Troubled by the increasing rancor of political debate in the U.S., I watched a rented copy of “Seven Days in May” last week. Its paranoid mood, partly created by Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie, minimalist score, captured exactly what I have been sensing lately. There is something dangerous afoot — an alienation that can easily morph into extremism. With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives: Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America’s identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm. Two days after watching “Seven Days in May,” I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that “any U.S. soldier,” given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two.

[Listen to Davis below]

How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio? Davis (who is obviously a glib horse’s ass) did this stunt very emphatically at a news break at the top of the first hour. It was from there that the Dallas magazine story was evidently picked up by liberal Web sites and disseminated, pressuring CBS to denounce Feherty, who made a public apology. The gravity of this case was unfortunately overshadowed by feisty comedian Wanda Sykes’ clumsy jibes at Rush Limbaugh the next night at the Washington Correspondents Dinner. Sykes (who is usually hilarious) was rushed and inept, embarrassing herself and her hosts. But what Mark Davis did, in irresponsibly broadcasting Feherty’s vile fantasy, was an inflammatory political act that could goad susceptible minds down the dark road toward “Seven Days in May.”

Talk radio has been seething with such intensity since Barack Obama’s first week in office that I am finding it very hard to listen to it. How many times do we have to be told the sky is falling? The major talk show hosts, in my opinion, made a strategic error in failing to reset at lower volume after Obama’s election. When the default mode is feverish crisis pitch, there’s nowhere to go, and monotony sets in. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don’t think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium. I want stimulation and expansion of my thinking — not shrill, numbing hectoring and partisan undermining of the authority and dignity of the presidency. Rabidly Bush-bashing Democrats shouldn’t have done it to the last president either, but that’s no excuse for conservatives, who claim to revere our institutions, to play schoolyard tit for tat.

Not that Obama’s policies and conduct shouldn’t receive sharp scrutiny. Despite my disgust at the grotesquely bloated stimulus package which did severe early damage to this administration, I am generally happy with Obama’s eagerness to tackle long-entrenched social problems, although there is sometimes a curious disconnect between what he says and what he does. The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen. But it’s about time an ambitious young leader shook up the stale status quo. The sepulchral, doom-obsessed and megalomaniacal Dick Cheney’s self-intrusion into the news last weekend was a nice demonstration of just what a fresh new breeze Obama represents in Washington.

I applauded the low profile taken by the Obamas on National Prayer Day, when they enjoyed family time in the White House instead of parading their piety around in front of TV cameras. This is a very positive first step toward detaching the American presidency from the heavy religious baggage that has complicated our politics for far too long. On the other side of the political spectrum, Obama’s willingness to court controversy among his own core groups by supporting civil unions rather than gay marriage (a position I agree with) is a sign of his own independence and strength of character.

I am still steamed, however, by the blunders made by the administration in its first response to the colossally stupid buzzing of New York City two weeks ago by a presidential plane and military jet. Press secretary Robert Gibbs should have been fired for the simpering, shrugging way he dismissed queries about this outrageous and terrifying event, which had occurred many hours earlier. Acting as if the issue was as insignificant as Lindsay Lohan’s latest dating flap, Gibbs claimed to know nothing more than the few passing references he had seen to it on the Web. 

[Watch Gibbs' response below.]

Later on, the press was told that Obama was privately “infuriated,” but no official statement from him was released, and Obama himself was never made even briefly available for comment in person — which he could have easily done by a simple stroll in a hallway.

The Obama administration was caught with its pants down on this one. It seemed likely even then that Obama knew nothing about that obscenely wasteful photo op, and indeed a subsequent investigation led to the termination of the incompetent White House official who was responsible. However, Obama made a serious error in failing to speak to the public directly and promptly to allay anxieties and express his own displeasure. Forget 3 a.m. phone calls: This was a high noon, tough-it-out commander-in-chief moment! The erratic deployment of a military jet over a major U.S. city was ultimately Obama’s responsibility, and it was up to him to show that he knew it. Using layers of spokesmen to distance this issue made the president seem passive and uncertain about his own constitutional duties and powers.

On to cultural issues. I laughed out loud at my campus mailbox as I flipped through a new book edited by Michael Montlack, “My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them.” Boy, do I understand diva worship! It’s definitely one of the weird, possibly DNA-linked traits that I have always shared with many gay men and very few lesbians. There are so many wonderful things in this book. Joseph Campana, for example, says about his passion for Audrey Hepburn: “Who hasn’t had real relationships with imaginary people or imaginary relationships with real people? What else were the arts invented for if not for consummating the deep and necessary loves that can only be lived in the imagination?” Hear, hear! That’s practically my militant manifesto.

Collin Kelley remarks about the aging but still ultra-sophisticated Jeanne Moreau, “A lifelong cigarette habit seems to have worked in her favor rather than against.” Reginald Shepherd observes about Kate Bush, “No real diva is loved by all. Without detractors, one can’t be a diva.” David Bergman writes about the attraction of young gay Jews to Lotte Lenya, who sang in German, “the forbidden language”: “Lenya had the world-weariness we aspired to, and the innocence we were stuck with … Yes, the sea is blue, so blue, she sang as if she had never noticed it before and it might suddenly be taken from her … She had the exile’s iciness, the survivor’s ruthlessness.”

My favorite chapter, predictably, is Lewis DeSimone’s ode to Auntie Mame, a principal icon of mine since childhood, when I saw Rosalind Russell’s bravura performance in the 1958 film. DeSimone’s subtitle is a line that still thrills me (with its application to both art and life): “I’m going to open doors for you, doors you never even dreamed existed.” I know that masterful film and Patrick Dennis’ witty original book so well that it amazed me to learn something new: DeSimone notes that the climax of the airheaded prepette Gloria’s notorious ping-pong speech is “a confrontation with a locked closet door” — a surfacing of the gay subtext. And he hits the nail on the head with this: “Mame is the perfect parent in large part because she is so woefully unprepared. She has no training in the traditional methods of relating to children — either ignore or infantilize them — so she treats Patrick like a small adult instead.” Which is, of course, how we got little Patrick’s immortal line about martinis: “Stir, never shake. It bruises the gin.”

Well, the one-year anniversary is approaching in late May of my slide lecture (“Varieties of the Erotic in 20th Century Art”) at the Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil — after which I was hit by the lightning bolt of a parcel of Daniela Mercury DVDs. Yes, Agnes Gooch (my clerical alter ego in “Auntie Mame”) sure got her limbic system rewired! Here’s the article I wrote for the April issue of the Brazilian magazine Bravo about my staggering experiences at the Salvador carnival in February. Bravo’s photo of Daniela and me (with her handsome bearded Italian boyfriend, Marco Scabia, and my Brazilian Vergil, Gunter Axt) at the top of her trio elétrico is pure Mame: The Gooch is clearly in a Dionysian zone following Mame’s fabled maxim, “Live, live, live!”

For this month’s installment of my Daniela Mercury department (or, more exactly, mega-church and theme park), I have flagged two fascinating low-key videos that show Daniela’s casual mastery as a live performer. My column of last August assembled far more elaborate and flamboyant videos that demonstrate her high-glam, super-sexy, ball-of-fire, magister ludi side — the tireless, work-it-to-the-max persona whom audiences see in concert on her world tours. These, however, from the 2007 Porto do Sol festival in Salvador, show Daniela completely relaxed in blue jeans and a flowing white blouse. Because she isn’t dancing, she is brimming with emotion, elicited by the music as well as her intimacy with the home crowd. The first, “Essa Ternura,” is a contemplative Latin love song co-written by Paul McCartney. The second song, “Tempo Perdido,” clearly has a political edge; the acoustic guitars and passionate tone feel, in American terms, very 1960s. Whenever I play it, I can’t get it out of my head.

Having followed Madonna’s career with enthusiasm and then disappointment for the past 25 years, it’s difficult for me to avoid making comparisons. Madonna and Daniela (seven years younger) are both theatrical Leos who were born in provincial obscurity, began their careers as dancers and became singers and major impresarios of their own troupes. Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet, as well as one of the wealthiest, but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah, fashion merchandising, adoption melodramas, the gym, and ill-starred horseback riding to study art. Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn’t expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.

Compare the two photos, above. Daniela, holding her 2007 Latin Grammy award, is, despite her excitement, warm, open and observant. Guess what: Daniela, unlike Madonna, actually recognizes the existence of human beings in the real world outside her ego. She has a graceful, natural, ripe womanliness (she has two grown children and recently became a grandmother), but there is often an undercurrent of something boyish, mischievous and subversive. Energy, spontaneity, humor, candor and hospitality are leading values for Daniela onstage and off. Check out this nifty photo of her (in a plunging top and black cargo pants) on a Spanish language TV show, where she is typically relaxed and unpretentious.

Now behold Madonna, arriving muscular and veiny-armed at the Vanity Fair party after this year’s Oscars in Los Angeles. Trying to be fair, I am not posting the horror candids of a skeletal Madonna in gym rags, nor am I showing her glassy-eyed at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Awards last year, when she was reeling through a bad pre-divorce patch. But Madonna, like Joan Crawford or the late Marlene Dietrich, has become a mask whose eyes see nothing but itself. Her life, for all her globe-hopping, has become rigid, predetermined, suspicious and claustrophobic. Despite her spiritual talk, Madonna is a voracious materialist and status-monger who is as addicted as Leni Riefenstahl to her triumph of the will. Persons have become mere instruments to her — which is why she cannot communicate with them heart-to-heart. And it is why Madonna’s creativity has tragically withered.

As a denizen of the Web, I watch very little TV anymore, aside from the eternal glories of Turner Classic Movies. So I have been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying Nickelodeon’s teen show, “iCarly,” to which my 6-year-old son has graduated after many entertaining years of nonstop “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Series creator Dan Schneider (who also did “Drake & Josh”) has a fabulous sense of comedy, both verbal and physical. A reliable rule in the popular performing arts is that quality is proved the second or third time around: I can testify that “iCarly” episodes retain their humor and freshness on repeated re-viewings. Miranda Cosgrove’s smart and spirited Carly is terrific, but so is Jennette McCurdy as her feckless pal Sam. The two have a hectic, daffy Lucy and Ethel chemistry. The tart-tongued McCurdy, at 16, has amazing timing — and a long and successful career ahead of her as a go-for-broke comedian and mime in the all-American Carol Burnett style.

Question for Salon readers: Does anyone recognize the following scenario from an early 1950s TV program? “Meet me at the Argentine” was the sinister repeated theme line. The climactic encounter occurred at a stone pool with seals — a setting that, after many decades of puzzling, I have finally tentatively identified as Astor Court at the Bronx Zoo. Please help!

