By Camille Paglia
Interview: I Told You So!
Camille Paglia sounds off to TWQ editor Charlotte Hays about the
feminist establishment, the Clinton scandals, and why Gloria Steinem
is out of touch
TWQ: The first question I want to ask you is about Monica. Is she a
vixen or a victim? Did she get what she wanted?
PAGLIA: Well, Monica Lewinsky herself bores me silly because she is
a kind of a prototype of a narcissistic and spoiled American girl
that I have been seeing develop over the last twenty-five years as a
teacher--not at my school, the University of the Arts, where most
people don't have those kinds of economic advantages. But I
certainly saw this coming from my first job at Bennington College
and later as a visiting instructor at Wesleyan and Yale. And I have
been warning about this for years and saying that we are raising up
a whole generation of young people who are completely removed from
any sense of the outside world. To me, the most damaging thing
Monica did to herself was her response to Barbara Walters' early
question: "When you went to the White House as an intern, were you
interested in politics?" And Monica Lewinsky is so shallow and her
family is so shallow that she said, "No, not at all,"-and in a very
high and superficial voice that you would use having a drink off
Rodeo Drive or something. I was just amazed at that! Our educational
system at the primary and secondary level is so flawed that we have
girls who would go to the White House as a tremendous career
opportunity for themselves and come out of that experience in
Washington undented by any sense of wider political or historical
realities.
TWQ: What would you advise her to do?
PAGLIA: I would advise Monica Lewinsky to get the hell off the
public stage before she damages the cause of women any further.
TWQ: What has been her impact on the establishment feminist
movement?
PAGLIA: Ohhh, I have been in hog heaven over that! Never, never did
I dream that Gloria Steinem would shoot herself in every one of her
eight feet-but she did over Monica Lewinsky!
Christina Hoff Sommers was an early warrior in this battle, and we
were together in all of this in the early 1990s. And now, of course,
a horde of other women have come onto the scene, and we no longer
have to take all the abuse. Christina and I have for years tried to
get people to see that the feminist establishment did not speak for
all women.
In fact, I'm the one who coined the term "feminist establishment."
When I went out on my first publicity tour after Sexual Personae and
in my early articles in 1990, 1991, 1992, I drilled that phrase in
every interview. I kept on saying, "feminist establishment, feminist
establishment"-to try to drive that wedge into media consciousness
and to make them understand that the leaders of the feminist
organizations based in Washington and New York not only did not
speak for all women but they did not speak for all feminists either.
They were as divorced from the actual historical currents within
feminism as the leaders of the Communist Party were in the Politburo
or the more recent Soviet Union, where they were living like the
dukes of the Romanovs.
At any rate, year by year, my campaign to portray--correctly
portray--the feminist leaders as out of touch with women has really
succeeded-and they helped me enormously! I feel that my record, in
terms of my feminist responses to the various sexual scandals from
the early 1990s, is now being proved to have been the correct one.
In 1986, for heaven's sake, in my own university, I lobbied for the
adoption of moderate sexual harassment guidelines, but at the same
time I felt there was a fascist extremism in feminism coming out of
Catharine MacKinnon that was pushing these things toward
authoritarian extremes that I, as a libertarian, could not support.
And so in 1991, I was the only feminist out there who was attacking
Anita Hill! One week into those hearings, I wrote a piece for the
Philadelphia Inquirer that begins, "Anita Hill is no feminist
heroine." And I felt Clarence Thomas was quite right: He was the
victim of a high-tech lynching. Then when Paula Jones came along in
1994, I was the only feminist immediately out there saying, "I find
her case credible." I was on the "Larry King Show" in May 1994--that
transcript is in my book, Vamps & Tramps. I went against Eleanor
Smeal, who was saying, "This is just a put-up job by the right
wing,"--the same thing Hillary tried all last year. And I said, "Oh,
really? Well, Anita Hill's case was a put-up job by the feminist
establishment."
