inherent majesty. Human consciousness, when fully expanded, is for me the ultimate value. As Heracleitus said, “All things flow.” To demand permanence or personal survival beyond death seems to me a tragically doomed quest. But by power of imagination, we each have the right to live in our own universe. All gods exist — because thinking makes it so.

In “Vamps & Tramps” you said that sex “reawakens and heals the ‘family romance’ of our personal biography.” I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on what you meant by “heals.” Do you mean that people who had a bad family life can, through their sex life, overcome the negative consequences this had for their psyche? I thought that because sexuality springs from the subconscious one couldn’t change anything about it and therefore that no amount of awareness and observation and analysis of one’s sexuality could change it. Is sexuality the only language the subconscious understands, a sexual act the only way to “talk” to one’s subconscious and, possibly, change it?

Mariana Pinheiro

When human beings were scrabbling for survival in the nomadic and agrarian eras, sex was a reproductive necessity, a drive as basic and primal as hunger and thirst. However, as civilization developed, personality became more complex, and along with it the pageantry of courtship and romance. Freud’s analyses of “family romance” were keyed to the hothouse environment of the bourgeois home. With the new intimacy of parents and children as well as the protraction of adolescent dependence (Shakespeare’s Juliet got married at 14), sex became freighted with symbolism that it may never have had in the pre-industrial and pre-Romantic period.

The issue is not an atypical “bad family life” but a universal bourgeois problem of ambivalent over-involvement. Modern identity has gotten far too intertwined with unrealistic ideals of love as well as the embattled theatrics of sexual orientation. However, we’re stuck with it, and it’s given us a hundred years of fabulous Hollywood movies! My point is simply that the love life of everyone I’ve known from my baby-boom generation and afterward is a chess board ruled by shadowy forces that long predate puberty. Erotic choices yearningly follow or rebelliously diverge from a cast list imprinted on us in childhood. Changing the template may be virtually impossible. Self-knowledge is the most that we can hope for. But for that we need poetry and art — not the rigid, sterile political ideology that still paralyzes gender studies.

Around the time I was 13 or 14 (I’m 28), I read [Mary] McCarthy’s story “The Company She Keeps” in a short story anthology. Well, needless to say, I loved the story so much that I went on to read just about everything McCarthy wrote. At first I was swept by her satirical prose; then, later, I was amazed to discover that she was extremely erudite, too. I do not remember the particulars, but McCarthy herself mentions her sexual escapades in her collection of stories of the same name, as well as her autobiography “How I Grew.”

In any case, I do not think McCarthy would have characterized herself as a feminist. Indeed, the “isms” she was concerned about were those of the day: communism, socialism, Trotskyism, etc. Nor do I think feminists would have been the only ones to admire her. As I write this, I recall a letter I discovered in a book of Philip Roth correspondence, in which Roth neurotically gushes over McCarthy’s realistic criticism of something he wrote. That is the type of reach and sway she had.

No matter what, it is nice to see someone evoking Mary McCarthy’s name. Next time, perhaps you could do it without mentioning Justin Timberlake.

Alexandre Bejerman
Montreal, Quebec

How delightful to hear from another McCarthy fan! Typical of the systemic philistinism of women’s studies programs from the 1970s on, strong voices like those of McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer were excluded from the maudlin, victim-centric curriculum. Things began to change in scattered quarters in the 1990s, thanks to a new generation of more open-minded feminists, but it is certainly the case that the overwhelming majority of women literature majors in this country are graduating without ever having heard Mary McCarthy’s name. More TV broadcasts of Sidney Lumet’s wonderfully acted ensemble film of “The Group” (1966) would help. (It’s an amusing bitch fest like “The Women.”) The political aspirations and disillusionments of McCarthy’s left-leaning Vassar College class of 1933 speak directly to our own time.

You wrote: “Two weeks after my return, I am still trying to process the enormity of my experience in Salvador, which was staggering on every level.”

I understand that usage is subject to change, but I feel a duty to my old English teacher, Fr. McFadden, SJ, to use “enormity” with the traditional sense of “great wickedness or evil.” I hope that you will agree that the standard definition of “enormity” is worth preserving. The president has been misusing that word for a while, and I fear that without the help of respected writers, it may soon be lost.

Steve Miner

Well, I certainly got an earful from Salon readers about this one! I appreciate the grammar protests from everyone who wrote in. But I honestly have never accepted that sharp distinction in English. In French, one can use enormité in either sense, and it seems to me a very useful duality. I was certainly signaling that the carnival in Salvador had both a physical and a spiritual dimension; neither “immensity” nor “enormousness” (which other readers suggested) would have been quite right.

From the swaying top of Daniela Mercury’s cruising trio elétrico, I was reminded of many things — Wordsworth’s sonnet about sleeping London at dawn as a “mighty heart” and Baudelaire’s spooky poem about beauty as a goddess-like stone sphinx with bruising breasts. With apologies to irate English teachers everywhere, “enormity” with a French twist really nails it!

I am a second year master’s student at York University. Two of the themes you constantly return to are your admiration for the creative instinct in gay male artists, and the profound influence European art cinema has had upon you throughout your life. I wonder, then, if you’ve ever seen any films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder — one of the most fascinating confluences of the two I’ve seen yet. The best of them bristle with a renegade vision of egomania, promiscuity, kleptomania and suicide that has virtually no equivalent in living memory for my generation.

Fassbinder was generally acknowledged to be the foremost figure of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, to the point that his premature death in 1982 is commonly used as a convenient point to mark the end of the movement. At various points, he managed to contain within his own work the combined styles and thematics of almost all of his New German Cinema peers — Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff, von Trotte, Reitz, etc. — as well as reviving the style of Douglas Sirk to deliver a series of blistering body blows to the Adenauer era, Germany’s 1950s equivalent of America’s Eisenhower era.

Fassbinder’s work, however, is something current undergraduates have the deck stacked against them if they want to appreciate properly. Film studies courses nowadays invariably only show either one of two films –”Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” — the only two of his films that, taken in isolation, can be used to inculcate misinterpretations of what he was really about. The former is often distorted into a parable of sentimental liberal humanism, and the latter seems simply to conform to the conventions of the well-made historical re-creation. This is exactly the sort of travesty you’ve railed about in connection to Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Robert Mapplethorpe and numerous others. I don’t know if you’d appreciate being reminded of one more, but this is one that has piqued me recently.

Malcolm Morton
Toronto

Thank you so much for sending up this alarm about Fassbinder. I am very distressed to hear that his films are being in effect censored to fit into the bromide-filled film studies curriculum. Fassbinder was a cardinal figure in my thinking throughout the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. My philosopher friend James Fessenden and I were avid Fassbinder fans. It would be difficult to reconstruct just how daring “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” was at its release in 1972 — from the claustrophobic yet baroque set to the bizarre costumes and seething lesbian S/M drama. (In retrospect, it must partly have been Fassbinder’s homage to Wilde’s “Salome.”) I was also very grateful to Fassbinder for recovering Douglas Sirk, whose sensationalistically supercharged Hollywood films I had always loved. But curious gay film fans should probably start with “Fox and His Friends” (1975), where Fassbinder himself plays a gritty piece of working-class rough trade.

I agree with you about “The Egyptian” — it’s a very underrated epic. You may already know this, but the casting of Bella Darvi, and her effect on the doctor, mirrored her effect on the movie itself. When she was cast, the movie had been intended as a vehicle for Marlon Brando who had committed to the picture. That’s why there were many other name stars like Victor Mature (why haven’t you discussed him? He’s a unique image in films also) and big-budget production values. Brando withdrew after hearing of Darvi’s casting, and that crippled the film.