Finally, in response to further reader queries, I must repeat that no, I do not have a Facebook page. Nor am I a “friend” on anyone else’s Facebook page or any other site. As a matter of long-standing policy, I have no active Web presence of any kind except on Salon, to which I have been contributing since its debut issue in 1995. While there may be Web pranksters masquerading as me, please be advised that yes, there really are other genuine Camille Paglias, who must wander the world burdened or cursed with my name.

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Charles
Pennsylvania

You are absolutely correct! The buck stops with the top executive. But we all know how little executive experience Barack Obama has had. He was elected for his vision and his steady, deliberative character, not his résumé. For better or worse, Obama is learning as he goes — and surely most fair-minded people would grant him reasonable leeway as he grows into the presidency, one of the hardest jobs in the world.

At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him — a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday’s news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama’s staffing problems are blatant — from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another — from the president’s tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady’s over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama’s sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.

Video: President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah during the G-20 summit

Enough already! These slips are worsening the anti-Obama backlash, which began with the administration’s bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package. Conservatives seem deliriously drunk with their cartoon picture of Obama, to whom is glibly attributed every pathology in the book. Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama’s educational records remains troubling. But I am still waiting for hard evidence about the host of other charges that are continually being hammered against him — from his alleged fidelity to the crypto-tactics of Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky to the questions raised by right-wingers about the production of Obama’s two memoirs. Out of respect for the presidency, conservatives need to put up or shut up about these issues.

I still strongly believe in Obama’s promise as a world leader. I was thrilled, for example, by his call this week for an end to nuclear weapons — a goal that he frankly admitted would not be attained in his lifetime. We have waited a long time for an American president who dreams big. Yes, there are bitter cells of fanatics everywhere who hate America and want a repeat of 9/11. And yes, there will always be petty dictators who covet the bomb and conspire to get it. But the mass of people around the world want to be inspired to a higher good. Whether the Obama presidency succeeds or fails will depend on his ability to sustain his ideals in the face of the testing crises that will inevitably erupt in far-flung regions where ethnic or religious strife has been a way of life for thousands of years. And closer to home, Obama will need to cut the umbilical to his hometown posse, whose inefficiency and poor decision-making took the shine off his honeymoon and brought the dispirited Republicans back from the dead.

As a former lover of talk radio, I too have wondered why programs with a liberal bent have fared so poorly in the free market. There are two specific factors that may be responsible for the disparity.

1) The vast majority of the talk radio audience listens in their car or from home. People driving around during the day and listening to the radio are probably demographically skewed toward the self-employed or people in some sort of sales. Admittedly, there are a large number of service jobs that require drive time, but I would bet those people are not interested in politics. The entrepreneur or six-figure sales professional is far more likely to be a conservative. People listening from home would either be stay-at-home parents or people working from home. These groups would also tend to be much more likely to listen to Laura Schlessinger than Al Franken.

2) The liberal talk shows I’ve listened to are not really all that entertaining. The jokes tend to be mean-spirited personal attacks and are rarely as clever as what I have heard on Rush Limbaugh’s program. I think if the left wants to have a successful talk radio platform, they should be asking people like Jon Stewart for ideas and quit trying to silence the opposition.

Marty Grant
New York City

Your theories about the talk radio audience are intriguing. The most rewarding aspect of talk radio for me is the callers, whose voices are heard nowhere else in the culture — the feisty, super-organized home-schooling moms, the gruffly stoical transcontinental truckers, and the fiercely independent and self-reliant small-business owners, outraged by Washington’s tilt toward bailing out corrupt, top-heavy corporations.

However, the popularity of conservative radio shows is a round-the-clock phenomenon. There are flamboyant evening hosts as well as night replays of the major daytime shows, extending well past midnight to dawn. Clearly, conservative hosts have an instinctive rapport with AM radio, which I have been arguing for years is a populist medium (an idea that finally seems to have taken wing in its invocation by other commentators).

Salon reader Cecil W. Powell writes: “The failure of talkers on liberal radio is in large part due to an absolute inability to poke fun at themselves.” How true! Liberal hosts like to snap and snip and chortle snidely, but they are weighed down by a complacent superiority complex, a paralyzing sanctimony. They mistake irony for wit. The conservative hosts love to rant and stomp and bring down the house. They’re doing breakneck vaudeville while liberal hosts are primly stirring their non-caffeine green tea.

Why do you and others in the press keep misattributing this “magic Negro” comment to Rush Limbaugh? My understanding from listening to his radio program is that the phrase you are referring to from Rush’s parody song was first brought to light in an article by David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Times. Why didn’t you mention this in your column? Rush merely ran with it in one of his many parodies, which he is notably famous for. Often he takes comments made in the press or by politicians and parodies them — most often to expose their hypocrisy.

The press has tied Rush to “magic Negro” as if he were the originator or instigator. Thus Rush is unfairly and routinely condemned for it.

L. Bryan
Columbus, Ga.

“Barack the Magic Negro” was a song parody by a longtime contributor to the Rush Limbaugh Show, Paul Shanklin, whom I consider to be one of the most brilliant satirists of our time. Shanklin has an analytic erudition about popular music, a genius for mimicry, and an astounding gift for creative rapid-response to hard news. The widespread and vitriolic misjudgments about what goes on during Rush’s show could and should have been dispelled a decade ago had Shanklin’s fiendishly clever parodies been released into general circulation. Yes, they can be purchased in CD collections, and they are also available online to subscribers to the Limbaugh Web site, but that draconian limitation has unfairly confined Shanklin’s work to conservative partisans. My all-time favorite in the Shanklin oeuvre is “I Can’t Recall,” a parody of “Try to Remember” (from “The Fantasticks”) with an air-headed Hillary on the witness stand claiming that she just can’t remember a single darn thing about that silly old Whitewater deal because her mind has turned to Jell-O … Jello-O … Jello-O (fading off in echoes).

When I first heard “Barack the Magic Negro” shortly after the March 2007 publication of the Ehrenstein article (which was partly inspired by a term used by director Spike Lee), I found it very daring and funny. It was timely and had the shock of the new — exactly like Lenny Bruce’s violation of conventional proprieties. But Rush kept playing it and playing it well beyond its shelf date, and after a while it felt gratuitous and dismayingly oblivious to racial realities and sensitivities in the U.S. Although I’m a longtime fan of Rush’s show, I started turning the radio off when this skit came on.

Here’s the main point: The vocal in “Barack the Magic Negro” mimics grandstanding black activist Al Sharpton, while the namby-pamby melody is borrowed from “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a children’s song that when originally performed by folkies Peter, Paul and Mary was widely assumed to be an allegory for marijuana smoking. So the Shanklin parody went well beyond the Ehrenstein article in what was being implied about Obama as well as the turf wars of African-American politics. There are so many other wonderful parodies in the Shanklin collection that more richly deserve repeated airplay. And for heaven’s sake, they all belong on YouTube. Unlock the vaults!

Regarding your observations about the rehabilitation of Sarah Palin and the insufferable snottiness of Dick Cavett and other good liberals: Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism? You call yourself a liberal, and you vote liberal, yet you are under constant attack by your liberal compatriots. Why? Because of your open-mindedness and your “real feminism” (as opposed to faux leftist feminism).

In the meantime, the torching of Sarah Palin’s church in Alaska (children were inside when the fire with accelerant was set) evokes a collective shrug in the mainstream media and other liberal precincts (if you can find any reference to the event at all). Why the all-too-frequent and downright nasty face of contemporary liberalism?

Timothy Condon
Tampa, Fla.

Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, “Berkeley in the Sixties,” chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I’m not kidding — there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It’s a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don’t get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!

Friends of mine and I have found ourselves at the crossroads of the Washington, D.C., media, gay press and the murder of a straight man at the home of a noted gay rights and marriage attorney. Print may be morbid, but maybe citizen journalism/investigation may fill the void. There is a three-year-old unsolved murder of a straight man who was drugged, incapacitated, sexually assaulted, suffocated, then stabbed in the home of three gay men, one of them being an old college friend. One of the defendants — not charged with murder, however — is noted K Street attorney Joe Price, who is active in Lambda legal circles.

The crime scene in Dupont Circle is just a few blocks from where I, my partner and two close friends live. The murder of Robert Wone had all the ingredients of a D.C. scandal: sex, drugs and murder. Yet there is almost zero buzz on the streets about this. The D.C. mainstream print media gave minimal coverage, and you can guess how few column inches or how little airtime the TV guys gave it. The four of us launched a blog, and we’ve broken news.

Why does the death of a straight man in the home of three gay guys not become “news” à la Chandra Levy? The four of us gay Washingtonians are all plugged into the media in some capacity, yet we can’t figure this out. Another question is why the gay media avoids this crime and issue. Some coverage, yet only a little.

The Web site dc.bilerico gave us space for a guest post. A recent Fox 5 / WTTG piece. And finally our site.

Craig Brownstein
Washington, D.C.

From your description of the appalling news blackout on this crime, it appears to be a blatant case of politically correct censorship. The 11th commandment of the liberal mainstream media is that no evil shalt be spoken of any gay persons, who have been sanctified by their precious victim status, without which liberalism would implode. You and your gay friends are to be congratulated for your passionate truth-seeking. I am very glad for the opportunity to publicize the facts in Salon. Please keep me informed of future developments.

I’m confused. You say you are an atheist. It seems to me that if there is no God, then we are all simply pieces of animated dirt. To pieces of animated dirt, on what basis can something be considered right or wrong, ethical or unethical? Of what value is life except that which animated pieces of dirt place on it? What would it matter if some place absolutely no value on life?

Abortion is “murder”? That has moral connotations. What is wrong with the “murder of a child”? All pieces of animated dirt eventually become lifeless. What does it matter when or how? Morality is just an invention of animated dirt. What if humans managed to destroy all life on earth? What would it matter? Surely, some other form of animated dirt would evolve to replace us. I certainly don’t know there is a God, but I choose to believe there is, because, for one, I don’t want to believe that I am just animated dirt.

Bob Ryden

The ancient Greeks, whose art and thought deeply influenced me in my youth, created ethics as a branch of secular philosophy, detached from religion and its moral imperatives. Like artworks, codes of law and ethics are uniquely human constructs — conceptual environments that separate us from animals, who are governed by biological instinct. It is rational to debate and define the rules by which any society exists. As a cultural relativist and atheist, I believe that values change over time and that there is no transcendent God who generates and enforces them. But societies have a right to require reasonable compliance from those who enjoy their material benefits.

Your vast panorama of “animated dirt” rising and sinking is actually closer to the Buddhist view of the cosmos — which I also find inspiring for its contemplative acceptance of things as they are. The operations of the life force have inherent majesty. Human consciousness, when fully expanded, is for me the ultimate value. As Heracleitus said, “All things flow.” To demand permanence or personal survival beyond death seems to me a tragically doomed quest. But by power of imagination, we each have the right to live in our own universe. All gods exist — because thinking makes it so.

