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How the Demos lost the White House in Seattle | page 1, 2, 3, 4

Responding to my remarks about the routine defamation of Italian-Americans by the entertainment industry, Mark Hall writes from Richmond, Va., about "libeled Southerners":

If you are annoyed by the stereotyping of people of Italian descent here, try being a native Southerner for a while! I'm so fed up with Hollywood's (and others') pathetic and hateful smears on my culture and values that I rarely see movies or television anymore. I never thought that believing in honor, integrity, and equality (not the man-hating feminist or affirmative action quota kind of "equality") would make me "racist" or a "misogynist," but that's what I am, according to the now decades-old barrage from Hollywood.

You're absolutely right, Mr. Hall. Scriptwriters, directors and production companies based in New York and Los Angeles have a very blinkered view of the rest of America, which they see as a vast wasteland of rednecks and yokels. Even the Midwest is too much of a stretch for them, as witness the cringe-making way Kansas is always portrayed by my favorite soap, "The Young and the Restless," as a drab, beige-hued flatiron peppered with very simple, slow-spoken folks who seem to be auditioning for the 1940 dustbowl film "The Grapes of Wrath."

Extending our ethnic theme, Rob Williams of New York asks if Madonna is an "Anglophile":

A recent news item in the gossip pages said that Madonna is looking for a house in England that would be near a prestigious school for her daughter Lourdes. The item was interesting because Madonna seems to be transforming herself into a Brit. Every time I see her on awards shows these days, she seems to speak with a more affected air, as if she never grew up in Michigan. (I was reminded of a line in a Tom Wolfe book where a character criticized an American for adopting a British manner to appear more cultured, as if his new accent had arrived in an airmailed box from England like a pair of dentures that he popped in his mouth.)

Is Madonna's behavior an attempt to gain respectability by adopting the manners of the British middle class or royalty? Is she in the next stage of some evolutionary process from New Money upstart pop icon to Old Money aristocrat? Do you consider her behavior laughable or even hypocritical? Does Madonna demonstrate some kind self-loathing in the continual reinvention of her image? Is it an artistic impulse or are these reinventions a business necessity to thrive as an entertainer?

All of the above! Madonna's application to a chic Manhattan preschool for Lourdes was apparently denied on the grounds that a pop star's presence would be dangerous and disruptive. Rushing off to England in a snit without exploring other options doesn't exactly sound like Madonna has all her maternal oars in the water.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.

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On the other hand, should Madonna decide that Lourdes ought to be educated in England, I would applaud it. American prep schools may have a substantive curriculum, but their graduates, as evidenced by the examples funneling into the Ivy League, are increasingly mundane. A British or continental education would give Lourdes a smattering of knowledge ("Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit," says Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell. "Touch it and the bloom is gone."), but more importantly it would make her a sophisticated woman of the world.

As for that bizarre in-and-out British accent, Madonna, like many artists, is a sponge. Just as she is a brilliant synthesizer of musical styles or fashion motifs, so she is highly susceptible to her last three-and-a-half experiences. Madonna talks like the queen mother when she's been loafing around with any of her British dates and pals, like that overrated bore of an actor Rupert Everett. As someone who has deliberately retained the irritatingly flat tones of her native upstate New York, I agree with you that it would behoove Madonna to remember her gritty family past in lower-middle-class metropolitan Detroit.

Sticking with divas, I love this saga of a letter from Salon reader Audrey Mack, which is titled "Babs & politics; fluffy shawls 'n' quilty things" and had me in stitches:

I was flipping through the TV channels on Nov. 16 when I stopped to watch a few minutes of an interview between Rosie O'Donnell and Barbra Streisand. I thought it was going to be a Linda Richman-style love-fest, all about Barbra's music, Rosie's all-consuming love for it, whatever. Good for a few laughs, anyway.

But noooo. Babs was yammering away about politics, carefully explaining to Rosie that the Democratic Party is "the party of the people," "the party that cares about the people;" and that the Republican Party is "ALL ABOUT [her words, not mine] supporting big business, insurance companies, the tobacco industry," plus one other group I can't recall. She went on in this vein for several minutes.

Well, where do I start? Has this woman been asleep for the past 20 years? Has she not seen that many working stiffs in this country support the Republican Party as a defense against (what they perceive as) the tax-and-spend Democrats? And has she missed all the moral/religious battles, in which Republicans are seen as the champions of "decent" American moral values, family values, and so forth -- as opposed to (what Republicans perceive as) the anti-religion, liberal, secular humanist (gasp) Democrats?

Has she not seen that political party loyalties have changed greatly in the past 20 years, and are still changing, largely due to moral, religious and ethical issues? I'd thought that the days of the "have" Republicans battling "have-not" (mainly working-class) Democrats were over; that the political battles aren't mainly drawn along economic lines anymore. That was my parents' struggle, in the FDR and post-FDR eras.

Thank goodness I have Barbra Streisand to set me straight. I don't mean to knock all liberals here, but really, there's no liberal worse than a Hollywood liberal: ignorant, uninformed, clueless, just plain DUMB.
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