The film seems just fine with Purdom, and I’ve seen it several times since first seeing it as a kid. It’s an epic that seems to stay fresh, and stands up to repeated viewings every couple or few years. Easily better than “Spartacus” (although it was hard to beat the cynical Crassus) or “The Robe” (although Caligula was done as well as well as Robert Graves could have ever visualized).

Al Handa

No, I had not realized until I wrote about “The Egyptian” in Salon that the casting of Darryl Zanuck’s mistress, Bella Darvi, had caused Brando’s flight from the film. And yes, the disorder that Darvi spread in production amazingly replicates the destructiveness of the Babylonian femme fatale whom she plays. There was also a lot of griping at the time about Darvi’s heavy Eastern European accent and how hard she had to work for her lines to be even minimally comprehensible. Darvi’s gotten a bad rap: I think she does a terrific job, and so does Edmund Purdom as her smitten victim.

You confirmed our vision alignment with your wonderful tribute to Daniela Mercury. I have been listening to her for 15 years, since I married my Brazilian wife, Valeria. On our frequent trips to Brazil,Daniela is often the soundtrack (or Ivete Sangalo, who is whipping a quarter-million people into a frenzy at Maracana here or gracefully sharing a stage with Daniela Mercury). My wife, and so many women in Brazil, can bring so much warmth, sex appeal and character to a room that, well, they stand out. My own special carioca has an MS in computer science, a black belt, and has danced in the carnival parades several times. When I go dancing with her, I am like the kid with a fresh driver’s license trying to drive a Ferrari, although I have learned a bit over the years.

I am amazed at the culture in Brazil in many ways beyond the wonderful women. Brazilian teenagers are happy! The angst, rebellion and binging behavior that is (and was for me and my generation) the norm here is mostly nonexistent. A 23-year-old can live at home with his parents and have a warm and respectful relationship going both ways. A 13-year-old girl can wear a tiny bikini and look like a blossoming young woman without being hooted at by drunken guys or sneered at by disapproving women.

John Moore
Boulder, Colo.

I was fascinated by your remarks about the close yet nonjudgmental relationship of parents and children in Brazil as well as the freedom that young women enjoy to show off their bodies without harassment from hooligans. I observed both of these things during my stay at the Salvador carnival in February. What are the cultural reasons for this? I am eager to hear from Salon readers about the Brazil/U.S. dichotomy. I adore Brazilians, male and female, and felt especially at home in Salvador da Bahia, where my Italian energy level seemed perfectly normal and was in fact overshadowed by many vivacious personalities bursting like fireworks.

Meanwhile, my study of Daniela Mercury’s astonishing corpus of work continues. Of the CDs she gave me three weeks ago in Miami (where she tirelessly sang and danced in a huge three-hour concert on Hollywood Beach), I have been stuck on “Musica de Rua,” which is an absolute knockout, and am now heavily into “Elétrica,” a live album executed at an intoxicating pace. At her invitation two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and privilege of watching Daniela mix her new song with Wyclef Jean in the production booth of a recording studio near Times Square in New York City. Of course I will be returning to the subject of Daniela in future columns. I remain completely overwhelmed by the exuberant intensity and rhythmic intricacy of her music, and I deeply admire her professionalism as an artist as well as her generosity and unpretentious warmth as a person.

Subject: These weren’t a few birds; they were Barbie birds. Knowing you’re a fan of the seminal Hitchcock classic, “The Birds,” I couldn’t help passing this along.

Amanda Myers
Chicago

This is a hoot! A $40 Barbie Doll sporting Tippi Hedren’s classic spring-green suit, with pecking blackbirds attached as accessories wonderfully paralleling Tippi’s ever-present purse! (I make much of that purse in my British Film Institute book on “The Birds.”) To add to the sadistic play in twitting girl Barbie collectors, this ad shows the haunting Victorian schoolhouse of Bodega Bay hovering on a hill in the background. That’ll teach ya!

Camille, how can an educated, classy woman like you not see through that horrific film “Titanic”?

Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, was one of the vilest and most disgusting characters ever to grace the silver screen. From beginning to end, she displayed nothing but character flaws and a lack of concern for everyone else around her. As the movie starts, she is a rich brat who is depressed that she has to marry an incredibly rich and handsome man because he treats her badly. Perhaps she should have taken into account his personality rather than his bank account when she accepted his proposal.

Rather than take responsibility for her own actions, stand up to her mother, and tell him to his face that she is not in love with him, she instead decides to take the easy way out and kill herself. Now, the whole world would be better had she just jumped off the back of that damn boat. Instead, our boy Leonardo DiCaprio talks her down from the ledge, and she sees him and thinks, “Ooh, cute poor boy.” So then she decides to slum it for the weekend and hook up with the cute poor kid. Then, to prove her total lack of morals, she decides that she will ask Jack to “draw her” — naked, of course.

So, while engaged to someone else (because she never had the decency to call it off), she decides to get naked for a guy she has known for all of about 24 hours. Immediately afterward it’s time to consummate the hours-old relationship in the back of a car that is not theirs. Wow, that’s a real “moral” Victorian woman for you! Of course, that is not enough. The ship hits the iceberg (we didn’t see that one coming). By the way, she was on deck when that happened. I wonder if our lookout was too busy snooping on her and Jack to notice the iceberg. Maybe it’s actually her fault the ship sinks in the first place.

Anyway, our hero Jack puts Rose on a lifeboat. Of course, being safe is not enough, so she jumps back onto the sinking ship — a prime example of great decision-making. After it goes down, Jack is safe on a door of some sort, but he has to give up his spot to save Rose. Now Rose is on the door, and Jack is stuck in the freezing waters. So in a sense she kills Jack in a slow, frigid, painful way — sort of like the experience I felt while watching this movie. She holds on to Jack’s shivering hand, telling him, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Of course, after a few minutes in Arctic waters, Jack’s hand is no longer shivering. Winslet, in tears, continues, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Around then, the lifeboat arrives, and Winslet immediately lets go, “Hey, I’m over here!” Jack sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Ms. Winslet grabs a spot on the lifeboat. Real nice, Kate, real nice: Whatever happened to never letting go?

We then hear the rest of Winslet’s life. Her fiancé loses his mind and ends up killing himself (you’re two for two, Kate). However, she finds a nice man, marries him, and lives a great life. Eventually, he dies (I wonder what she did to make that happen), and we see Winslet’s Rose again at age — I don’t know, let’s say 126 — with her granddaughter or whoever is on the ship trying to find the Titanic’s wreckage. At the end of the film, Rose walks to the back of the ship and takes the priceless diamond necklace that she could give to her grandchildren, which would set her family up for generations, but instead she throws the freaking necklace into the ocean! Queue overplayed, overhyped and over-sung Celine Dion song (I mean, seriously, by the end she is practically screaming the lyrics — like Celine, we get it, you have a great voice, stop assaulting us with it already).

Back to throwing the fancy necklace: She might as well have thrown three generations of her family over the side of the ship. Could she possibly be more selfish? Well, yes, she could, because then, apparently Rose dies, and we see her in heaven. For some reason, heaven is the Titanic (not exactly what I picture paradise to be). She opens up a stateroom door, and there is Leonardo’s Jack waiting for her in bed. Not her actual husband, mind you, but Jack. So she is even cheating on her husband in heaven.