In “Vamps & Tramps” you said that sex “reawakens and heals the ‘family romance’ of our personal biography.” I was wondering if you could elaborate a little on what you meant by “heals.” Do you mean that people who had a bad family life can, through their sex life, overcome the negative consequences this had for their psyche? I thought that because sexuality springs from the subconscious one couldn’t change anything about it and therefore that no amount of awareness and observation and analysis of one’s sexuality could change it. Is sexuality the only language the subconscious understands, a sexual act the only way to “talk” to one’s subconscious and, possibly, change it?

Mariana Pinheiro

When human beings were scrabbling for survival in the nomadic and agrarian eras, sex was a reproductive necessity, a drive as basic and primal as hunger and thirst. However, as civilization developed, personality became more complex, and along with it the pageantry of courtship and romance. Freud’s analyses of “family romance” were keyed to the hothouse environment of the bourgeois home. With the new intimacy of parents and children as well as the protraction of adolescent dependence (Shakespeare’s Juliet got married at 14), sex became freighted with symbolism that it may never have had in the pre-industrial and pre-Romantic period.

The issue is not an atypical “bad family life” but a universal bourgeois problem of ambivalent over-involvement. Modern identity has gotten far too intertwined with unrealistic ideals of love as well as the embattled theatrics of sexual orientation. However, we’re stuck with it, and it’s given us a hundred years of fabulous Hollywood movies! My point is simply that the love life of everyone I’ve known from my baby-boom generation and afterward is a chess board ruled by shadowy forces that long predate puberty. Erotic choices yearningly follow or rebelliously diverge from a cast list imprinted on us in childhood. Changing the template may be virtually impossible. Self-knowledge is the most that we can hope for. But for that we need poetry and art — not the rigid, sterile political ideology that still paralyzes gender studies.

Around the time I was 13 or 14 (I’m 28), I read [Mary] McCarthy’s story “The Company She Keeps” in a short story anthology. Well, needless to say, I loved the story so much that I went on to read just about everything McCarthy wrote. At first I was swept by her satirical prose; then, later, I was amazed to discover that she was extremely erudite, too. I do not remember the particulars, but McCarthy herself mentions her sexual escapades in her collection of stories of the same name, as well as her autobiography “How I Grew.”

In any case, I do not think McCarthy would have characterized herself as a feminist. Indeed, the “isms” she was concerned about were those of the day: communism, socialism, Trotskyism, etc. Nor do I think feminists would have been the only ones to admire her. As I write this, I recall a letter I discovered in a book of Philip Roth correspondence, in which Roth neurotically gushes over McCarthy’s realistic criticism of something he wrote. That is the type of reach and sway she had.

No matter what, it is nice to see someone evoking Mary McCarthy’s name. Next time, perhaps you could do it without mentioning Justin Timberlake.

Alexandre Bejerman
Montreal, Quebec

How delightful to hear from another McCarthy fan! Typical of the systemic philistinism of women’s studies programs from the 1970s on, strong voices like those of McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer were excluded from the maudlin, victim-centric curriculum. Things began to change in scattered quarters in the 1990s, thanks to a new generation of more open-minded feminists, but it is certainly the case that the overwhelming majority of women literature majors in this country are graduating without ever having heard Mary McCarthy’s name. More TV broadcasts of Sidney Lumet’s wonderfully acted ensemble film of “The Group” (1966) would help. (It’s an amusing bitch fest like “The Women.”) The political aspirations and disillusionments of McCarthy’s left-leaning Vassar College class of 1933 speak directly to our own time.

You wrote: “Two weeks after my return, I am still trying to process the enormity of my experience in Salvador, which was staggering on every level.”

I understand that usage is subject to change, but I feel a duty to my old English teacher, Fr. McFadden, SJ, to use “enormity” with the traditional sense of “great wickedness or evil.” I hope that you will agree that the standard definition of “enormity” is worth preserving. The president has been misusing that word for a while, and I fear that without the help of respected writers, it may soon be lost.

Steve Miner

Well, I certainly got an earful from Salon readers about this one! I appreciate the grammar protests from everyone who wrote in. But I honestly have never accepted that sharp distinction in English. In French, one can use enormité in either sense, and it seems to me a very useful duality. I was certainly signaling that the carnival in Salvador had both a physical and a spiritual dimension; neither “immensity” nor “enormousness” (which other readers suggested) would have been quite right.

From the swaying top of Daniela Mercury’s cruising trio elétrico, I was reminded of many things — Wordsworth’s sonnet about sleeping London at dawn as a “mighty heart” and Baudelaire’s spooky poem about beauty as a goddess-like stone sphinx with bruising breasts. With apologies to irate English teachers everywhere, “enormity” with a French twist really nails it!

I am a second year master’s student at York University. Two of the themes you constantly return to are your admiration for the creative instinct in gay male artists, and the profound influence European art cinema has had upon you throughout your life. I wonder, then, if you’ve ever seen any films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder — one of the most fascinating confluences of the two I’ve seen yet. The best of them bristle with a renegade vision of egomania, promiscuity, kleptomania and suicide that has virtually no equivalent in living memory for my generation.

Fassbinder was generally acknowledged to be the foremost figure of the New German Cinema of the 1970s, to the point that his premature death in 1982 is commonly used as a convenient point to mark the end of the movement. At various points, he managed to contain within his own work the combined styles and thematics of almost all of his New German Cinema peers — Wenders, Herzog, Schlondorff, von Trotte, Reitz, etc. — as well as reviving the style of Douglas Sirk to deliver a series of blistering body blows to the Adenauer era, Germany’s 1950s equivalent of America’s Eisenhower era.

Fassbinder’s work, however, is something current undergraduates have the deck stacked against them if they want to appreciate properly. Film studies courses nowadays invariably only show either one of two films –”Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” — the only two of his films that, taken in isolation, can be used to inculcate misinterpretations of what he was really about. The former is often distorted into a parable of sentimental liberal humanism, and the latter seems simply to conform to the conventions of the well-made historical re-creation. This is exactly the sort of travesty you’ve railed about in connection to Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Robert Mapplethorpe and numerous others. I don’t know if you’d appreciate being reminded of one more, but this is one that has piqued me recently.

Malcolm Morton
Toronto

Thank you so much for sending up this alarm about Fassbinder. I am very distressed to hear that his films are being in effect censored to fit into the bromide-filled film studies curriculum. Fassbinder was a cardinal figure in my thinking throughout the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. My philosopher friend James Fessenden and I were avid Fassbinder fans. It would be difficult to reconstruct just how daring “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” was at its release in 1972 — from the claustrophobic yet baroque set to the bizarre costumes and seething lesbian S/M drama. (In retrospect, it must partly have been Fassbinder’s homage to Wilde’s “Salome.”) I was also very grateful to Fassbinder for recovering Douglas Sirk, whose sensationalistically supercharged Hollywood films I had always loved. But curious gay film fans should probably start with “Fox and His Friends” (1975), where Fassbinder himself plays a gritty piece of working-class rough trade.

I agree with you about “The Egyptian” — it’s a very underrated epic. You may already know this, but the casting of Bella Darvi, and her effect on the doctor, mirrored her effect on the movie itself. When she was cast, the movie had been intended as a vehicle for Marlon Brando who had committed to the picture. That’s why there were many other name stars like Victor Mature (why haven’t you discussed him? He’s a unique image in films also) and big-budget production values. Brando withdrew after hearing of Darvi’s casting, and that crippled the film.

The film seems just fine with Purdom, and I’ve seen it several times since first seeing it as a kid. It’s an epic that seems to stay fresh, and stands up to repeated viewings every couple or few years. Easily better than “Spartacus” (although it was hard to beat the cynical Crassus) or “The Robe” (although Caligula was done as well as well as Robert Graves could have ever visualized).

Al Handa

No, I had not realized until I wrote about “The Egyptian” in Salon that the casting of Darryl Zanuck’s mistress, Bella Darvi, had caused Brando’s flight from the film. And yes, the disorder that Darvi spread in production amazingly replicates the destructiveness of the Babylonian femme fatale whom she plays. There was also a lot of griping at the time about Darvi’s heavy Eastern European accent and how hard she had to work for her lines to be even minimally comprehensible. Darvi’s gotten a bad rap: I think she does a terrific job, and so does Edmund Purdom as her smitten victim.

You confirmed our vision alignment with your wonderful tribute to Daniela Mercury. I have been listening to her for 15 years, since I married my Brazilian wife, Valeria. On our frequent trips to Brazil,Daniela is often the soundtrack (or Ivete Sangalo, who is whipping a quarter-million people into a frenzy at Maracana here or gracefully sharing a stage with Daniela Mercury). My wife, and so many women in Brazil, can bring so much warmth, sex appeal and character to a room that, well, they stand out. My own special carioca has an MS in computer science, a black belt, and has danced in the carnival parades several times. When I go dancing with her, I am like the kid with a fresh driver’s license trying to drive a Ferrari, although I have learned a bit over the years.

I am amazed at the culture in Brazil in many ways beyond the wonderful women. Brazilian teenagers are happy! The angst, rebellion and binging behavior that is (and was for me and my generation) the norm here is mostly nonexistent. A 23-year-old can live at home with his parents and have a warm and respectful relationship going both ways. A 13-year-old girl can wear a tiny bikini and look like a blossoming young woman without being hooted at by drunken guys or sneered at by disapproving women.

John Moore
Boulder, Colo.

I was fascinated by your remarks about the close yet nonjudgmental relationship of parents and children in Brazil as well as the freedom that young women enjoy to show off their bodies without harassment from hooligans. I observed both of these things during my stay at the Salvador carnival in February. What are the cultural reasons for this? I am eager to hear from Salon readers about the Brazil/U.S. dichotomy. I adore Brazilians, male and female, and felt especially at home in Salvador da Bahia, where my Italian energy level seemed perfectly normal and was in fact overshadowed by many vivacious personalities bursting like fireworks.

Meanwhile, my study of Daniela Mercury’s astonishing corpus of work continues. Of the CDs she gave me three weeks ago in Miami (where she tirelessly sang and danced in a huge three-hour concert on Hollywood Beach), I have been stuck on “Musica de Rua,” which is an absolute knockout, and am now heavily into “Elétrica,” a live album executed at an intoxicating pace. At her invitation two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and privilege of watching Daniela mix her new song with Wyclef Jean in the production booth of a recording studio near Times Square in New York City. Of course I will be returning to the subject of Daniela in future columns. I remain completely overwhelmed by the exuberant intensity and rhythmic intricacy of her music, and I deeply admire her professionalism as an artist as well as her generosity and unpretentious warmth as a person.

Subject: These weren’t a few birds; they were Barbie birds. Knowing you’re a fan of the seminal Hitchcock classic, “The Birds,” I couldn’t help passing this along.