It's comical the mess that Steinem made over Monica Lewinsky, but
the real hypocrisy was in the Paula Jones case in 1994. If in fact
the feminist establishment had responded with principle rather than
with expediency-in trying to protect their own conspiratorial
associations and affiliations with the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party (to which I belong) --if they at that time had
spoken out and put pressure on the President, on the President's
lawyers, and said that this is a very disturbing charge that Paula
Jones is making, then Clinton's legal team might have been in a mood
to settle and have persuaded the Clintons to settle at that time and
spared the nation all of this endless controversy which has
diminished everyone. It has diminished America in the eyes of the
world, it has diminished the stature of the U.S. government, it has
diminished the office of the presidency, and it has poisoned the
atmosphere so that young people no longer feel like going into
politics-which is going to damage us for decades. It's going to make
this country politically vulnerable in the world if we cannot get
strong, idealistic people to go into politics. The Monica case is
like the cow that has long left the barn! It was the Paula Jones
mess that I think historians are going to focus on.
TWQ: What about Juanita? Do you believe Juanita Broaddrick's
accusation that Bill Clinton raped her in Little Rock when he was
attorney general of Arkansas?
PAGLIA: Okay, my feeling about the Juanita Broaddrick case is not
unlike what I felt about the Anita Hill charges. That is, Anita Hill
came forward ten years after the fact, making very trivial charges
about conversations that made her uncomfortable--when the poor man
didn't lay a hand on her, apparently. And I felt that it was like
the surveillance of a police state, with Hill coming out ten years
later at a crucial moment for Clarence Thomas and making charges
about conversations at lunch! I thought that was a fascist trend in
American politics, and this seems to me the same thing: twenty-one
years later, even if Clinton is guilty, this is un-American, okay?
It's undemocratic to say, "This is the final straw; if this had been
known, he should have been driven from office." Her charges might
well be true. However, as a feminist, I have to say that I have
serious questions about the kind of judgment that was shown by her
at that age. The story that she told Lisa Myers of NBC--that she and
Clinton met briefly at a political gathering two hours from Little
Rock, and that Clinton encouraged her to call him. She did that when
she was going to Little Rock and he said, "Well, I'll meet you in
your hotel room."
Now, excuse me: As far as I'm concerned, by any rational measure,
her consent to meet him in a hotel room conveyed to him-especially
since he hadn't ever heard from her or met with her before-that she
wanted to have sex with him. All right now, he was wrong and brutal
in his behavior, and if it were within the statute of limitations,
then I think he deserved prosecution for what became an assault. I'm
not excusing his behavior in that room, but for heaven's sake, give
me a break! That a mature married woman had no idea, was totally
stunned when he began kissing her at the window! Now, women cannot
behave like this. It was too muddled.
TWQ: You have been very critical of the feminist view of rape. They
seem to think it's rape if somebody looks at you crossways. Is this
going to change because of the Clinton scandals?
PAGLIA: Well, the recent controversy at Harvard, where the faculty
was assembled to vote on a charge of sexual misconduct by a student,
shows that the PC attitudes are very deeply entrenched in a lot of
places in this country. In terms of sexual harassment and date rape
issues, we're in a terrible muddle right now. It's completely
confused. The only thing that can be seen clearly is that the
authority of the feminist establishment to speak about sexual
matters is now over.
Unfortunately, this has led many other people to say, as Michael
Crichton did in his recent Playboy interview, "Feminism is dead."
That's a disaster! That's the ultimate damage inflicted by the
hypocrisy of the feminist establishment. Feminism is not dead, but
the word "feminism" has become very tarred because of these selfish
women who seem to think that all women are somehow pro-choice
members of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Just recently,
Gloria Steinem opened her mouth again and stated that "Mrs. Dole
does not speak for women." And I thought, "After all this time,
Gloria Steinem! Your views do not speak for all women either! Not
all women are of your particular social elite Manhattan clique!" So
I think we're beginning all over again.
TWQ: You said that the first female president will be somebody who
has her sexual persona straight. Could that be Elizabeth Dole?
PAGLIA: No, I don't think so. Unfortunately. I had great hopes for
her, watching her over the years, but her recent announcement of an
exploratory committee was such a disaster.
TWQ: Why?
PAGLIA: It was one of the worst things I have ever seen on
television, by any politician, I have to say. And the media gave her
a free pass on it. There's no doubt about it. Because she is a
woman, people are very leery about applying to women a standard of
critique that you apply to a man. It was just a canned version of
her normal speech. The sprightly tone and the giddiness and the
coming out into the audience were completely inappropriate for that
particular context where she was walking among media people-very
cynical media people who were watching with an air of disgust with
their cameras and their notepads. It was just a replay of the
after-dinner speeches she has been giving for years. She failed to
understand that, if she is going to be a statesman, then she has to
behave in a statesman-like manner now and that her presentation has
to be issues-oriented. I found it condescending--that going up to
people and touching them on the shoulder. I think she's a credible
vice presidential candidate, but one expects them to be able to step
into the shoes of the president. We need a far more commanding
figure.