I rest my case. The vilest, most horrifying character in cinematic history. An Academy Award for playing the she-devil would be one of the greatest travesties in mankind’s history since … the actual Titanic.

Signed, Every Rose has its Horns
Steve Derion
Manahawkin, N.J.

What joy! I had thought that the “Titanic” department of this column was closed for good. My 11-year crusade about Kate Winslet’s lost “Titanic” Oscar seemed over this year when she won a Golden Globe and had unstoppable momentum for the Oscar, which she finally did get. But no –  “Titanic,” like lint, is forever!

Many, many thanks for your letter — one of the funniest I have ever received at Salon. I was practically on the floor in convulsions of laughter when I got it. The genre of your letter is burlesque — a parodic sendup or travesty of a well-known and revered original. In the 19th century, burlesque was a popular form in both England and the U.S., including on the stage, which featured rude, rowdy lampoons of prestige plays. Burlesque acquired its tawdry strip-show associations long afterward.

On her hit TV variety show, Carol Burnett did brilliant burlesques: Her campy versions of “Rebecca” and “Mildred Pierce,” for example, are phenomenal and full of surprising, sharply observed insights into those classic films. Burnett’s shows should be in constant rotation in TV syndication. They are a working laboratory for aspiring young actors, who barely even know who Lucille Ball is these days. Comedy is an art form, but its past masters have receded in a callow entertainment industry addicted to sophomoric snark.

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

As I told Kellow on a recent panel on Kael at the New York Film Festival, this helped explain for me Kael’s emphatic use of the colloquial American voice—which I have also striven to do in my writing on popular culture. I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions—which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years. Kael socialized with poets in San Francisco. On the same panel, film critic David Edelstein called Kael’s writing “jazzy”—which is exactly right. It must be remembered that the Beats were heavily influenced by be-bop and cool jazz. Kael often uses abrupt, surprising syncopations in her writing that I would classify as Beat. I remain stubbornly attached to the Beat movement, which hugely influenced me in college. It’s one reason I ruffled so many feathers (to continue the chicken-farm trope) by my book on poetry, “Break, Blow, Burn,” which promoted the Beat style and rejected the cringingly artificial, pseudo-philosophical meanderings of grossly over-praised contemporary poets like John Ashbery.

Browsing through the Library of America’s massive new collection of her writing (called “The Age of Movies”), I was stunned at Kael’s range and power. Her voice, shaped by the American idiom, is still utterly fresh and dynamic. She is a superb role model for young writers. She has a keen eye for crisp detail and a lust for both attack and celebration. This is a perfect moment for the release of the Kellow and Library of America books. Cultural criticism is in the dumps. Nothing important is coming out of academe, and the “serious” general magazines are insular and verbose. Film criticism has waned, and the Web is overrun with gassy, sniggering, solipsistic snark.

As I said at the panel, the two new Kael books struck me with special force because I have just completed over four years of work on a book on the visual arts for Pantheon. In the process of my research, I was horrified by the degeneration of arts criticism in the past four decades. What excited me anew about Kael’s work is that, even though she was writing solely about movies, she was constantly inventing fascinating paradigms and templates for talking about the creative process as well as the audience’s imaginative experience of performance. Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts. Kael had phenomenal intuition and gut instinct about so many things—the inner lives of directors and actors, the tangible world of a given film, the energy of film editing.

I find Kael stimulating and provocative even when I disagree with her. That’s the entire point of good writing!—to force the reader to think independently. For example, I loved the decadent European art films that she mocked—above all, ”La Dolce Vita.” But her scathing satire of those films was hilarious and persuasive in its own way. I am also very fond of “Rich and Famous,” George Cukor’s last film, over which Kael got in big trouble because gay activists thought her review homophobic. Preparing for the panel, I viewed that film again via Netflix and was startled to see that YES, there is indeed a glaring male-hustler moment in there that makes no sense whatever in heterosexual terms. So Kael was right about that. But I can’t understand why she failed to appreciate how well Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen work together as a quarreling comic duo. They are fabulous!

And then there is Kael’s hostility to Alfred Hitchcock, which seems inexplicable in a major film critic—particularly since she was so enthusiastic about Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” which is a Hitchcock tribute. Because Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors (I wrote a book on “The Birds” for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics Series), I have always been mystified by Kael’s attitude. When I raised this issue at the Film Festival, it led, I think, to a breakthrough. On the panel, director and screenwriter James Toback replied that Kael loved De Palma’s active camera and that she tended not to like static, long-held shots, such as Hitchcock was known for. Eureka! One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It’s why he found shooting on set boring—because he had already composed the film in his head.

Then at the Film Festival dinner afterward, David Edelstein, who like Toback was a close friend of Kael’s, told me in passing how he had often tried to get her to appreciate Mahler and Bruckner, whom she actively disliked. (Kellow describes how her memorial service ended with her favorite Baroque music.) Second eureka of the night! I instantly said to Edelstein that this must be another reason Kael disliked Hitchcock—because of Bernard Herrmann’s lush, insistent, immersive, Mahler-like scores, which I adore and would describe as ecstatic and visionary. Edelstein remarked that, in general, Kael was not interested in the transcendent. This is just one example of the exhilarating train of associations triggered by a daring, opinionated, and sometimes cantankerous writer like Kael. We are in desperate need of original minds and voices like hers!

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we’re hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors’ offices. They’ll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it’s printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!

And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It’s as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies. Republicans, on the other hand, have basically sat on their asses about healthcare reform for the past 20 years and have shown little interest in crafting legislative solutions to social inequities. The usual GOP floater about private medical savings accounts is a crock — something that, given the astronomical costs of major medical crises, would be utterly unworkable for families of even average household income.

International models of socialized medicine have been developed for nations and populations that are usually vastly smaller than our own. There are positives and negatives in their system as in ours. So what’s the point of this trade? The plight of the uninsured (whose number is far less than claimed) should be directly addressed without co-opting and destroying the entire U.S. medical infrastructure. Limited, targeted reforms can ban gouging and unfair practices and can streamline communications now wastefully encumbered by red tape. But insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry are not the sole cause of mounting healthcare costs, and constantly demonizing them is a demagogic evasion.

How dare anyone claim humane aims for this bill anyhow when its funding is based on a slashing of Medicare by over $400 billion? The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable. One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.

Last week’s startling gubernatorial victories by Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey were routinely dismissed as local aberrations by the liberal media or inflated as referendums on President Obama by the conservative media. But voters were clearly revolting against the deranged excess spending of government at both state and federal levels. So it was as much a protest against Congress as against the White House.

Obama sure needed a lift and got it from Pelosi. The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan — another rats’ nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama’s flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall — which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president’s principal advisors. And Obama’s muted response to last week’s massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden — a prize that can become a curse.

On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on — lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) — as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need — which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him “the father of modern anthropology” (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the “primitive” or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss’ binary formulations (like “the raw and the cooked”) were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss’ work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today’s sterile academic climate.

What mal-education goes on at killer prices at the elite schools! Skyrocketing tuition costs are legalized piracy. It’s a national scandal, which the mainstream media has shamefully neglected. A few weeks ago, I was bemused to discover the bill from my first semester (fall 1964) at Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The tuition was $200, which was offset by my state scholarship for that amount. My shared room was $150; linen was $6.50. Board at the cafeteria was $225. The physical education fee was $2, and there was an activity fee of $17.50 and a general college fee of $12.50. The grand total my parents owed for the semester was $413.50 — for which I received the superb education that is still the basis of my professional life as a teacher and writer. If only the billions upon billions that this country has thrown down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan had been redirected to education and healthcare!