Amanda Myers
Chicago

This is a hoot! A $40 Barbie Doll sporting Tippi Hedren’s classic spring-green suit, with pecking blackbirds attached as accessories wonderfully paralleling Tippi’s ever-present purse! (I make much of that purse in my British Film Institute book on “The Birds.”) To add to the sadistic play in twitting girl Barbie collectors, this ad shows the haunting Victorian schoolhouse of Bodega Bay hovering on a hill in the background. That’ll teach ya!

Camille, how can an educated, classy woman like you not see through that horrific film “Titanic”?

Kate Winslet’s character, Rose, was one of the vilest and most disgusting characters ever to grace the silver screen. From beginning to end, she displayed nothing but character flaws and a lack of concern for everyone else around her. As the movie starts, she is a rich brat who is depressed that she has to marry an incredibly rich and handsome man because he treats her badly. Perhaps she should have taken into account his personality rather than his bank account when she accepted his proposal.

Rather than take responsibility for her own actions, stand up to her mother, and tell him to his face that she is not in love with him, she instead decides to take the easy way out and kill herself. Now, the whole world would be better had she just jumped off the back of that damn boat. Instead, our boy Leonardo DiCaprio talks her down from the ledge, and she sees him and thinks, “Ooh, cute poor boy.” So then she decides to slum it for the weekend and hook up with the cute poor kid. Then, to prove her total lack of morals, she decides that she will ask Jack to “draw her” — naked, of course.

So, while engaged to someone else (because she never had the decency to call it off), she decides to get naked for a guy she has known for all of about 24 hours. Immediately afterward it’s time to consummate the hours-old relationship in the back of a car that is not theirs. Wow, that’s a real “moral” Victorian woman for you! Of course, that is not enough. The ship hits the iceberg (we didn’t see that one coming). By the way, she was on deck when that happened. I wonder if our lookout was too busy snooping on her and Jack to notice the iceberg. Maybe it’s actually her fault the ship sinks in the first place.

Anyway, our hero Jack puts Rose on a lifeboat. Of course, being safe is not enough, so she jumps back onto the sinking ship — a prime example of great decision-making. After it goes down, Jack is safe on a door of some sort, but he has to give up his spot to save Rose. Now Rose is on the door, and Jack is stuck in the freezing waters. So in a sense she kills Jack in a slow, frigid, painful way — sort of like the experience I felt while watching this movie. She holds on to Jack’s shivering hand, telling him, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Of course, after a few minutes in Arctic waters, Jack’s hand is no longer shivering. Winslet, in tears, continues, “I’ll never let go, Jack, I’ll never let go.” Around then, the lifeboat arrives, and Winslet immediately lets go, “Hey, I’m over here!” Jack sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Ms. Winslet grabs a spot on the lifeboat. Real nice, Kate, real nice: Whatever happened to never letting go?

We then hear the rest of Winslet’s life. Her fiancé loses his mind and ends up killing himself (you’re two for two, Kate). However, she finds a nice man, marries him, and lives a great life. Eventually, he dies (I wonder what she did to make that happen), and we see Winslet’s Rose again at age — I don’t know, let’s say 126 — with her granddaughter or whoever is on the ship trying to find the Titanic’s wreckage. At the end of the film, Rose walks to the back of the ship and takes the priceless diamond necklace that she could give to her grandchildren, which would set her family up for generations, but instead she throws the freaking necklace into the ocean! Queue overplayed, overhyped and over-sung Celine Dion song (I mean, seriously, by the end she is practically screaming the lyrics — like Celine, we get it, you have a great voice, stop assaulting us with it already).

Back to throwing the fancy necklace: She might as well have thrown three generations of her family over the side of the ship. Could she possibly be more selfish? Well, yes, she could, because then, apparently Rose dies, and we see her in heaven. For some reason, heaven is the Titanic (not exactly what I picture paradise to be). She opens up a stateroom door, and there is Leonardo’s Jack waiting for her in bed. Not her actual husband, mind you, but Jack. So she is even cheating on her husband in heaven.

I rest my case. The vilest, most horrifying character in cinematic history. An Academy Award for playing the she-devil would be one of the greatest travesties in mankind’s history since … the actual Titanic.

Signed, Every Rose has its Horns
Steve Derion
Manahawkin, N.J.

What joy! I had thought that the “Titanic” department of this column was closed for good. My 11-year crusade about Kate Winslet’s lost “Titanic” Oscar seemed over this year when she won a Golden Globe and had unstoppable momentum for the Oscar, which she finally did get. But no –  “Titanic,” like lint, is forever!

Many, many thanks for your letter — one of the funniest I have ever received at Salon. I was practically on the floor in convulsions of laughter when I got it. The genre of your letter is burlesque — a parodic sendup or travesty of a well-known and revered original. In the 19th century, burlesque was a popular form in both England and the U.S., including on the stage, which featured rude, rowdy lampoons of prestige plays. Burlesque acquired its tawdry strip-show associations long afterward.

On her hit TV variety show, Carol Burnett did brilliant burlesques: Her campy versions of “Rebecca” and “Mildred Pierce,” for example, are phenomenal and full of surprising, sharply observed insights into those classic films. Burnett’s shows should be in constant rotation in TV syndication. They are a working laboratory for aspiring young actors, who barely even know who Lucille Ball is these days. Comedy is an art form, but its past masters have receded in a callow entertainment industry addicted to sophomoric snark.

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration’s weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don’t they read the “Iliad” anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.

President Obama — in whom I still have great hope and confidence — has been ill-served by his advisors and staff. Yes, they have all been blindsided and overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the presidency. But I continue to believe in citizen presidents, who must learn by doing, even in a perilous age of terrorism. Though every novice administration makes blunders and bloopers, its modus operandi should not be a conspiratorial reflex cynicism.

Case in point: The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys. I returned from carnival in Brazil (more on that shortly) to find the Limbaugh affair in full flower. Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name. Limbaugh had every right to counterattack, which he did with gusto. Why have so many Democrats abandoned the hallowed principle of free speech? Limbaugh, like our own liberal culture hero Lenny Bruce, is a professional commentator who can be as rude and crude as he wants.

Yes, I cringe when Rush plays his “Barack the Magic Negro” satire or when he gratuitously racializes the debate over Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is a constant subject of withering scrutiny for quite different reasons on sports shows here in Philadelphia. On the other hand, I totally agree with Rush about “feminazis,” whose amoral tactics and myopic worldview I as a dissident feminist had to battle for decades. As a student of radio and a longtime listener of Rush’s show, I have gotten a wealth of pleasure and insight from him over the years. To attack Rush Limbaugh is to attack his audience — and to intensify the loyalty of his fan base.

If Rush’s presence looms too large for the political landscape, it’s because of the total vacuity of the Republican leadership, which seems to be in a dithering funk. Rush isn’t responsible for the feebleness of Republican voices or the thinness of Republican ideas. Only ignoramuses believe that Rush speaks for the Republican Party. On the contrary, Rush as a proponent of heartland conservatism has waged open warfare with the Washington party establishment for years.

And I’m sick of people impugning Rush’s wealth and lifestyle, which is no different from that of another virtuoso broadcaster who hit it big — Oprah Winfrey. Rush Limbaugh is an embodiment of the American dream: He slowly rose from obscurity to fame on the basis of his own talent and grit. Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media. As a Democrat and Obama supporter, I certainly do not agree with everything Rush says or does. I was deeply upset, for example, by the sneering tone both Rush and Sean Hannity took on Inauguration Day, when partisan politics should have been set aside for a unifying celebration of American government and history. Nevertheless, I respect Rush for his independence of thought and his always provocative news analysis. He doesn’t run with the elite — he goes his own way.

President Obama should yank the reins and get his staff’s noses out of slash-and-burn petty politics. His own dignity and prestige are on the line. If he wants a second term, he needs to project a calmer perspective about the eternal reality of vociferous opposition, which is built into our democratic system. Right now, the White House is starting to look like Raphael’s scathing portrait of a pampered, passive Pope Leo X and his materialistic cardinals — one of the first examples of an artist sending a secret, sardonic message to posterity. Do those shifty, beady-eyed guys needing a shave remind you of anyone? Yes, it’s bare-knuckles Chicago pugilism, transplanted to Washington. The charitably well-meaning but hopelessly extravagant Leo X, by the way, managed to mishandle the birth of the Protestant Reformation, which permanently split Christianity.

Oh, the incestuous mediocrity of American politics and media — compared to the splendors of Brazil! As a direct result of the two articles I wrote about superstar singer Daniela Mercury in Salon in June and August of last year, I was invited by the publisher Editora Abril to observe the 2009 carnival in Salvador da Bahia and write about it from an American perspective for the Brazilian magazine Bravo. Two weeks after my return, I am still trying to process the enormity of my experience in Salvador, which was staggering on every level.

As Daniela Mercury’s special guest, I was generously granted amazing access to her home, dressing room, van, and the performance platform of her trio elétrico (amplified truck), where she has never permitted anyone to stand before. For someone like myself who has been studying and writing about the arts for over 40 years, this was a priceless opportunity to see a major contemporary artist in action. I doubt I will ever again witness a performance equal to the one of heroic dimensions that occurred on the fourth night of the carnival: Exhausted after two prior nights of intermittent problems with rain and electrical short circuits, Daniela went out there and exploded with fiery intensity as she sang 63 songs over six hours, with only one 15-minute break. And she was also dancing!

Here’s a selection of photos of the Salvador carnival (with my captions) from Daniela’s official Web site. They capture only a fraction of the immensity of the crowd, which on this beachside route of the carnival (from Farol da Barra to Ondina) surely exceeded a million. Of the striking costumes Daniela wore for each of the five nights, my favorite was the stunning white vinyl and lace Barbarella outfit, which Daniela had requested Martha Medeiros to design. What a spectacle, whose images will be burned forever in my brain: Daniela dancing in luminous white against the black sky as the trio elétrico slowly moved among the floodlit palm trees with the rippling sea glittering far below.

The ecstatic, inspired atmosphere of the Salvador carnival is well caught in this video of Daniela performing her new song, “Oyá Tê Tê,” an ode to Iansä, the Afro-Brazilian goddess of wind and storm. Daniela is wearing a gold lace dress in the style of Carmen Miranda (whose international fame is often cited as the sole parallel to Daniela’s among Brazilian performers), while her star guest, Margareth Menezes (whose rich lower voice can be heard), is in white. When the camera pans left, I’m visible with my Brazilian liaison, the intellectual Gunter Axt, at the rear of the platform. Standing next to us is Daniela’s handsome and super-smart boyfriend, Marco Scabia.

“Oyá Tê Tê,” evoking the mood and movements of a Brazilian candomblé ritual with roots in Africa, put the crowd into a delirium every time it was performed. The video cannot possibly duplicate the mammoth power of the drums pouring out from the second floor of the trio elétrico (my legs were vibrating for days!). But the eerie magic that I felt from the first moment I visited Salvador last year is manifest in this video, even in the mist hanging in the air — which no one who was there that night actually saw.

