Salon | Ask Camille

S A L O N +|+ A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Martha Stewart, I salute you

Dear Camille:
Well, the major figure of our time is back in the news again. Bill Gates has been targeted by Janet Reno (now there's a fun couple!). The feds are accusing him of monopolistic practices, to which Gates replies, "Hey, I'm just a good capitalist!" What do you think of Bill Gates and his information juggernaut? Should we all stop worrying and learn to love Microsoft, or is it truly the Dark Force of our age?
Beta boy

Dear Beta:
With her butch instincts bottled up by sorrow and pity for her floundering First Boss, Janet Reno has been getting her jollies by breathing fire at quailing senators and beating up on supergeek Bill Gates.
As a world-class entrepreneur in the line of the shrewd, cut-throat robber barons of the 19th century Gilded Age, Gates is as American as apple pie, and I do think he is being unnecessarily harassed by an ad hoc coalition of prissy Washington technocrats and fiercely territorial Web pioneers.
I like the idea of brain power and audacious individualism winning such immense success. On the other hand, what one hears about Gates personally isn't very appealing. He seems parochial and one-dimensional -- limitations mirrored in his mini-double editor-of-choice, Michael Ever-the-Grad-Student Kinsley, with his yawn of a cyberzine, Slate ("Mr. Neuter's Neighborhood").
It was probably film director Steven Spielberg, more than 20 years ago, who began this depressing trend of the Mogul as Nebbish. I'm quite nostalgic for the robust old days of Harry Cohn, Mike Todd and Aristotle Onassis, when powerful, self-made men had a masculine magnetism and a primal, earthy sensuality and vulgarity. With his tofu-bland public persona, Gates as Emperor of Computer Moles can only worsen the imploding identity problems of the progeny of the white middle class.

Dear Camille:
How much longer should American troops spend in the Balkans? When are you going over to entertain our soldier boys?
Okrah

Dear Okrah:
So you think I'm the new Martha Raye? The Clinton administration snookered American journalists and politicians into foolishly believing that our ground troops would be out of Bosnia in a year. Of course that was a lie from the start. What the hell are we doing there? Let Europe grow up and take charge of its own internal defenses. Should a genuine Hitler ever arise anywhere in the world, American forces can zap him to the Stone Age via air strikes alone.
I'm sick and tired of American troops being used as hall monitors and baby sitters, when there are so many pressing social problems that need funding right here at home. With inner-city schools in disrepair, decaying neighborhoods overrun by warring dope dealers and basic medical services being trimmed, the government has no business wasting taxpayers' dollars abroad. The whole corrupt foreign-aid boondoggle needs stringent review.
In my essay on Susan Sontag in "Vamps & Tramps," I indicted the Northeastern intellectual and media establishment for its trendy infatuation with Bosnia, in which I saw elements of racist escapism from America's immediate problems, as well as from far bigger disasters in central Africa. That purblindness has continued, even as Bosnia itself has receded in the fickle media consciousness.

Dear Camille:
I'm a male student at Brown University, and I think your analysis of the Ivy League is right on. We garden-variety bachelors and the Birkenstocked girlbots that our loins are forced to covet possess no ability to act on instinct at all. We don't date, we "buddy-up," like at camp.
Even though tenure will keep our English Department full of bitter feminazi profs (my prof taught Mamet and Strindberg as mysogynist pricks), I was wondering if you have noticed a change in the students who are now coming to college? It seems that the girls who were high school seniors or college freshmen (freshwomen?) during the Anita Hill spectacle have now graduated, done their damage and left, leaving Atlanta burned to the ground, Gen. Sherman-style. But it seems the new group of girls saw how little fun their sorority mentors had and have pragmatically decided that once the boys get that "no means no," we should all just pump the keg some more and crank up the Marvin Gaye.
Could it be just a few more years before no girls take English, either? Please say it's so. Like a baby who's navigated a two-year breached birth, I'm screaming with joy at the thought of a reality outside of this womb.
Hopeful and relieved
P.S. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on Gen X getting married, especially the zeal with which the girls are clinging to the whole white-gown and big-church idea. I say let them have their '90s woman, agnostic/virgin bride, big church, but on one condition: Every guy they've slept with has to march behind them, carrying the veil's train.

Dear Hopeful:
Thank you for your eye-opening communiqué from the clammy, rat-filled trenches of the Ivy League. The latchkey kids of Generation X, desperate for family warmth, have turned sex into cuddling and lovers into long-lost siblings.
You're quite right that, in this Reconstruction period after the culture wars (which my side obviously won), most young women have little interest in old-style feminist or poststructuralist rhetoric. But the tenured humanities professors remain, ensuring that the elite schools will remain bogs of banality for another generation. The price will be paid by the students themselves, who have been robbed of their future creativity.
As for white-gown weddings, traditional marriage ceremonies have indeed been returning in the last decade, after my generation's revolt against formality and religious orthodoxy. Diana Spencer's fairy-tale 1981 wedding to Prince Charles (only now has a photo surfaced of a malevolent frog, Camille Parker-Bowles, skulking among the cathedral guests) probably started it all.
Weddings are for brides anyway; the men are ciphers -- sweaty, stuffed props shoved about by the officious mother-in-law and her conspiratorial cadre of cackling females. I take the drag-queen view that any time you can be a diva, go for it! These days, of course, it's likely the groomsmen will rip the veil right off the bride and try it on for size.

NEXT PAGE | Paglia on videogame porn and Martha Stewart

Illustration by Zach Trenholm