Now on, with relief, to pop! I’ve been enjoying “Gainsbourg Forever,” a two-disc set made in France of the best songs of Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91). It came as a surprise that he wrote big-beat techno songs at the end of his career. I adore “Mon Légionnaire” (1989), which ends the collection and which I’ve been playing over and over in my car. This video doesn’t quite capture the delicious crispness of the synthesizer and twangy guitar licks, but you get the idea. I nearly drove off the road when I heard “Bonnie and Clyde,” Gainsbourg’s 1968 duet with Brigitte Bardot, a homage to the epochal Arthur Penn film starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty of the prior year. In the video, Bardot (as amusingly deadpan as Nico fronting the Velvet Underground) shows a lot of leg and can be heard oddly whooping in the background. Check out Gainsbourg’s mug in this vid, and don’t tell me that he, Bob Dylan and Canada’s Leonard Cohen weren’t close cousins a few generations back in the old country (Eastern Europe and Russia). There’s some shared genius DNA going on there.

A quick segue from grizzled, decadent experience to lyrical, springtime innocence: Here’s Emily and Fiona, two young English sisters living in Germany who do amazingly deft versions of classic 1960s songs (presumably based on their parents’ collection). When I recently stumbled on Emily and Fiona gravely performing “House of the Rising Sun,” I literally got goose bumps. I felt that I was seeing apparitions from the 17th century — the small-town singers of British and Scots-Irish folk ballads that would bewitch the Romantic poets and eventually produce American country music, centered in Appalachia. Emily and Fiona do a creditable job with the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin,” as well as their less well-known “Creeque Alley,” an autobiographical summary of the group’s knockabout early years. (Creeque Alley is a tiny old town street in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I was ecstatic when I discovered it by accident six years ago.) Cheers to Emily and Fiona for their harmonizing gifts and musical mission!

Bouncing back to hard-bitten experience: This week, the U.K.’s Daily Mail published several photos of Lady Gaga on a German TV show. Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old? I’ve been in advanced doubt about it for a while, particularly after seeing this video of early photos of her hanging with some mighty tough critters. (A friend of mine said of Gaga in this vid: “Too many miles of bad road there.”) I think Gaga was a hell of a lot sexier as a fun Italian-American brunette. This artificial, masklike, over-the-top Club Kids thing that she’s now into seems compulsive and wearily passé. Give it a rest, and focus on the music!

And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil! The poverty-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro are her latest charity — presumably because dusty, distant Malawi is too bare of the hordes of paparazzi required to record the latest feats of Our Lady Bountiful. How convenient that the best hotels of Ipanema are only minutes away from the Rio slums! Oh, that girl — always thinking, ain’t she?

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil? And that she is contemplating buying a house there? Is she planning to take tutorials from the queen of axe, Salvador da Bahia’s very own superstar, Daniela Mercury? Well, it’s kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna’s much-delayed self-education.

Daniela herself has had a hectic few months, touring Brazil, Portugal and Argentina for her new album, “Canibalia.” Last week she was the finale of the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, which were broadcast by Univision and pulled the largest TV audience in the history of that event. Here are some sexy visuals: Daniela in a fabulous, textured, bronze suit with see-through netting before an industry dinner; in her black lace and black leather gauntlets stage costume in the press room; and (in a truncated video) energetically performing with her red-clad troupe of Bahian dancers onstage. Vive Brazil!

NOTE: Two weeks ago, my essay collection “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”  was released in translation in France by Denoël Editions. The new subtitle (drawn from my manifesto, “No Law in the Arena”) is “A Pagan Theory of Sexuality.”

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

I see Obama and his presidency as the crowning of the ideas of that northeastern liberal aristocracy you so much criticize. He appears to me as a cliché of all their pathologies, and yet you seem infatuated with him. You continually praise his speech and demeanor while to me it seems like a mask for his lack of substance. I find him to be a man of an oversized ego, with a messianic complex and a cult-like following, which would not be so scary if he didn’t wear the media as his own personal lap dog.

As a person born and raised in Latin America who studies history as a hobby, I can’t help but see President Obama as the closest thing we have had in this country to the long line of populist leaders who have been the scourge of Latin America for decades and sent many of us here into exile. He is not a Chavez-like figure who uses vulgarity and threats as a weapon but a more sophisticated version of a young Peron.

Hermes Diaz

Miami

Yes, ever since week one of the Obama administration, I have been doggedly calling for heads to roll. As months of crass ineptitude drag on, however, the blacklist of those who should be tagged for the guillotine gets longer and longer. The most recent fiasco, of course, was sending the president of the United States on a humiliating fool’s errand to beg for the Olympics as a Chicago boondoggle. I cheered when splendiferous Rio de Janeiro rightfully got the gig.

You are correct to argue that the cluster of appointees around a person in power reflects his or her belief system and modus operandi. However, it is a mark of leadership to recognize the need for professional evolution beyond an old comfort zone. Obama is approaching a turning point which will define his political future, if he has one. He is surrounded by some mighty small potatoes who need shoveling into the dumpster. The petty provincials need to go, and far more sophisticated and world-savvy analysts must urgently be brought on board.

Opponents of Obama are perplexed by the disconnect in polling between Americans’ rejection of Obama’s policies and his personal popularity. Count me among those who are very critical of many of Obama’s actions or evasions but who continue to like him and to believe in his potential as a world leader. It’s true he has accomplished nothing thus far and did not remotely deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, a gift carrying a terrible curse. The Nobel should have been the crown of Obama’s career and not the butt of jokes. Yet the award has tangible significance insofar as Obama has endorsed the humanistic (if unrealistic) dream of a world without nuclear weapons. The lion may never lie down with the lamb, but politics will always be mired in seething, selfish squalor unless idealistic leaders appeal to our higher nature.

Hey, I’m a soldier and have been one for 30 years. My son is a soldier too. I have been deployed to the Iraqi theater, and my son is deployed to the Afghani theater. These are my credentials.

I understand your opposition to Iraq and Afghanistan in an intellectual sense, but I probably am tribal, too, and can’t understand it in an emotional sense. Here is my take from one who has been there and has someone I love still there. I agree the stated reasons we went to Iraq were in error, but the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan have one redeeming feature. The people we are fighting are tribal. All the nuts and haters are flocking to Iraq and Afghanistan to throw us out and kill us. That is excellent, and here is why.

If you look at the terrorist attacks against American target statistics for the 10 years before the Iraq “incursion” and then look at the statistics since, you will find a significant drop. I believe this is because all the crazies are attacking us in Iraq and Afghan, along with the disruptions we are causing their planning cells. While I personally dislike being shot at and targeted for high explosives (from personal experience), I much prefer that to people targeting my family at home. Here’s why. In the field I have weapons and support. When the other guy comes along, he is neither trained, equipped nor supported as well as I. In the majority of cases, he dies, not me. Look at the comparative death rates in the attacks in those prior ten years and now. We are killing more of them now than they are of us. In the field, we are prepared; in a terrorist attack, we are not.

Anything that reduces that is good, in my opinion.

By the way, I personally think fighting and killing are a waste of energy and treasure, but I am not going to stand aside while some other idiot who doesn’t believe as I do goes around killing my people.