In explaining Daniela’s sense of connection with Iansä, Gunter Axt wrote this to me about the goddess: “Iansä is a woman warrior, a woman general, the synthesis of femininity and sensuality. She is the queen of all souls. It is she who can dispel the dark spirits that take to the streets when the candomblé is in recess during carnival. Iansä is the butterfly, the wind, and the lightning. Her colors are red and white. She is the fruit of the Surinam cherry. She is plenty. Iansä is a woman’s pleasure but also all wars and conflicts. She is protective of gays, prostitutes, and transvestites — those who are not protected. She is next to every woman who needs to fight and all women who express their sensuality.” This is the ancient poetry of religion, without which the world would be a very barren place.

One of my strongest impressions of the carnival in Salvador was the vast sea of young people, who had come not just from all over Brazil but also from distant nations such as the U.S. and France. From the top of Daniela’s trio, one saw in those glowing faces a sublime panorama of the life force, a throbbing vitalism that embodied a global humanism beyond politics. I will elaborate on my more specific reflections for Bravo magazine, but let me just say that dozens of times, as Daniela communed with the crowd or whipped past me with garments flying on her monumental chariot, I had visions of Egypt, Babylon and Rome.

The bottom line is this: The carnival in Salvador should be a major destination for young people worldwide. The great carnival in Rio de Janeiro is now a highly formal and regulated stage show, with rows of bleachers and strict police oversight. But what is happening in Salvador is pure energy unleashed, an improvisational celebration in the streets like the true source of carnival in the Roman Saturnalia. There are discreet and reassuring files of military police, but the real controls are provided by the Filhos de Gandhy, Brazilian men wearing blue and white turbans and robes in honor of the spirit of peace represented by Mahatma Gandhi. But over five nights of the carnival, I saw from my bird’s-eye view very few negative incidents of any note. On the contrary, I was amazed at the concord and mutual respect of the people in the street — especially as it pertained to beautiful and scantily clad young women, who would be mercilessly harassed at any street fair in New York.

In Salvador da Bahia, young people will find a profound multicultural experience that cannot be reproduced by any university. They will be enveloped by the thrilling spirit of music and dance, which is at the heart of Bahian culture. The main issue is finding a place to stay; cheap food and drink are easily available from the multitude of street vendors at carnival. My recommendation is that young visitors purchase an abadá (T-shirt) for one or more of the major performers so that they can revel in the streets while following a trio elétrico. But they should at least once view the long and majestic procession of trios from a high vantage point, such as the big balconies of restaurants, which charge a fee. No one who visits the carnival in Salvador will leave untransformed.

Ever since I returned to humdrum reality in Philadelphia, I’ve been working my way through the CDs that Daniela Mercury heaped in my welcoming arms at her lovely home. I was thrilled to finally get a copy of her epochal 1997 album, “Feijão com Arroz,” which has been called a masterpiece. Of course, I now recognize many classic songs on it, but I’ve been obsessing over a relatively obscure one, “Vai Chover,” which YouTube has in a rather blurry clip from a Brazilian TV show. The intoxicating level of musical excitement that is standard in Brazil is obvious in this video. I’m going to lobby Daniela’s company (Canto da Cidade) to get the original of “Vai Chover” (a rain-filled love song) onto the Web, because it’s a phenomenal example of her distinctive fusion of personal lyricism and syncopated articulation with fantastically complex percussion.

And then there’s another obscure song that’s blown me away: Carlinhos Brown’s “Todo Canto Alegre” from Daniela’s first and self-titled album (1991). Its intricate rhythms demonstrate the marriage of Brazilian samba with Caribbean reggae (descending from James Brown and funk) that produced Bahia’s revolutionary axé style, which Daniela helped pioneer. Her soaring, melting, vamping vocals here are exquisite — and at times almost spiritual. Why isn’t this great song on YouTube? Hey, Daniela fans, get cracking!

Daniela Mercury will be performing at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, as the headline event of Brazil on the Beach, a three-day celebration of Brazilian music and sports on Hollywood Beach near Miami. Daniela’s concert will be at the water’s edge, and admission is free and open to the public. Oh, yes, I’ll be there!

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Why in the cosmos would the new administration, smoothly sailing out of Obama’s classy inauguration, repeat the embarrassing blunders of Bill Clinton’s first term? By foolishly promising a complete overhaul of healthcare within 100 days (and by putting his secretive, ill-prepared wife in charge of it), Clinton made himself look naive and incompetent and set healthcare reform back for more than 15 years.

President Obama was ill-served by his advisors (shall we thump that checkered piñata, Rahm Emanuel?), who evidently did not help him to produce a strong, focused, coherent bill that he could have explained and defended to the nation before it was set upon by partisan wolves. To defer to the House of Representatives and let the bill be thrown together by cacophonous mob rule made the president seem passive and behind the curve.

Most mainstream American voters are undoubtedly suffering from economist fatigue these days. This one calls for tax cuts; that one condemns them. One says we’re wasting hundreds of billions of dollars; the other claims that sum falls pathetically short. A plague on all their houses! Surely common sense would dictate that when Congress is doling out fat dollops of taxpayers’ money, due time should be delegated for sober consideration and debate. The administration’s coercive rush toward instant action, accompanied by apocalyptic pronouncements of imminent catastrophe, has put its own credibility on the line.

But aside from the stimulus muddle, Obama has been off to a good start. True, I was disappointed with the infestation of the new appointments list by Clinton retreads and slippery tax-dodgers. Nevertheless, I was very impressed by Obama’s relaxed, natural authority with military officers on Inauguration Day, in contrast to the early Bill Clinton’s palpable unease and exaggerated posturing. I applauded the signal Obama sent to the world by starting the closure of the Guantánamo detention center. Contrary to the rote claims of conservative talk radio, there is as yet no public evidence that every individual being held at Guantánamo is a proven “terrorist”– whom we would all agree should be severely punished. That is the entire point of a rational process of indictment and trial. If Guantánamo became a symbol of un-American repression, it is the procrastinating, paralyzed Bush administration that should be blamed.

Speaking of talk radio (which I listen to constantly), I remain incredulous that any Democrat who professes liberal values would give a moment’s thought to supporting a return of the Fairness Doctrine to muzzle conservative shows. (My latest manifesto on this subject appeared in my last column.) The failure of liberals to master the vibrant medium of talk radio remains puzzling. To reach the radio audience (whether the topic is sports, politics or car repair), a host must have populist instincts and use the robust common voice. Too many Democrats have become arrogant elitists, speaking down in snide, condescending tones toward tradition-minded middle Americans whom they stereotype as rubes and buffoons. But the bottom line is that government surveillance of the ideological content of talk radio is a shocking first step toward totalitarianism.

One of the nuggets I’ve gleaned from several radio sources is that Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has been in the aggressive forefront of the campaign to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, is married to Tom Athans, who works extensively with left-wing radio organizations and was once the executive vice-president of Air America, the liberal radio syndicate that, despite massive publicity from major media, has failed miserably to win a national audience. Stabenow’s outrageous conflict of interest has of course been largely ignored by the prestige press, which should have been demanding that she recuse herself from all political involvement with this issue.

Interactive political talk radio is a fabulous American genre (how I miss it when traveling abroad!), but there are other successful radio styles, as demonstrated daily by the BBC World Service, with its exquisitely produced you-are-there reports recorded in streets and cafés or on farms or tundras around the globe. The rich range of regional or class accents (from both inside and outside Great Britain) shown off by BBC commentators is mesmerizing in its own right.

Speaking of radio enchantment, it’s happening in spades whenever British cuisine queen Nigella Lawson is interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition. I didn’t pay much attention to Lawson’s book and TV vogue, partly because I found her show’s trendy fast editing too dizzy-making. But anyone who thinks Lawson’s talents were mainly a function of her brunette mane and ample bust hasn’t experienced her as a pure, disembodied radio voice. I’m on the record about the mediocrity of too much poetry these days (Elizabeth Alexander’s mundane inauguration poem was all too typical). Well, English poetry is thriving in the subtle, mellifluous, adjective-laden culinary odes of Nigella Lawson (who has an Oxford degree in medieval and modern languages). After listening to her on my car radio on the way to work, I often arrive for my morning classes in an ecstatic haze. But hey, let’s not dis that bust, which has gotten lusciously ample. Check out these recent London pix of Lawson as a merry dumpling barely contained by her midnight-blue velvet evening gown.

Another knockout in the fashion department was Kate Winslet at last month’s Golden Globes banquet. When Winslet finally won a major award and went deliriously bossy at the mike, I was in seventh heaven. I knew exactly what Nancy Pelosi meant when she said that when ex-President Bush’s helicopter took off from the Capitol three weeks ago, “It felt like a ten-pound anvil was lifted off my head.” For 11 years, ever since Winslet was robbed of her Oscar for “Titanic,” I’ve been grimly pursuing my vendetta against the provincial Hollywood establishment. I pray that Winslet’s two wins at the Golden Globes finally portend a sleek gold statuette is in her immediate future.

The elegant, architectural, black satin strapless gown (by Yves Saint Laurent’s Stefano Pilati) that Winslet wore at the Golden Globes ultimately descends from the voluptuous black sheath that Jean-Louis designed for Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame” striptease in “Gilda.” I had the great pleasure and privilege of being able to examine that magnificent piece of engineering up close and personal about 15 years ago, when the “Gilda” gown was on display in a collection of Hollywood artifacts at an Atlantic City casino. (Rita’s proportions were unexpectedly petite.)

In a forthcoming book about Lana Turner, “Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of ‘Imitation of Life,’” Sam Staggs delivers some fascinating background information about Jean-Louis’ career. Born J.L. Berthault in Paris in 1907, he worked as a sketch artist in a house of couture. Arriving in New York in 1936, he became the head designer at Hattie Carnegie, where he created the blockbuster Carnegie suit, an iconic look for contemporary women. In 1943, Jean-Louis was hired by Columbia Pictures. Staggs says, “Eventually he dressed all the ladies of Hollywood, or close to it, onscreen and off.”

Jean-Louis created 29 outfits for Lana in “Imitation of Life.” He costumed Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday”; Joan Crawford in “Queen Bee” and “Autumn Leaves”; Judy Garland in “A Star is Born”; Kim Novak in “Picnic”; Deborah Kerr in “From Here to Eternity”; Doris Day in “Pillow Talk”; and Vivien Leigh in “Ship of Fools.” He also designed the gowns Loretta Young wore to whirl campily through the doorway every week on her famous TV show — and then he and Young married. But here’s the kicker: Jean-Louis worked for six months to produce the mature Marlene Dietrich’s signature, flesh-colored chiffon sheath encrusted with bugle beads (she debuted it onstage in Las Vegas in 1953). And he dressed Marilyn Monroe in that incredible, near-transparent sheath, spangled with 6,000 beads, in which she breathily sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962. Monroe had to be sewn into her dress backstage. First lady Jackie Kennedy was a prudent no-show.

