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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Incoming! Readers demand answers about WASPs, Tim Russert and Obama's teleprompter skills.
By Camille Paglia
Read more: Madonna, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Camille Paglia, Homosexuality, Politics, Opinion, Barack Obama
July 9, 2008 |
Ms. Paglia,I find your political relativism dangerously naive. Unfortunately, there are "good guys" and "bad guys" regarding state actors. The Iranian regime epitomizes evil on all social and political fronts. From its draconian punishment of women and homosexuals to its aggressive anti-Semitism (to highlight a few offenses), Iran must be stopped from having the political and military leverage that comes with the acquisition of a nuclear weapon program. Outside the walls of the academy, America is by all objective accounts the superior nation. America's negative qualities – which our freedoms thankfully allow us to question and correct – do not give worse nations a pass.
Before you attack a minor point of mine to debunk my entire argument (how emblematic) or ignore me, please know that I doubt it is possible to change the way you view the world. I can only hope you have the same impotence over those you try to influence.
Walter Haas
San Francisco, CA
Thank you very much for your query. A century from now, when the competitive flux among world cultures will doubtless be as intense as today, your stern view of Iran may well have been proved correct. The failure of the West to act decisively and to intervene in Iran's nuclear armament may look timid and foolish. If nuclear weapons manufactured in Iran end up in the hands of jihadists and are successfully deployed in our capital cities, the West will look as if it committed suicide and deserved to fall.
But politics is not science. It is impossible to predict with perfect accuracy the real-life results of any course of action. A thousand unanticipated factors may cause idealistic plans to go horribly awry. In the case of Iran, short of a massive land invasion or the outright assassination of its leaders (currently forbidden by civilized nations), it would be virtually impossible to surgically remove Iran's regime without visiting death and destruction on untold numbers of innocent Iranian civilians. Do their lives mean nothing to you? By what ethical reasoning have you determined that the American way of life, which I too love, is or should be paramount on Earth, at the expense of all others?
What makes me uneasy in your argument is the Manichean polarization between "good guys" and "bad guys" among world governments. In my view, such stark moral absolutes do not exist, except from a fundamentalist religious perspective -- such as the one that animated the Muslim fanatics who attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center. "The Iranian regime epitomizes evil," you say. While we may rightly abhor and condemn the archconservative social policies of that regime, surely we should reserve extreme terms like "evil" for the genuine monsters of history, like Nero, Vlad the Impaler or Hitler. Calling every petty regional dictator "evil" is ultimately counterproductive by coarsening our political discourse and dehumanizing our opponents.
Camille,As a social libertarian and defense/economic conservative, I find your observations on John McCain spot on. However, I believe you have been swept up in Obama fever.
If Obama can prove to me that he really wants to work with the opposition to solve many of our problems, I may vote for him. He is spending too much of his time trying to connect McCain to Bush, and that connection does not stand up to historical facts. Despite McCain’s stodginess and poor public speaking skills, he has a history of reaching across the aisle and being an independent thinker rather than an ideologue. Obama has no history of working with Republicans and is only talking about it.
I am a former Marine officer who loves your column.
Steve Combes
Saint Paul, MN
You are so right about McCain's "history of reaching across the aisle." He's done so much reaching, in fact, that it's a wonder he hasn't turned into that droopily taffy-armed Pixar Incredible character, Elastigirl. As a fan of talk radio, I've had an earful for years about McCain's political zigzagging and his indifference to bedrock principle. Some might see him as a pragmatic doer; others call him a narcissistic opportunist.
As a Democrat, I appreciate McCain's refusal to demonize his opponents. As a free-speech libertarian, however, I have questions about the disturbing curbs on political expression wrought by the McCain-Feingold bill. Does the "independent" McCain in fact have any coherent system of beliefs? Or is he just a fidgety nibbler, noodler, and hot-dogger without a powerful vision for the future? His erratic campaign thus far, with staff whizzing in and out, is hardly reassuring.
Having watched Obama in action (on TV but once in person in suburban Philadelphia), I feel cautiously confident about his idealistic desire to heal partisan divisions in this country. Remember his measured acknowledgment during the heated primary season of the far-reaching influence of Ronald Reagan's ideas? I was amazed at Obama's daring, given his embrace by my party's left wing. The first step to a new concord in the U.S. is for both the right and the left to admit that there are significant and substantive ideas on the other side. The present destructive atmosphere of hysteria, with its rigid stereotyping and lurid moralism, must end.
Obama's maturity and forebearance toward opponents were on display nowhere better than in the Democratic debates, where he maintained his graceful reserve in the face of one catty cut after another from a grandstanding, camera-hogging Hillary Clinton, who deserved to have a Santa Claus sack of scandal-ridden 1990s press clippings dumped all over her prettily coiffed head.
You said of Obama: "He has a judicious, reflective, authentically presidential temperament." He certainly has a talent for sounding natural when reading a prepared speech from a teleprompter, but he doesn't come across nearly as well when speaking extemporaneously. It's as if when he's not reading a speech that he is just looking to insert as many prepared talking points as possible and fumbles for words to put around them as opposed to giving you the feeling he's speaking from his heart about the bigger picture. Do you ever get that same sense, and do you feel that will be a problem for him?>Blake Krass
Pflugerville, TX