Take care–

Bill Gasaway

Forest Park, GA

Thank you very much for your family’s selfless service to our nation. U.S. forces, with international cooperation, have concretely succeeded in major disruption of jihadist communications and training camps. But I remain skeptical of the “flypaper” theory of terrorism, which alleges that bad guys around the world have flocked to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the U.S. incursions. Exactly what evidence is there of such a migration of outsiders? This viewpoint underestimates the degree of active indigenous resistance to the American presence, including among citizens who might not otherwise be politically engaged or attracted to Muslim extremism.

Because of my own family’s service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars. However, I want the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I oppose the costly maintenance of U.S. military bases all over the world. Let Europe, for example, pay the price of its own defense and stop leeching off of us. Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends. With advanced satellite technology that can read the street number on a house, why are we still locked to outmoded theories of warfare predicated on the cumbersome transport of battalions and materiel?

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation. In many long-embattled regions, there are internal processes at work that simply must play themselves out. We are overextended abroad and committing financial suicide at home. The escalating national debt is our enemy within. Fanatical jihadism will continue to be a tactical problem, but its attacks, however devastating, will always be sporadic and local. Jihadism cannot destroy the U.S. But our own reckless politicians, spending us into oblivion and servitude to China, can.

I was a liberal graduate student in the 1980s. I am now a conservative Navy veteran, small-business owner, wife of an active duty officer who has been to Iraq four times (and will deploy again next year) and a concerned mother of two small children.

As a registered Independent, I am very concerned about where our country is headed. I am now a “right-wing terrorist” and have attended multiple Tea Parties. I host an active political Facebook page (“Pensacola Teaparty”). This is the first time in my 44 years that I have been involved in politics.

On both the domestic and foreign policy fronts, I am scared to death about where our country is going. My husband is the first to raise his hand to volunteer for a mission when duty calls (he’s a Navy SEAL and physician), but I am increasingly concerned over the lack of strategy in our current war efforts.

I am sickened to see our Constitution being trampled on day after day. I am disgusted with the corruption and dirty politics being played on both sides of the aisle. I am infuriated that our elected officials arrogantly refuse to listen to We the People, no matter how many genuinely concerned citizens peacefully congregate at town halls or on the streets of Washington, D.C.

So much of the population is ill-served by the mainstream media’s “coverage” of events. Like you, I listen to talk radio every single day (I am now a photographer and work from home). This isn’t about liberal versus conservative. It’s not about Democrat versus Republican. It’s about right versus wrong. It’s about liberty versus tyranny (thank you, Mark Levin!).

I and scores of other “Mommy Patriots” are genuinely frightened for the future of our children, and we are rallying to save our great nation. Our country needs people who are not afraid to speak the truth!

Cheryl Casey

Pensacola, FL

I have been deeply impressed by the citizen outrage that spilled out into town hall meetings this year. And I remain shocked at the priggish derision of the mainstream media (locked in their urban enclaves) toward those events. This was a moving spectacle of grassroots American democracy in action. Aggrieved voters have a perfect right to shout at their incompetent and irresponsible representatives. American citizens are under no duty whatever to sit in reverent silence to be fed propaganda and half-truths. It is bizarre that liberals who celebrate the unruly demonstrations of our youth would malign or impugn the motivation of today’s protestors with opposing views.

The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

Superb evisceration of the Democrats. I, too, have indelible memories of the risky, ecstatic mysticism of the late ’60s (trivialized by younger baby boomers who turned hallucinogens into party drugs) and often wonder where that mystery depth dimension went.

But there is a sense in which that spirituality was only another affluence-subsidized consumer good, the Davy Crockett coonskin cap of our adolescence. And I’m afraid what our generation meant by “freedom” turned out to be little more than the freedom from responsibility and commitment and the freedom to get it on. Adolescent demands.

That’s not fair, I realize. Breaking out of rigidified, oppressive notions about race, authority, women and nature was a true and very American liberation. Too bad those insights have now rigidified into new pieties that are as codified, unimaginative and oppressive as those they overthrew.

Annie Gottlieb

What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny. You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the ’60s tried to destroy by any means necessary. But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today’s speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance.

The purpose of this message is to express my outrage at the frequent criticism of Sarah Palin for having gone to five schools before she graduated from the University of Idaho. What many of her critics fail to understand, or smugly disdain, is the reason she attended several schools. Sarah’s parents told their four children that they could not afford to pay their way through college, and if any of them wanted to go on to college, they must figure a way to pay for it on their own.

It is a towering credit to Sarah Palin’s ambition, courage and will to persevere that she acquired college credit hours when and where she had the opportunity and could pay for them and had the drive and guts to earn her B.A. Although a degree from the University of Idaho may not impress someone who attended an Ivy League school, having the title the University of Idaho on her sheepskin is certainly more elegant than, say, Southwest Wyoming State Teachers College.

Those whose parents paid their way through school evidently don’t appreciate what extra effort it took Sarah to acquire her B.A. But I do, because hailing from Galena, Kansas, the only Kansas town mentioned in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” I know what it’s like to grow up poor, at least poor in relative terms.

It’s common for working-class youngsters who manage to go on to college to go to one school, as did I, for their first couple of years. In many cases, a kid will live at home while going to a nearby college. It irks me that smug, spoiled brats have the gall to criticize Sarah Palin for going to several colleges, because she didn’t flunk out of those schools — she was scratching and clawing to grab credit hours when she could.

Although I graduated from the University of Kansas very near, if not at the very bottom, of my class, I remain proud of the degree I earned, because it enabled me to wiggle my way out of the lower working-class. I busted my fanny to make it through school, working as a busboy at a tavern and as a waiter in a sorority house. But first I went to school at a small state college, Kansas State Teachers College at Pittsburg, near my hometown, before transferring to the University of Kansas to earn my B.A. from a school with a better reputation than KSTC’s.

My father was the youngest of ten children born to a farm family and probably never had a penny which he hadn’t earned by his hard labor. He chose to lease and operate a gas station in Galena, Kansas, until he’d earned enough to purchase the station from the oil company. Operating a gas station was his vocation for more than 40 years. In all those years, I knew him to take only one weekend vacation, when he and my mother drove to St. Louis to watch a Cardinals game.

Dave Livingston

Colorado Springs, CO

Thank you very much for your personal testimony. I too have been repulsed by the elitist insults flung at Sarah Palin in the massive, coordinated media effort to destroy her. Hence I have been thoroughly enjoying the way that Palin, despite all the dirt thrown at her by liberal journalists and bloggers, keeps bouncing back as if unscathed. No sooner did the gloating harpies of the Northeastern media think they had torn her to shreds than she exploded into number one on Amazon.com with a memoir that hadn’t even been printed yet! With each one of these amusing triumphs, Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

Yes, the snobbery about Palin’s five colleges is especially distasteful, given the Democratic party’s supposed allegiance to populism. Judging by the increasingly limited cultural and factual knowledge of graduates of elite schools whom one encounters working in the media, blue-chip sheepskins aren’t worth the parchment they’re printed on these days. Young people forced through the ruthlessly competitive college admissions rat race have the independence and creativity pinched right out of them. Proof? Where are the major young American artists, writers, critics or movie-makers of the past 20 years? The most adventurous and enterprising minds have gone into high tech. We’re in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system.

Your opposition to hate crimes legislation makes some intuitive sense and is not uncommon. But my understanding is that it’s contradictory to some of the foundational ideas of U.S. law.

Would you also erase the traditional distinctions between the various degrees of murder, and between murder and manslaughter? The exact parsing varies by state, but some sort of stratification of killings by heinousness seems to be nearly universal. A murder committed for financial gain is worse than a murder committed in the heat of passion, and either is worse than an unintended killing. In these broad instances, the exact details of the crime are likely to differ, but that is coincidental. It’s easy enough to come up with thought experiments in which the only variation lies in motivation or mental state.