Continuing with the movie theme, I was disappointed with the satirically belittling tone taken by the Guardian’s obituary of British actor Edmund Purdom, who died at the age of 84 last month in Rome. Purdom’s reserved but intense performance as a doctor in ancient Thebes in Michael Curtiz’ 1954 film, “The Egyptian,” was absolutely extraordinary. The melodious and sometimes heartbreaking intelligence with which he delivered his lines set a high-water mark for sword-and-sandal epics. With his reflectiveness and burning interiority, Purdom could and should have played leading roles in films about major writers or artists.

Despite its weak Nefertiti, “The Egyptian” remains one of my favorite films, not least because of its haunting score by Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. Here are two clips that showcase the music: first, the titles and then a cruel exchange where the naive young doctor falls under the seductive spell of a glamorous Babylonian courtesan, played by Bella Darvi — a scene that had a huge influence on my lurid theory of the femme fatale in my first book, “Sexual Personae.” It was only while fact-checking for this column that I learned that Bella Darvi had a life like a Hollywood screenplay: Born in Poland and imprisoned by the Nazis, she was discovered by producer Darryl F. Zanuck while she was sitting at a sidewalk café on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Zanuck left his wife for Darvi but then left Darvi when she turned out to be a lesbian! After years of extravagant gambling and affairs with wealthy playboys like Aly Khan, Darvi committed suicide by gassing herself in Monte Carlo. Whew!

Erotic revelations took me similarly by surprise when I recently read Frances Kiernan’s massive study, “Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy,” published in 2000. Although I of course knew that McCarthy was bold and enterprising, I had no idea of the extent of her sexual adventures. She was truly a new woman of those radical decades of the 1920s and ’30s, whose gender innovations were reversed by the cult of domesticity that settled like a gray cloud over the conformist period following World War Two. Kiernan produces testimony that for years the young McCarthy was having sex with a different man every day — and sometimes several men in one day. Mind-boggling! Was she a gay man in disguise?

I nearly fell out of my chair when, on the next to last page, there I was with Katie Roiphe: Kiernan cites us as dissident feminist admirers of McCarthy. Yes, indeed, McCarthy was the very first role model I had as a woman writer. As a fractious adolescent in Syracuse, I discovered her nonfiction books in a secondhand bookstore. The black and white cover photo of the paperback of “Cast a Cold Eye” (I loved that title!) showed McCarthy confidently gazing across the Paris skyline under an overcast sky. It was only later that I encountered Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (given to me in 1963 by a Belgian colleague of my father). What towering figures those two women were on the intellectual landscape. Where are their successors? I pity ambitious young women aspiring to be thinkers and writers today. What a morass of propaganda and expensive mal-education they must forge their way through.

Now for our pop finale. As I was recently jumping out of my car to grab a falafel sandwich in South Philadelphia, I stopped dead with one foot on the curb to listen to Justin Timberlake’s voice coming over the radio. It was “Cry Me a River,” a song that seems just as painfully evocative as it was at first release seven years ago, in the wake of Timberlake’s romantic breakup with Britney Spears. In fact, the song has gained tragic power because of Spears’ later psychological travails and humiliating career decline — from which she may thankfully be emerging.

After I got home, I pulled up the video of “Cry Me A River” from trusty YouTube.com and was transfixed. Directed by Francis Lawrence and with a cameo by ace producer Timbaland, it’s a mini-masterpiece of brooding Euro-decadence. Timberlake stalks a sinuous blonde Britney look-alike with tortured voyeurism, prancing through her moderne house with dreamy skateboarder moves. His revenge: implanting her TV with a sex clip of himself and a hired gamine skank. Despite the window-breaking violence and obsessive psychopathology of the part he plays, Timberlake, especially in tight close-up, is superb at conveying profound emotion. So artistic is this video that I was astounded to learn that the director grew up in Los Angeles. But wait: He was born in Vienna! Thus even though Francis Lawrence emigrated at age 3, he evidently carried the decadent gene of Vienna’s glorious artistic past with him. I’m thinking Gustav Klimt, of course — hallucinatory icons of imperious femme fatales embedded in gold.

My keynote lecture for last October’s conference celebrating the centenary of Theodore Roethke at the University of Michigan has just been published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. The title is “Natural Vision and Psychotic Mysticism in Theodore Roethke’s Poetry.”

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

Blake Krass
Pflugerville, Texas

Because my support for Obama was based on his steady, tempered performance in the debates rather than on his soaring but rather vague speeches, I have never been troubled by any gap between his mundane and rhetorical selves. The widespread notion that Obama is inarticulate came from stunt tapes broadcast on conservative talk radio where his occasional hesitations on the road were stitched together to make him sound like a stuttering Bugs Bunny.

Who wouldn’t misspeak from fatigue on the long, brutal national campaign trail? Only candidates popping pep pills or relying on a Versailles-like staff of flunkies to feed them talking points and buzzwords. Considering what a relative newcomer he is, Obama endured that punishing trial by fire amazingly well. Since the election, he has also projected a cordial dignity and thoughtful reserve that seem to have impressed and reassured observers across the political spectrum.

However, you are quite right to call the controversy over the indictment of buffoonishly sly Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich a “mess.” That the normally deft Obama team mishandled its rapid response to it was obvious from the get-go. Obama’s first statements about his and his staff’s communications with Blagojevich were inadequate at best and misleading at worst. Then there was a second stage of needless blunders when Obama opposed the tarnished Blagojevich’s perfectly legal appointment of Roland Burris to fill Obama’s vacated Senate seat — a foolishly hard line that the president-elect inevitably had to reverse.

The usual tranquil transition period between an election and inauguration has certainly been overshadowed by the murky Blagojevich scandal, but I think most reasonable people would give Obama a pass on it. Any new president must learn crisis management the hard way. No evidence to date directly implicates Obama in Blagojevich’s follies. But Obama’s future chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the arrogant Chicago scrapper who was reportedly a conduit to the governor, already seems like an albatross who should be thrown overboard as soon as possible. Nobody wants a dawning presidency addicted so soon to stonewalling, casuistry and the Nixonian dark arts of the modified limited hangout.

I wish to present an observation, of sorts, from an evil conservative view.

I am not in the least bit surprised that the Obama crew is shaping up to look like a Clinton retread crew because it seems to me that the Clinton years are the only real benchmark of accomplishment that Democrats today can look to. Sure, they wiped up the Republicans in ’06 and ’08, but they haven’t done much of anything of substance except torpedo Congress’s already historically abysmal approval ratings and piss off their own Capitol Hill staffers. If anyone ought to be allowed (or encouraged) to smoke, it would be these D.C. staffers, and are you really willing to screw with that?

It is going to be interesting to see how the Democrat Party is able to hold up in this first year or so internally. In my humble opinion, Obama is not the leader of this party — Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are — and to see how Obama grabs hold of Dem leadership responsibilities, if at all, will be interesting. I think that the party is at a crossroads, with political posturing at the top (Obama’s rapidly backpedaling policy plans), power and ego struggles (Hillary, Harry, Nancy, etc.) and a voter base that is starting to look and sound more like British Labour and that grows less tolerant of electoral posturing and only more restless in its pursuit of what I can only describe as radical change.

Obama will certainly have his hands full with his band of bozos, and because they control Congress and the White House, whichever way they pull themselves, so go the rest of us. Oh well, in God I trust, and in his faithful servant, John Browning.

Daine Zaccheo

469th FMC Info Sys Support Spc

Palm Bay, Fla., by way of Balad, Iraq

Thank you for your tart perspective on the travails of my party! In invoking God’s “faithful servant” John Browning, I assume you are referring to the innovative Mormon gunsmith (1855-1926) who invented a staggering number of weapons and who is considered the godfather of today’s automatic and semiautomatic firearms.

Surely both parties should be rooting for Congress to dig in its heels and assert its constitutional authority vis-à-vis the White House. The U.S. was meant to have a vigorous tripartite government, which has been weakened by the post-Nixon slide toward an ad hoc imperial presidency. The legislative branch shouldn’t roll over and play dead like a cutesy pound puppy.

On the other hand, I agree with you that Congress has come across lately like a clumsy, flea-bitten bunch of “bozos.” Its poll ratings are lower than stinking swamp mud. I have a soft spot for the nimble Nancy Pelosi, a master of the ladylike stiletto thrust, but Harry Reid is a cadaverous horse’s ass of mammoth proportions. How in the world did that whiny, sniveling incompetent end up as Senate majority leader? Give him the hook! As for the “radical change” that you fear, it’s hard to imagine (short of a crisis-driven imposition of martial law) how that will ever happen in our sluggish, consensus-driven political system.

Dick Cavett is someone whose column I almost always enjoy very much. But I agree that he put down Sarah Palin’s use of language for no good reason. The example he cited (she was discussing Darfur and what Alaska had done in view of events there) was an almost perfect example of coherent thought on her part if you recognize that a longish sentence includes a parenthetical aside.

Here is the bit he cites in his column: “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

Here is my own very minor rework of her sentence (rework in italics): “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue (as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there where we see the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent), the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

When she spoke, the sense of what she meant was clear, and a minor edit makes the sentence good enough for a print medium.

No doubt she can be attacked in several areas on substance, but it is interesting and strange that instead people engage in elitist attacks on her for being a hunter or for the way she talks. In point of fact, she is a very able communicator, as time will bear out, I am sure, and yet the number of people on the left who recognize her political gifts is very small.

Cavett will come back and entertain me again soon, I am sure, but this is one case where he’s just lost his objectivity and comes off sounding like a prig.

Blaine Walgren

Excellent analysis! You have cut the entire ground out from beneath Dick Cavett’s lofty claim of grammatical superiority to Sarah Palin by exposing his inability to sense a simple parenthesis in a spoken passage. I laughed heartily at your e-mail, for which I am most appreciative.

As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides — a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric’s dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a “mama grizzly” at libels against her family.

Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal clichés within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain’s running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric’s vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett’s bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.

And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.

Longtime listener, first-time caller. Although I wasn’t yet alive in the times it describes, I too was blown away (pun intended) by “The Weather Underground” film, not so much by the namby-pamby William Ayers — who for all his scandalous reputation, was never charged with more than throwing a few rocks and helping to blow up a statue — but by steel-jawed, unrepentant Bernadine Dohrn.

In reading about this (dis)organization from various contemporary sources, it becomes clear that despite the credit granted to male figures, and despite the sexism of the era and the organization overall, Dohrn was in fact its primary leader and one of the main reasons for its success in eluding capture for many years. Even more interestingly, the males in head leadership positions within the Weathermen — Jeff Jones, Ayers — seemed to derive their leadership from their relationships with her, much as, to use a musical metaphor, the Jefferson Airplane’s musical leadership depended on whom Grace Slick was sleeping with!

