Searching, for example, for online news about Italy in recent years, I've been dismayed by its near-total domination by soccer, with archaeological discoveries and the restoration of Old Master paintings coming in second. The pope flits hither and thither, but that's it. Is there nothing new in post-Fellini Italian culture? It's as if Europe, struggling to incorporate massive Muslim immigration, has retreated into a bubble where the beautiful artifices of the past float like a mirage. Secularism evidently cannot stimulate creativity as profoundly as religion does -- whether in the artist's soaring affirmation or angry resistance.
Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of religion in American politics is becoming a tedious distraction from urgent social problems like healthcare. I detest sanctimony in any form -- from the unctuous piety of smarmy televangelists to ostentatious badge-wearing (such as the gold-cross necklace that Hillary Clinton was regularly flaunting around Capitol Hill). Religious protestations are now a rote formula for asserting family values and opposing moral relativism, with which the Democrats have been tagged since the hedonistic '60s. One reason religion is so intrusive in the United States is because of the mammoth institutional power of our mass media, which is unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Religion has become a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness against our Hollywood Babylon.
Meanwhile, my pessimism about the Democrats' chances in next year's presidential election vanished for an ecstatic moment when I laid eyes on a photo posted last week on the Drudge Report of the Obamas standing with Oprah Winfrey. I was electrified by the relaxed, genial Obama coupledom -- what a vision of a future White House! It flashed through my mind that Michelle Obama would be the most graceful, stylish first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy.
And she's fierce! Michelle in combat goes straight for the jugular. There's none of that bitter, self-pitying feminazi irony that Hillary indulges in -- as in her smugly caustic reference in the recent CNN debate to the onerous "impediments" that women face. (Oh, right -- men are to blame for the privileged Wellesley and Yale Law grad having failed her D.C. bar exam.)
Salon readers have been asking what my take is on the risqué gossip swirling on the Web about Hillary and her top aide Huma Abedin (and first reported three weeks ago in the mainstream press by the Times of London). I think the rumors are ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about college-era bisexual adventures in the biography of any product of the 1960s, but I just don't buy the crackpot right-wing hallucination of Hillary the whip-cracking bull dyke. On the other hand, there's some mighty weird projection onto Hillary smoking up from her hetero female admirers. I think CNN anchorwoman Campbell Brown should have been fired after that misty look of submissive adoration with which she bathed Hillary during her pseudo question at the climax of the CNN debate. What a travesty!
Sticking to the erotic front, I enjoyed the reappearance of Gennifer Flowers on the national scene last week, when she made news by saying she'd consider voting for Hillary as a woman. Flowers was certainly the crème de la crème of the Arkansas ladies with whom Gov. Bill Clinton allegedly dallied, and not least, she seems to have kick-started copycat Hillary on the road to blondness.
My partner, Alison, and I had the great pleasure of meeting Gennifer Flowers in person at her cozy nightclub in New Orleans three years ago. (I was speaking about Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer" at the annual Words & Music Festival.) Flowers strolled around amiably singing and greeting her guests. We were mesmerized. (Alison got a signed T-shirt for her father.) Even a quarter century after her Little Rock prime, Gennifer Flowers was one of the most radiant, charismatic people I have ever seen in my life. We were in no doubt about her hypnotic buxom appeal to the roving-eyed young Bill. Check out these photos from the year we saw her: Flowers is making a courtesy call on "BOOBS! The Musical." Now y'all be sure to enlarge!
There was an excellent Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week about the urgent national need for technical education -- which has been a recurrent theme in my Salon columns for a decade. Walt Gardner, who taught public school for 28 years in Los Angeles, calls for a "shift in our attitude to grant career and technical education the same recognition, respect and value that we reflexively accord academic education."
Gardner predicts severe dislocations for the college-educated middle class over the next two decades: "Auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians will be earning a comfortable living and deriving deep satisfaction from their work, while many graduates from marquee-name colleges will find themselves unemployed when their jobs are off-shored."
Exactly! And as a career college teacher, I want to insist yet again that the general education offered by American public high schools and even elite colleges and universities has become blatantly mediocre and not worth the price. Soaring tuition costs are a national scandal that the presidential candidates have failed to systematically address. Families and students themselves have incurred monstrous debts in their deluded search for brand-name cachet, which only marginally relates to a quality education. The college admissions race in the United States is a gigantic marketing scam that most mainstream journalists, desperate to get their kids into the overrated Ivy League, have shamefully neglected.
Next page: Erupting volcanoes and Madonna's dyed sheep