You are understandably reluctant to turn the analysis of a defendant’s private thoughts over to government functionaries, but that doesn’t mean that mental state can simply be disregarded. Somebody has to make a determination of motive. (Sadly, novelists and sibyls are rarely on hand to fill this role in court.) Would you really want sentences for murder to be assigned without reference to motive?

Hate crimes are not newly invented crimes. They’re just garden-variety crimes for which racial or ethnic antipathy is acknowledged as a potential motivation and as an aggravating factor; that is, a factor that causes the crime to be considered more serious than it otherwise might be. Many other aggravating factors are defined in existing law: profit motive, planning or premeditation, targeting of specific groups (police officers, judges, public officials, mail carriers), commission of the crime in the context of the planning or execution of a second crime and so on.

The real question is: Are these motivations common enough and pernicious enough that they merit special mention? If you had written that judges and juries already have wide enough latitude to make use of their intuitive appraisal of a crime’s seriousness, I wouldn’t be arguing. But you seem to be stating rather explicitly that no consideration should be given to mental state in any legal context. Really?

Garth Snyder

Seattle, WA

Thank you for your very cogent and stimulating rebuttal. In rejecting the category of hate crimes, I never meant to imply that I also object to classifying degrees of murder. However, the latter gradations are exculpatory, making the blunt instrument of ancient law more nuanced and flexible. I would question the relevance of this issue to hate crimes, which in my view impose a rigid conceptual frame derived from social engineering onto the legal process.

You raise an excellent point about harsher penalties on the books for assaults on police officers. However, I have never understood the reasoning informing those statutes, which seem to endow the lives of police officers with more value than those of ordinary citizens. There is certainly a social benefit in protecting police officers, who put their lives on the line every time they make a random traffic stop. Yet I see no parallelism here with the lives of gays in the U.S. Exactly what sacrifices have gays qua gays made for the nation to deserve protected status? Harassment of or violence against citizens for any reason should not be tolerated, whatever the motive.

There are a thousand elusive complications to any clash in public spaces like schools, bars or the street. For example, there was a horrifying recent incident in Philadelphia, where a melee in a bar among drunken white guys ended up with the beating and kicking to death of one of them outside the Phillies’ baseball stadium. Nothing but stupidity and deranged egotism was at fault in this atrocity. But if any one of the participants happened to have been gay or black, the p.c. vultures would have swooped in and turned the entire thing into a breast-beating cause célèbre — even if homophobia or racism played no role whatever in the events.

Hate crimes legislation, in my view, simply cushions people in their own subgroups and gives them a damaging sense of false entitlement. The world will always be a very dangerous place where anyone can cross paths with a psychopath. The human mind is home territory for Edgar Allan Poe’s “imp of the perverse.” Here’s another example from the Philadelphia police blotter: Last year, five African-American youths, just for the fun of it, sucker-punched a passing white man in the Center City subway concourse in the middle of the day. A manager at Starbuck’s who was on his way to work, he died from an asthmatic attack triggered by the assault. Surely he had been targeted because of his race. Why, then, was it not denounced as a hate crime? Why did those amoral marauders get a free pass in the hate crimes sweepstakes? The historical injustices suffered by enslaved Africans should not give infinite latitude to depraved individuals.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society’s care.

I’d appreciate hearing your views on the various reactions to Roman Polanski’s fate. What seems lacking is open acknowledgment that a country’s great artists do — and, in rare cases, should — receive special treatment. As in the case of Jean Genet, whom the French government released from prison simply for being a genius, Polanski should, for the greater good, be allowed to continue his work.

Is this moral relativism? I don’t think so. The primary goal of a country’s laws should be to protect and foster its citizens. In this case, Polanski is no danger to anyone, and the victim simply wants to move on. Prosecutors must decide which cases are in the public’s best interest to pursue (no mention yet of the money and resources that could have been better spent here), so appeals to justice ring false. And besides, if given the choice between a great new Polanski movie and another media circus, which would you rather watch?

Tim Sandel

When I first heard that Roman Polanski had been arrested in Switzerland, I thought it was absurd because of his advanced age as well as the gravity of other issues facing this war-torn world. It seemed like a publicity stunt by Los Angeles authorities with too much time on their hands. However, on reflection, I soon concluded that Polanski, whatever his artistic achievements, has no right to claim exemption from the law’s demands. He is not a political refugee but a proud sybarite who has flaunted his tastes and conquests. If you live like the Marquis de Sade (one of the principal influences on my first book, “Sexual Personae”), then you should be willing to be imprisoned like Sade.

Polanski’s low-budget, bleakly black and white “Knife in the Water” (1962) was the first foreign film I saw in my very first week of college in 1964. It made a stunning impact on me and completed my liberation from the perky tyrannies of the ubiquitous Doris Day, who ruled mainstream U.S. culture like a basilisk. “Repulsion” (1965), another low-budget tour de force, retains its power as a surrealist nightmare starring the delectable Catherine Deneuve as a psychotic manicurist marooned in London. The occult “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) is superb story-telling with a sardonic twist; Polanski got sensational performances out of both Ruth Gordon and Mia Farrow. I have constantly recommended “Chinatown” (1974) to my students as a brilliant example of a moody, issues-oriented film noir in color — with three more top-notch performances (Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston). I have little interest in Polanski’s later films.

Despite this distinguished body of work, however, could anyone seriously argue that Polanski’s contributions to U.S. culture are so weighty that he deserves suspension of our laws for drugging and seducing a 13-year-old girl — even if it occurred during the hedonistic 1970s? Jean Genet, in contrast, was pardoned by France because of his cultural achievements in radically extending and subverting French language and literature (following Gide and Proust). Polanski’s work will retain the esteem of film historians and stay in rotation on Turner Classic Movies, but that’s a sliver of the population. Most Americans reading news stories about the Polanski case didn’t know who the hell he is. Why should they?

Subject: Mind-numbing French professor

I am perhaps the only airplane mechanic who also has a B.A. degree in French literature. I’m interested in obtaining a master’s degree in French and have searched websites of my local universities for more information about various programs. I came across this professor’s home page at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Rice has a great reputation, and but what kind of nonsense is this? Here are his areas of interest:

How do we articulate what we have learned in recent decades from a “cultural constructionism” of subjectivity and literary canons with aesthetic ecstasy (both the “old” and the “new” aestheticism)? Deleuze’s and Derrida’s notions of a “dissolved cogito” and “non-egological” consciousness in the context of aesthetic ecstasy. More generally, in what might life “after the subject” consist? A reevaluation of both the continuities and apparent standoff between phenomenology — Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry — and poststructuralism. I.e., possible revisionary versions of the dominant account of French thought from existentialism to the present. For example, were the French poststructuralists really ever the “constructionists” (still less the “cultural” constructionists) they have been claimed to be? Distinguishing between constructionism’s lasting contributions and its simultaneous unwitting complicity with the domination of all life-forms by global capitalism.

I have no idea what he is talking about. What does this say about modern scholarship? Or am I just a dumb blue collar guy?

Wondering in Houston, John

Oh my lord, what a fly-flecked pile of horse manure! It’s hard to believe that such empty palaver is still being peddled by major universities in the U.S. And this guy has a Yale PhD! (When I got mine, it still meant one could write coherent English.) One can only pity the parents bankrupting themselves for their children to be “educated” by such chicanery.