Putting aside the extremity of their ideals, the close bonds and sexual radicalism of the Weather Underground did seem to produce a new model of the family and community, with woman at the head. When Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert went to jail for their extended sentence, Dohrn and Ayers adopted their child without a thought. And now, Chesa Boudin is a Rhodes scholar. Amazing!

If you have not already read it, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Jane Alpert’s autobiography of her own ’60s terrorist activities, and time on the run, “Growing Up Underground.”  Not only does it include both warm and not-so-warm memories of Dohrn and other famous Weather figures, but it’s a refreshingly candid and honest look at the interplay between sexual repression/desire/neurosis and radical political action. Alpert also provides thoughtful critiques of the emerging feminist movement of the time, which she embraced and later modified her worship of. I think it’s worth a look for those who lived through the times, and certainly worth deep study for those who didn’t.

K. Lenz

I’ve been haunted by that upsetting “Weather Underground” documentary ever since I saw it two months ago. Like you, I was simply stunned by Bernardine Dohrn and have come to view her as one of the central and paradigmatic figures of my ’60s generation. No history of the time will be complete without examining Dohrn and trying to explain the mystery of her motivation. In her heyday, she was such a singular hybrid of criminality and idealism. You make a powerful point about the bold sexual dynamics at work in her matriarchal milieu.

No, I never read Jane Alpert’s terrorist memoir — thanks for the tip, which I’m sure will interest many Salon readers. I love the parallel you draw to Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, a group that loomed very large for me during college and grad school, when rock was still thought to be a revolutionary agent. I played the 1969 Jefferson Airplane version of “Wooden Ships” for my art of song lyrics class this past semester and was full of admiration once again for Slick’s unique sound and artistry. What an extraordinary song — a vision of post-nuclear devastation and human reconstruction, treated not with angry sermonizing or bombast but with floating, lyrical atmospherics. 

I am a conservative lesbian living in New York. I would love you to address how the Fairness Doctrine has become a viable possibility for the liberal agenda, given that it is simply modern-day censorship, and also taking into account the undeniably left-leaning media. How can the left not see its hypocrisy?

Kara McGee

If there’s anything that demonstrates the straying of the Democratic Party leadership from basic liberal principles, it’s this blasted Fairness Doctrine — which should be fiercely opposed by all defenders of free speech. Except when national security is at risk, government should never be involved in the surveillance of speech or in measuring the ideological content of books, movies or radio and TV programs.

Broadcasters must adhere to reasonable FCC regulations restricting obscenity, but despite the outlandish claims of Democrats like Sen. Charles Schumer, there is no analogy whatever between pornography and political opinion. Nor do privately owned radio stations have any obligation to be politically “balanced.” They are commercial enterprises that follow the market and directly respond to audience demand. The Fairness Doctrine is bullying Big Brother tyranny, full of contempt for the very public it pretends to protect.

As a fan of AM radio since childhood, I adore the proliferation of political talk shows spurred by Rush Limbaugh’s pioneering rise to national syndication in the late 1980s. It represented a maturation of the late-night coast-to-coast radio programs that I had been listening to in the 1970s, such as Herb Jepko (broadcasting from Salt Lake City), Long John Nebel (from New York) and Larry King (from Miami).

However, I do lament the gradual disappearance of small, quirky local shows due to the trend toward national syndication. And I often get bored and impatient with the same arch-conservative message being drummed out 24/7. But let’s get real: Liberals have been pathetic flops on national radio — for reasons that have yet to be identified. Air America, for example, despite retchingly sycophantic major media coverage, never got traction and has dwindled to a humiliating handful of markets. The Democrats are the party of Hollywood, for heaven’s sake — so what’s their problem in mastering radio?

Instead of bleating for paternalistic government intervention, liberals should get their own act together. Radio is a populist medium where liberals come across as snide, superior scolds. One can instantly recognize a liberal caller to a conservative show by his or her catty, obnoxious tone. The leading talk radio hosts are personalities and entertainers with huge rhetorical energy and a bluff, engaging manner. Even the seething ranters can be extremely funny. Last summer, for example, I laughed uproariously in my car when WABC’s Mark Levin said furiously about Katie Couric, “What do these people do? Open fortune cookies and read them on air?”

The best hosts combine a welcoming master of ceremonies manner with a vaudevillian brashness. Liberal imitators haven’t made a dent on talk radio because they think it’s all about politics, when it isn’t. Top hosts are life questers and individualists who explore a wide range of thought and emotion and who skillfully work the mike like jazz vocalists. Talk radio is a major genre of popular culture that deserves the protection accorded to other branches of the performing and fine arts. Liberals, who go all hushed and pious at Hays Code censorship in classic Hollywood, should lay off the lynch-mob mentality. Keep the feds out of radio!

Have you noticed how much the call for combating global warming crusade has in common with how we got into the Iraq war?

In both cases, there are “experts” who tell us that evidence justifying action is undeniable. They say, “The risk of doing nothing is too great for us to do nothing.” And as a fallback position they say, “Even if we’re wrong, we’ll still be doing some good in the world.”

Kind of makes me think man-made CO2 emissions will turn out to be the biggest case of nonexistent WMD since Saddam Hussein’s nukes. (Or maybe even bigger!) What do you think?

Jim Carroll

Wonderful letter! I became a vocal opponent of the onrushing Iraq incursion when I was shocked by the flimsiness of evidence presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in 2003. Similarly, I have been highly skeptical about the claims for global warming because of their overreliance on speculative computer modeling and because of the woeful patchiness of records for world temperatures before the 20th century.

In the 1980s, I was similarly skeptical about media-trumpeted predictions about a world epidemic of heterosexual AIDS. And I remain skeptical about the media’s carelessly undifferentiated use of the term “AIDS” for what is often a complex of wasting diseases in Africa. We should all be concerned about environmental despoliation and pollution, but the global warming crusade has become a hallucinatory cult. Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases.

I’m a right-wing, pro-life, Christian, Republican extremist, and also one of Rush Limbaugh’s “Mind Numbed Robots.” In your column, you said you were an atheist. The Old Testament of the Bible predicted the coming of Jesus as the Savior of all mankind, and all of those detailed predictions, written hundreds of years before, came to pass. What if the Bible is true? Where would you spend eternity?

Thanks and may God bless you,

Sam

Thank you for your challenging question. I respect the Bible as one of the world’s greatest books, based on a magnificent body of oral poetry. It is a fundamental text that everyone, atheist or believer, should know. It speaks profoundly to everyone at each stage of life. And of course its hero sagas, from Moses to Christ, have been absorbed into the Western fine arts tradition.

But I do not accept the Bible as divinely inspired. Indeed, most scholars would agree that the New Testament was purposefully written as a point-by-point response to the Old Testament to prove that Jesus was indeed the Messiah whose arrival had been forecast for centuries. Therefore the details of Jesus’ life and experiences were tailored and shaped to echo the language and imagery of the Old Testament.

Personally, I do believe there was a historical Jesus. The evidence is fragmentary but, to me, convincing that a charismatic, itinerant preacher of his name was swept up into the cruel politics of the Roman occupation of fractious, rebellious Judaea. Furthermore, as a literary critic, I hear a very distinct speaking voice in the sayings attributed to Jesus. This was a brilliant poet who was able to find simple, universal metaphors (a coin, a tree, a mustard seed) to convey spiritual truths to the masses. He was also a performing artist with startling improvisational gifts. Whether or not he himself thought he was the Messiah is unclear. A solid general education today should include Siddhartha (the Buddha), Jesus and Mohammed, all of whom radically changed the world.

In regard to your question about eternity, I am a naturalist who reveres the cosmos and the vast organic cycle. Despite their superior consciousness, human beings, like plants and animals, simply decay to revitalize the earth. I see nothing depressing in that; on the contrary, it is an affirmation of the life force. My philosophy is very similar to that of Amerindians, who saw godlike forces in every rocky outcropping and storm. I also like the attitude of feisty, progressive Katharine Hepburn, who said, “I don’t fear death. It must be like a long sleep — delicious!”

There has been a lot of discussion (though not much lately) of whether homosexuality is inborn or caused by outside factors. Whatever happened to the Electra and Oedipus complexes of Freud, of which so much was heard when I was in college way back when? And what do you think?

This is from a hetero male happily married to a hetero female. The question is one of intellectual curiosity.

Henry Delahunt

Shreveport, La.

Yes, the intellectual climate of the 1950s and ’60s, during which I was educated, was saturated with Freud, even at the level of stand-up comedy (as in Lenny Bruce or Mike Nichols and Elaine May). I loved it! But the Freudian style of lacerating self-examination would pass from the scene after the politicized ’60s, which promoted a new worldview where everyone is a victim of oppressive external power.

In clinical psychology, pharmaceutical intervention became the norm. Long-term Freudian psychoanalysis, which probes childhood memories, began to seem too protracted and expensive. Practical, short-term help with current problems was now sought. Freud was also turned into a cartoon sexist by feminist philistines like Gloria Steinem, who dismissed his entire body of work merely because of a few passages they didn’t like. French poststructuralist readings of Freud became a campus fad in the ’70s and ’80s but sank in a sludge of their own gobbledygook.

After the American Psychiatric Association, responding to activist pressure, removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973, psychological inquiries into homosexuality slowly became verboten. To even ask about the origins of homosexuality was automatically dubbed homophobic by gay studies proponents in the ’80s and ’90s. Weirdly, despite the rigid social constructionist bias that permeated the entire left, gay activists in and out of academe now leapt on the slightest evidence that could suggest a biological cause of homosexuality. The very useful Freudian concept of “family romance” (typified by the Oedipus and Electra complexes) is almost completely gone. Yet the intricate family dynamic of every single gay person I’ve ever known seems to have played some kind of role in his or her developing sexual orientation.

The widespread desire to find a biological basis for homosexuality seems to me very misconceived. It will inevitably lead to claims that gays are developmentally defective at the prenatal level. I myself believe (as I argued in “No Law in the Arena” in “Vamps & Tramps”)  that everyone is born with a potential for bisexual responsiveness and that exclusive homosexuality is an adaptation to specific social conditions. When a gay adult claims to have been gay since early childhood, what he or she is actually remembering is the sense of being different for some reason, which in boys often registers as shyness or super-sensitivity, leading to a failure to bond with bumptious peers. This disjunction, with all its painfully stifled longings, becomes overt homosexuality much later on. But retrospective psychohistory is out these days, and the only game in town is pin the tail on the oppressor.

“Revalorization of the trades”: You’ve perfectly articulated what I’ve thought for years. Time to remove the stigma and recognize trades for the skilled and professional work they are (and to bring that level of professionalism to them).

As a college writing professor, I see many students who clearly don’t want to be on the university path but are there because their parents want them to be and are willing to foot the bill. It’s all so misdirected. Wouldn’t our society and citizens be better served if we quit thinking of vo-tech types as “flunkies” and second-stringers?

