R E C E N T L Y Out with self-esteem tutorials, in with standardized tests! (12/02/98) Corporate America needs bosses, not "non-hierarchical management" (12/09/98) More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches (12/02/98) Ken Starr's strange sexual persona (11/25/98) A tale of two Blooms (11/18/98) ___________________ Love Camille Paglia? Pick up her books at barnesandnoble.com ___________________ A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright Bring on the full Monty! (12/11/98) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Money talks (12/18/98) Left Hook By Joe Conason Why Lott and Barr hate Clinton (12/22/98) Unspun By Steve Erickson Mementos from the pre-millennium (12/23/98) Right On! By David Horowitz How "low" crimes and misdemeanors become "high" (12/21/98) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor How can I get the exciting man I married to stop talking about multiprotocol networking? (12/15/98) Word by Word By Anne Lamott The last waltz (12/23/98) Media Circus By Susan Lehman Cool on global warming (12/17/98) On Television By Joyce Millman Smits walks, "Felicity" stalks, Sammo rocks (12/21/98) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik And a little scumbag shall lead them (12/22/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Yes, there is a better search engine. While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire (12/21/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Family matters (12/14/98) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Rolling out the years (12/17/98) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - -

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A | PAGE 2 OF 2 --- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled --- Dear Bowled Over: The rise of viper-tongued Dr. Laura is highly salutary for women in America, where even a complex, high-minded but cold-eyed bitch queen like Hillary Rodham Clinton is sugared o'er by effusively middlebrow lady reporters (as in the cloying canonization of the co-presidential Woman of the Year also-ran in the Dec. 28 Time, which systematically deletes opposing opinions about Hillary that the magazine was gathering since November). We urgently need strong female voices in Schlessinger's bracing, take-no-prisoners style. She's a pungent antidote, for example, to the misty drift of Oprah Winfrey's once superb show, which has dissolved into a bubble bath of spiritual bromides, hawked by an endless stream of gal pals, earth mothers, crackerbarrel philosophers and beaky charlatans to whom Oprah is looking for the Truth of Life. As a teacher, I do wince when I hear Schlessinger trash some hapless, garrulous, dithery caller. What a dominatrix! Her show's theme song should be the Rolling Stones' "When the Whip Comes Down." Half the time, Dr. Laura makes Camille Paglia sound like Doris Day. What I like best about Schlessinger is the way she cuts through the crap and homes right in on key ethical issues, often involving the sacrifices parents must make when they bring children into the world. Her blistering indictments of egotism, frivolity and self-indulgence can rise to real eloquence -- of the kind Roman senators used against encroaching imperial decadence. At her worst, Schlessinger sounds impatient, cranky or savagely curt, with unnecessary contempt for the average person just trying to muddle through. It's a sad commentary on the failings of permissive, post-1960s American culture that so many wishy-washy parents need a radio show to give them old-fashioned, common-sense lessons about how to deal firmly but justly with their children and other querulous relatives. You're so right to say we suffer from "masculine" depletion. Feminism slew the fathers without realizing what children would lose. So the inscrutable Fates have supplied stern father-mothers like Dr. Laura to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Dear Camille: I'm wondering, what are your views on reincarnation? Do you believe in people living past lives and encountering troubles in their current life because of an unlearned lesson in a previous one? Or do you feel this is the only life, and once the lights are out, that's it? Just Curious Dear Just Curious: Reincarnation seems like an awful nightmare -- like being on a deranged merry-go-round we can't get off. I emphatically do not believe in the existence of any kind of soul or consciousness that survives death (except via literature and art). As a teenager, I was very impressed by Corliss Lamont's "The Illusion of Immortality" (1935), which confirmed my atheism after many tedious years of compulsory churchgoing. I believe in nature, the majestic material processes of the universe with its generative cycles and infinite space. The eerie experience of the "sublime" (as it was understood by the Romantics) is my form of prayer. See, for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" and Emily Dickinson's "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers." However, I do feel something is operating in human life that I call "the karmic boomerang": As we used to say with 1960s neo-Hinduism, "Everything that goes around comes around." I saw it happen to me (when I got fired from my first teaching job 20 years ago), and I'm watching it happen again to my blithe time-twin, President Clinton. While reincarnation and resurrection seem absurd to me, I think there are oddities that are not supernatural but that science has not yet explained. The time-space continuum, like a Möbius strip, may be subject to hallucinatory repetitions or warps. And it is also possible that intense expenditure of traumatic energy, as in murder or suicide, may leave a psychic residue that sensitive minds can pick up, leading to legends of ghosts or to fantasies of past lives. See "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek"! Postscript: The holiday card mailed out this year by Alison and me is a sacred artifact from the cult of pagan nature. "Peace on Earth," it says in blood red beneath a publicity shot of the blond, disheveled Tippi Hedren frantically batting away attacking crows while Alfred Hitchcock sits calmly carving a roast chicken behind her. Alison scanned the photo from a splendid, mint-condition 1963 Life magazine sent to me this fall by culture critic James Wolcott and his wife, Laura Jacobs, after the publication of my British Film Institute book on Hitchcock's "The Birds." Season's greetings from Cybele and the rest of the pagan crew! Dec. 23, 1998 Got a question for the oracle? Ask Camille. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.