My manifesto against post-structuralism (which squirted its toxins into the tiny open jaws of the American professoriate) was “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” published in the spring 1991 issue of Arion and reprinted (78 pages long) in my first essay collection, “Sex, Art, and American Culture.” It caused an uproar at the time, but most sensible people, on campus and off, have slowly swung around to my way of thinking. But airless pockets of pollution clearly still remain.

I read “Sexual Personae” several years ago, right at the beginning of my career as a male soprano. I found it a fascinating and helpful companion to the odd, quasi-castrated role in which I found myself — in the eyes of the public and music administrators, at least — if not in the way I viewed myself.

A male soprano, incidentally, is not to be confused with a countertenor — you might as well conflate baritones and tenors into the same voice category. We sing the roles of heroes and lovers, tyrants and freaks — and occasionally over-the-top women. However, the feminist movement that is now making itself felt in opera is replacing theatrical verisimilitude with the arguably easier-on-the-ears voices of women.

Here is a brief intro to male soprano singing (running about four minutes). My primary goal is to interest you in this subset of artistic gender-bending. The piece I am performing is by Giacomo Carissimi, from the Roman Church around 1650. The popes had forbidden both opera and female singers in the Papal States, and that verbot gave rise to this form of operatic church music, sung almost exclusively by soprano castrati.

I may not need to say this, but I am not a castrato, merely a man who can, for some reason or other, still sing soprano.

Robert Crowe

Berlin, Germany

Thank you so much for sending this link, which I am sure will be of the highest interest to culturally oriented Salon readers. Your singing is absolutely gorgeous! Why is there no profusion of videos of your performances in Europe and the U.S. on YouTube.com? I am hopeful that this surprising gap will soon be remedied.

In “Sexual Personae,” I wrote about Balzac’s strange story “Sarrasine,” where a French sculptor visiting Rome falls in love with a beautiful prima donna who turns out to be a castrato under the vengeful protection of a gay cardinal. (For those interested in this subject, I recommend Angus Heriot’s excellent 1956 study, “The Castrati in Opera.”) “Sarrasine” should obviously be made into a movie as should Théophile Gautier’s piquant transvestite adventure, “Mademoiselle de Maupin” (1835), which Greta Garbo wanted to star in but never did.

Turner Classic Movies recently showed a fantastic day-long series of Jean Seberg films. While probably known best for “Breathless” (1960), the TCM presentation showed, I think, that her true mastery is in “In the French Style” (1963) and “Lilith” (1964). I love the sophistication and silken glamour of “In the French Style,” but it’s “Lilith” that really wowed me.

I’m absolutely blown away by Seberg’s portrayal of Lilith Arthur, a sort of schizophrenic femme fatale, whose effortless, amoral manipulations bring death to at least one man and madness to another. The film suffers from too many long, boring shots of Warren Beatty’s dimensionless mug (he’s had the same expression on his face for 40 years!), but every moment Seberg is on screen is rich, evocative and disturbing. Seberg obviously knew she was playing not only a complicated woman of the 1960s but also a figure from mythology, dating back over 5,000 years. She rose magnificently to the occasion. I doubt that Sharon Stone studied Seberg’s Lilith for her role in “Basic Instinct,” but the characters seem made from the same stuff. And one wonders if Jessica Walter, who was also in “Lilith,” picked up a thing or two from Seberg on the set, because just a few years later, she’d explore similar territory as a deranged femme fatale in “Play Misty For Me” (1971.) I would suggest that Seberg as Lilith is one of the truly great, overlooked performances by a woman in film history.

Damion Matthews

San Francisco

My favorite Jean Seberg film is “Bonjour Tristesse,” where she plays Francoise Sagan’s dissolute ingenue cavorting around the Riviera. Here is a riveting, subtitled 1960 interview with a bitchy French journalist where Seberg is charmingly gracious and shows off her natural poise and charisma. I adore the way that, while speaking French with quick facility here, she aggressively maintains her flat Iowa accent! Seberg’s romantic travails and psychological decline were tragic: At the age of 41, she was found dead in her car in Paris, a presumed suicide due to the overdose levels of barbiturates found in her blood.

You draw some very intriguing parallels between “Lilith,” “Basic Instinct” (for which I did the DVD commentary) and “Play Misty for Me,” one of my all-time favorite films and the blatant inspiration for “Fatal Attraction.” Jessica Walter tears up the scenery in “Play Misty,” as she also did in the film version of Mary McCarthy’s “The Group.” It’s a scandal that Walter was underutilized in Hollywood, although she has made her presence felt in TV. In the glory days of the old studio system, roles for her would have been specially written into scripts. With her statuesque height and power of personality, she belongs to the swashbuckling line of Mary Astor and Alexis Smith.

Subject: All I ever needed to know I learned from Dynasty

While I browsed the shelves at the public library the other day, a pink-jacketed book caught my eye — “The Art of Living Well” by Joan Collins. I checked it out without haste. I have been fascinated by Ms. Collins’ charisma since her days as Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan on the nighttime soap “Dynasty,” which aired on ABC from 1981 to 1989. The book gives tips on exercise, diet, etiquette, etc., but the most interesting chapter is titled “Glamour and How to Achieve It.” It basically lists all of the tricks of the old Hollywood stars and gives some insight into why “Dynasty” was so engrossing and why Joan Collins’ character Alexis was the linchpin of the series.

I watched “Dynasty” religiously as a child, never missing a week. I have been rediscovering the series through Netflix rentals and marathon viewings. As an adult, the old Hollywood references that escaped me as a child are blatantly apparent — a revelation that now explains why my father was a weekly viewer along with my mother and myself.

“Dynasty” was sort of the last bastion of the old studio system before most of the people who actually lived that life passed on. Its two female leads, Joan Collins and her nemesis, the goody-two-shoes second wife Krystal Carrington, played by Linda Evans, were seen off screen looking very much like their television characters, dressing in the same wardrobe created by the show’s costume designer, Nolan Miller. No expense was spared for the costumes on “Dynasty” — the finest furs and fabrics were used, similar to the way the studio stars were costumed by the studios for all public appearances. Each character had several costume changes per episode. It is worth watching for the clothes and sets alone. These people are supposed to be rich and look it, so the real thing was used whenever needed, from Rolls Royces to Gucci luggage.

Watching those old episodes, one longs for the days when no expense was spared to bring quality television to the masses. Now we are stuck with humdrum reality shows that never give one a sense of fantasy or a dream but just give you constant bickering and childish name calling. People will argue that there are quality shows on HBO or Showtime, but these are pay services — they do not reach the masses of anyone just flicking on his or her TV set, and they still don’t hold a candle to “Dynasty.” I encourage everyone to take a second look at the series. Unfortunately, it is only available on DVD up to season four right now, but that should be enough to get you started. Wikipedia also has a great outline of the show and its characters. I would love to know your thoughts on the show and if you were ever a fan.

Thomas Paul

New York City

Am I a “Dynasty” fan? Be still, my beating heart! I have never recovered from the cancellation of “Dynasty.” In fact, daytime soap opera never recovered from “Dynasty,” period. The failure of daytime to realize that its primetime imitator had ramped up the glamour and melodrama to classic Hollywood proportions is one reason for the slow decline and extinction of soaps over the past 15 years.