Marna Krajeski

I agree with you completely! The American system of higher education has become an insane assembly line — bankrupting families to process hapless students through an incoherent, haphazard and mediocre liberal arts curriculum. In the ’60s, there was a brief moment when middle-class young men were dropping out of college to become silversmiths or leather workers in San Francisco or Greenwich Village. As the product of an Italian-American immigrant family where the crafts were honored, I cheered that development and prayed that it would continue. But it sputtered out — probably because the recession of the 1970s was a cold dose of reality.

Perhaps there’s hope of change because of the tens of thousands of liberal arts graduates with expensive degrees who are finding themselves out of work and depressingly marginalized in a society where the manual trades offer guaranteed employment at relatively high wages. A dose of Buddhism might do people good: Sweeping garden sand into oceanic designs around ornamental rocks is considered a spiritual exercise in Asia. I say that landscaping, construction, carpentry, metalworking and all the other trades should be promoted by primary education as worthy careers for both men and women. The pre-college rat race is a sadomasochistic imposition on the young that robs them of free will and saps their vital energies. When will they rebel?

Our professors of humanities seem to trip over themselves in praise of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1984 scholarly study “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.” I trudged through his garbled, inflated prose like Katharine Hepburn’s Rosie Sayer slogging through the labyrinthine muck of a dissipated river, the African Queen in tow. Their determination to undermine the evaluative standards of the great Western art tradition borders on pathological — born out of the nihilistic defeatism of their self-imploding, French-theory-bound careers. Why are so many Ivy League teachers determined to reduce art to a means of shoring up class distinctions or a mere manifestation of educational capital?

Tom Joudrey

Mansfield, Ohio

Any teacher who assigns Bourdieu’s groaning gasbag of a book to American undergraduates should be charged with fraud. Any student who takes a course where Bourdieu’s book is assigned should be charged with naivete. Yet the book still regularly appears on many elite school library reserve lists.

The subject is a good one. I too believe that taste is defined by changing social assumptions, depending on place, period and class. But wasn’t that obvious to any student of culture 50 years ago? Bourdieu’s book is an embarrassment — a lot of constipated straining for chapter after chapter until you get to the appallingly simplistic questionnaire at the back that was the basis for the whole antique project. What a joke!

Why are American professors forcing American students to plow through a boneless blob of a book that is predicated on now totally passé French manners and mores? Why is egregious theoretical verbosity being force-fed to cyber-savvy, text-messaging young people who barely read as it is and who still haven’t found their own writing voices? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind — yes, the big wind of elite school flatulence, which may be the true cause of global warming.

I’m sick of you championing “Titanic” in any way. It has to be one of the most lame-brained movies ever made, and I hope, upon review, the Academy will ask for those best picture and best director Oscars back.

Don’t get me wrong; I am a big James Cameron fan. I think “Aliens” has to be one of the most perfect action movies ever made — not an ounce of fat on it and terrific performances all around. But with “Titanic,” if it weren’t for that ship going under, there’d be no reason to watch that waste of celluloid. I remember sitting in the theater, incredulous at the idiocy unfolding in front of me. Most offensive was the misuse of its stars. DiCaprio was laughably miscast as a man, and Winslet was given nothing to work with. (A friend of mine says he always remembers Kate running down the hallway carrying Leo in her arms!) I think Winslet is one of the most talented actresses working today, but if you’re going to booster one of her performances, why not the one in “Heavenly Creatures”?

And give me a break with that “Kate Winslet’s Oscar” crap! Yes, anyone would have been better than Helen Hunt (she should never have been nominated, and thankfully, she appears to have been banished from the universe for the offense). The award was more suited to Judi Dench or Julie Christie that year.

One final note: I refuse to accept “Titanic’s” “most successful movie ever” moniker as evidence of its relevance. “Gone With the Wind” still beats it when adjusted for inflation and stands the test of time. “Titanic” today? Not lookin’ so good. It’s only because of young girls that “Titanic” did the box office it did — the same type who drove the Miley Cyrus movie to a $30 million box-office weekend. Like training bras and first periods, what was exciting to teenage girls soon becomes an embarrassing memory, to be discarded like a used maxi pad.

Signed, I Hate “Titanic”

Oh, dear, I’m afraid I do deserve this drubbing. I agree with you about Leonardo DiCaprio being as weak as a tea crumpet in “Titanic,” but Kate Winslet was phenomenal. She was luscious, vibrant and athletic and carried the whole film. True, she and Leo seemed like mother and son sometimes, but what the heck? Her period high-class Philadelphia accent was all wrong (bad speech coach), and the film’s special effects were dismayingly uneven — the glorious North Atlantic stars, for example, were nothing but tacky, generic dots. But the Titanic story in any version will always entrance because it’s a morality play about the hubris of Western culture, in love with its own frail technology. In this case, it also had Celine Dion’s mega-operatic theme song, which I still find moving and riveting.

I have to agree with you about Kate Winslet. There’s a scene midway through “Titanic,” after you’ve gotten caught up in the characters, with her just sitting at a dining table. She doesn’t say or do anything, but her presence in that blue dress is so powerful and overwhelming. It’s like a classic painting coming alive and whacking you in the brain.

Jack Greenhalgh

Oh, thank you, thank you! After being chastised for my “Titanic” campaign, I am delighted to find a fellow admirer of Kate Winslet’s Rubensian period, when she looked like a voluptuous basket of ripe fruit. She’s still handsome, but I loved her early opulence. We need to rethink our current harsh standards of female beauty, which have driven even that apostle of sexuality, Madonna, to morbidly skeletal extremes.

I enjoyed your discussion of Jim Morrison and the Doors pushing the boundaries of the sexual and sonic envelope. However, I would, like your opinion of Frank Zappa.

I was born in 1960 and had brothers who were 10, 8 and 5 years older than I was. As I grew into a teenager, I remember how my musical taste was shaped by listening to what they were listening to, which was more interesting than the tripe that was on the radio at the time. The Yardbirds, Beatles, the Who, Deep Purple and so many more became embedded in my gray matter.

My late brother, Bill, was a huge Frank Zappa fan. In those days, there were no such things as personal entertainment devices, so much of what I heard was played on the stereo in the den. Now Frank could be a little intense, language- wise. However, the steady diet of “200 Motels,” “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” and one of my favorites, “Hot Rats” (top that for a song title), burned their way into my brain. The cover of “Zoot Allures” had a picture of Frank standing up with what looked a kielbasa taped to his inner thigh, creating a huge bulge in his pants.

One of the most interesting things about him was his strong libertarian leanings, and his vociferous defense of the First Amendment. He was not your standard American weeping liberal rock star, though if he were still with us today, I wonder if Laura Ingraham would want him to “shut up and sing.”

Rick Wakefield

With his fusion of rock, jazz and avant-garde music, Frank Zappa should be ranked among the principal American artists of the last half of the 20th century. Here is my positive review of Barry Miles’ biography of Zappa in the New York Times Book Review four years ago.

I am writing to advise you of a fantastic music video that leaves me breathless each time I watch it: Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown.”

I can’t quite be sure that it’s your sort of thing, but at the very least I thought you might appreciate the imagery.

Cath Gulick

New York

Thanks so much for this! No, I hadn’t seen the West video, which I found very skillfully directed by the British artist Simon Henwood. The bleak, washed-out hues and the editing and pacing of images are superb, although I wish, given that assembly of talent, there was more footage of actual dancing. The spectacular African body-painting that leaps into hypnotic color at the end is reminiscent of early Grace Jones in her downtown New York period.

I like the candid simplicity and sonic distortion of West’s melancholy lyric as well as the viscerally potent, stripped-down ensemble of bass, drums and piano. But I do find a bit unsettling the director’s use of “primitive” tribal motifs as a reference point for a sophisticated black man in a coolly modernist setting. Is the video saying that the African diaspora is at the root of every black man’s heartache? Is it saying that contemporary professional men, frustrated by sex and romance, long to return to the reassuring sexual polarities of the ancient savanna? Or is it merely saying, as did everyone from Petrarch to Pat Benatar, that love is a battlefield? Then take up your spears and arrows with abandon!

My heart skipped a beat when I saw Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” in your Paper Cuts playlist in the New York Times Book Review.  Your short but apt analysis (the influence of African-American church music; the song as an example of musical theater) added new levels of admiration for a song that my friends and I still talk and laugh about regularly.

For me, Braxton’s virtuosic performance in this recording is also an example of high, melodramatic camp at its very best, especially in her vocal modulations — numerous, expertly timed and wonderfully over-the-top. All you need is a man lip-syncing in drag or to watch the ridiculously amazing music video  to give the song a camp stamp of approval (bare-chested Tyson Beckford doing tai chi! Toni and Tyson playing Twister!).

Strangely, the performance reminds me of Dorothy Malone’s mad, patricidal dance in Douglas Sirk’s “Written on the Wind.” Both are examples of a climactic, melodramatic response to heartbreak, even if they differ vastly in tone.

I really love this kind of melodrama — a strange mix of over-the-top emotional gesturing and deep sincerity — but I don’t know where to find it in contemporary American culture. The ’90s were full of great R&B artists who embraced melodrama in their musical performances, but most of them ended up in bankruptcy court, Las Vegas, or “Aida” on Broadway! The only semblance of this kind of performance I can still see is in the self-posturing of some reality TV stars, like Tiffany Pollard of “Flavor of Love” and “I Love New York” fame. Where else can I find it?

Nick Ross

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Wow, this is great! I am fascinated by your linkage of Toni Braxton’s knockout song to the wild Dorothy Malone scene in “Written on the Wind.” Long before the Douglas Sirk revival (expedited by his German admirer, the gay director Rainer Werner Fassbinder), I had spotted that movie on late-night TV and become obsessed with it. This was at Yale Graduate School in the late ’60s, when all I had was a small black-and-white TV set. I was so enraptured with the film that I invited a fellow grad student over to view it when it was scheduled again. She was mercifully polite but could barely conceal her disdain and incomprehension. (Of course she went on to dazzling career success as a poststructuralist — there’s a theme here.) Hence my joy at the way “Written on the Wind” has become a canonical American film, celebrated on cable TV on Turner Classic Movies.

You’re so right about the sad decline of American melodrama — which was once a staple of postwar “women’s movies” and TV soaps — including the prime-time variety like “Dynasty” and “Knots Landing.” I had hoped that the drag queen renaissance of the 1990s (with one drag film after another) would bring all that back, but it didn’t. Melodrama is like Kabuki or Italian grand opera — a lavish, highly stylized emotional and choreographic expressionism. But we’re in a period of shallow, cynical irony — all those “knowing” shrugs and winks that populate satirical shows from David Letterman to Jon Stewart (whom I avoid like the plague). If popular culture is to revive, it will have to take lessons from African-American church services, where intense, surging music remains the vehicle of spirituality and profound emotion.

Camille Paglia’s column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.