Joan Collins had a tremendous cultural impact in “Dynasty” which has never been fully acknowledged. She instantly ended the drab, puritanical dress-for-success look that women had donned to enter the professions in the 1970s. Collins as Alexis Carrington Colby showed how an ambitious, hard-driving businesswoman could combine beauty and brains. She dressed to kill — and women followed suit, reclaiming their sexuality and female allure with flamboyant colors, fabrics, jewelry and high heels. Donna Mills in “Knots Landing” went one step further: As the cut-throat businesswoman Abby Ewing, she was no campy vamp in the glittery Euro-flash Collins style but a subtly purring American blonde whose wide, liquid eyes entranced and paralyzed her victims.

Let’s hope that your letter will inspire readers to lobby ABC to release “Dynasty” to cable so that a new generation can see how ravishingly sensuous and sweepingly entertaining TV can be!

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?) 

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen. 

This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster — as witness the middle-of-the-night bum’s rush given to “green jobs” czar Van Jones last week — but there’s a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare? 

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows. 

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. 

How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds? And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!” Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.” 

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled. 

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences — in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy — of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management. 

But dreaming in the 1960s and ’70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time. Here’s a gorgeous example: Bob Welch’s song “Hypnotized.” which appears on Fleetwood Mac’s 1973 album “Mystery to Me.” (The contemplative young man in this recent video is not Welch.) It’s a peyote dream inspired by Carlos Castaneda’s fictionalized books: “They say there’s a place down in Mexico/ Where a man can fly over mountains and hills/ And he don’t need an airplane or some kind of engine/ And he never will.” This exhilarating shamanistic vision (wonderfully enhanced by Christine McVie’s hymnlike backing vocal) captures the truth-seeking pilgrimages of my generation but also demonstrates the dangerous veering away from mundane social responsibilities. If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U.S., it’s partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left. (I addressed the drugs cataclysm in “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s” in the Winter 2003 issue of Arion.) 

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women’s control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material. 

Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let’s get the hell out! While I vociferously opposed the incursion into Iraq, I was always strongly in favor of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan to smithereens in our search for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps. But committing our land forces to a long, open-ended mission to reshape the political future of that country has been a fool’s errand from the start. Every invader has been frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like mountain terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a larger sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for 5,000 years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian acrimony for a tranquil solution to be possible for generations to come. The presence of Western military forces merely inflames and prolongs the process and creates new militias of patriotic young radicals who hate us and want to take the war into our own cities. The technological West is too infatuated with easy fixes. But tribally based peoples think in terms of centuries and millennia. They know how to wait us out. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure. 

In response to persistent queries, I must repeat: No, I do not have a Facebook page, nor am I a “friend” on anyone else’s Facebook. Nor do I Twitter. This Salon column is my sole Web presence. Whatever doppelgänger Camille Paglias are tripping the light fantastic out there (as in the haunted bus-station episode of “The Twilight Zone”), they aren’t me!

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Case in point: the administration’s grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical, because Democrats control the White House and both Houses of Congress. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan — it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats’ nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran’s rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran’s power and nuclear ambitions.

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we’ve gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it’s as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

Of course, it didn’t help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted “stupidly” in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama’s automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president’s standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn’t help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.

Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates’ house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates’ loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?

Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about “black kids” made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director’s inept description of the “complexion” of the pool having been changed — which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.

Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class children often have quite different styles of play — as I know from present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher, and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise, you’d get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.

In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at home — a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded, dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering in the urban summer heat.

Now on to art and pop. Highlight of the month for me was definitely a recent performance by Alo Brasil, a local Brazilian music and dance ensemble, at Philadelphia’s World Cafe Live. I positioned myself smack in front of the stage to bathe in the magnificent, hypnotic drumming, a Bahian style with West African roots that takes one into another reality — sublime and trans-historical. Of course, then there was the sensory overload of the beautiful, nimble, long-legged samba dancers in their jeweled bikinis and high heels! But all the dancers of Alo Brasil, male and female, are absolutely brilliant — it was mind-blowing. Anyone born and raised in Bahia (such as Daniela Mercury) has obviously been immersed in these rhythms from earliest childhood. They are surely profoundly transformative, reshaping the neural synapses and opening the mind toward ecstatic group communication. To be continued!

Our pop medley for this column begins with the Algeria-born Etienne Daho, whose three-disc set, “Dans la Peau de Daho” (2002), I have been working my way through. Last year, I posted two other videos featuring Daho — his quietly compelling duet with Charlotte Gainsbourg and his moving tribute to Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. This song, “Paris le Flore,” is a hauntingly atmospheric ode to random encounters in the streets and cafés of Paris. In the narrative superimposed by the video, two notable French performers do their thing — Virginie Ledoyen (who appeared with Catherine Deneuve in “8 Women” and with Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Beach”) and singer/actor Benjamin Biolay, ex-husband of Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni. I love the way Daho’s shimmery song re-creates the meditative mystique of French eroticism, shown in a thousand films. And that liquid, stuttering bass line — divine! (Hey, Salon readers, if you don’t have good speakers on your computer, you’re missing the cultural riches of the Web.)

Next on the docket is Sharon Stone, exploding in all her topless glory on the cover of Paris Match. Now there’s a gal who knows how to work the gym while still keeping the sacred flame of sexiness alive! Yes, you know who the Big Bad Example is of obsessive gym culture gone to seed — that increasingly artificial construction of paraffin and chicken wire, our Madonna of the Shallows. Jesus Luz must be blessedly myopic. (Cue the Contours’ 1965 R&B hit, “First I Look at the Purse.”)

Caught HBO’s 1998 movie “Gia” for the umpteenth time on cable the other day. My admiration remains boundless for the 22-year-old Angelina Jolie’s bravura performance as the Philadelphia-born fashion model Gia Carangi, a heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. I’ve often recommended Stephen Fried’s excellent 1993 biography, “Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia,” but this time I hit the Web to see what else I could dig up.

Mother lode! I found Gia’s original nude fence photos, shown in the movie being shot by the perverse fashionista Chris von Wangenheim. I was startled to learn that Wangenheim was killed in a car accident in 1981, another blow for Gia. In trying to find his obit, I discovered that New York Times files of the World War One era are filled with references to his noble German ancestors, many of whom were barons killed in battle. Another German decadent artiste, like the incomparable Helmut Newton.

Here are some wonderful photos of Wilhelmina (stylishly played in the movie by Faye Dunaway), the Dutch fashion model veteran of 300 covers who founded an agency that hired the scrappy Gia but who then tragically died of cancer at age 40 in 1980, leaving Gia bereft. And here’s Gia’s ever-patient, real-life girlfriend, Sandy Linter, who turns out to be a more in-your-face urban type of the Deborah Harry school than she was portrayed in the movie.

Interested parties should check out this pastiche of clips, with a great song, which ingeniously conflate Gia with Patricia Charbonneau in that lesbo classic “Desert Hearts” (1985). This is a good chance to appreciate anew the charming eroticism of the car-in-the-rain first kiss between Charbonneau and Helen Shaver, which proves the point I made in my last column about the best lesbian scenes on film having ironically been performed by straight women. Finally, here is Gia herself — a late clip showing her in surly, rambling butch mode, with druggy speech and tics, and then a dazzling collection of her peak high fashion images, which whiz by too fast but still reveal what an astonishing, almost supernormal presence she was.

Oh, one last note. Gay trivia: The 17-year-old hustler who in 1975 murdered the gay film director Pier Paolo Pasolini by repeatedly running him over with his own car on an Italian beach was named Giuseppe Pelosi. Hmm … Hustling must run in the family.

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.