Christine Whitman has it. Here's a woman who is a real sportswoman,
who comes out of a mandarin background, but she has that manner--the
manner of command. I've seen her come out to the cameras with other
governors from the White House and stand there in the portico and
give forceful statements to the press and so on. That woman's got
it! Now the problem is her rather moderate position on abortion
which may make her unpalatable to a lot of Republicans. But there's
a woman who is ready to step into the presidency. Similarly, Dianne
Feinstein has the manner. She was mayor of a very fractious city and
has a lot of experience--which Hillary Clinton does not!--no
experience whatsoever with any political matter outside of sitting
inside the White House with her sunglasses on making phone calls to
her Yale law school friends.
TWQ: Should Hillary run for the Senate?
PAGLIA: No, absolutely not! She has no talent whatever for that! The
med-ia, you'd think, would have learned their lesson because of the
Clinton debacle, but they went right ahead in a big stampede and
promoted Hillary Clinton, way beyond her abilities. She has no
ability to be a senator. She has no ability to work on a team.
Basically, she is a coterie-type personality. What she would be
ideal for is what she is doing now-which is to go out into the world
and to be a spokeswoman for highly educated Western career women and
to fight for women's and children's rights or as an
ambassador-at-large for the UN. That's her appropriate role. I want
to fall on the floor laughing--imagining Hillary Clinton working
well in the Senate with everybody else! Oh, give me a break! I've
already joked in print that they would need to build her a private
cloakroom on the Mall. This is not a woman who has any ability to
deal with the mass of humanity. She is the most arrogant, the most
moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on the
earth--and it is just a joke that the media have allowed this to go
on as long as it has.
TWQ: Why did it take us so long to see what Bill Clinton is really
like?
PAGLIA: The media are to blame. They dropped the ball, okay? They
dropped the ball over the Gennifer Flowers thing. That's the one
they should have pursued. If I hear one more time, "Well, she went
to the Star and many people dismissed her." Why did she go to the
Star? She went to the Star, for heaven's sake, because that tabloid
was the only one that would give her an airing of her views! I mean
all other media were in such a hurry to sweep the Republicans out of
office that they overlooked all kinds of stuff that they knew about,
including the Broaddrick case, at that time in 1992.
The media are the guilty party in all this! Then the feminist
establishment, after that. They were so biased. In the early 1990s,
the majority of journalists were and still are Democrats, liberal
Democrats, and they wanted Bush out of office. They wanted the
Republicans out so they played this game, and then the snake turned
around and bit them in the ass! That's why the media have been
obsessed with this story for so long. They realized they had been
rooked, that they had been suckered! They had been taken! They had
been seduced and abandoned by Clinton himself. So I thought, well,
one good thing has come out of this--the media have really learned
to be much more neutral in their political positions.
But no, oh no, no, no! The Hillary senatorial story took off in this
giant balloon, and once again there was manipulation of the news to
turn at-tention away from the impeachment disgrace of Bill Clinton.
So the media have learned nothing! And neither has the Hollywood
establishment.
TWQ: Will the Clinton marriage last after they are out of the White
House?
PAGLIA: I have no idea. You know, they know each other best. She has
no friends. All this talk about her great female friendships! She
has no friends aside from him. I think they are a dysfunctional
pair. I just don't see what they would do apart from each other. I
happened to be in the convention hall in 1996 for Clinton's second
nomination (I was in Chicago for the "Oprah" show) and I saw Hillary
making her speech. I looked up and saw Chelsea: The spotlight was on
her, smiling and applauding her mother on the podium. And I saw
sitting next to her what I thought was a prison matron or an FBI
agent--a mean-looking woman, fierce and unsmiling. Later I learned
it was Hillary's mother! Here's Hillary giving the speech, one of
the high points of her life, and her daughter is applauding and
smiling and these people are giving her standing ovations, and the
mother was there, brutally ungiving. And that is the whole story of
that family, okay?
Hillary is a mess. And her family was a mess, and the media won't
touch it. The media will not go near the mess of Hillary's family!
Those brothers, the walking wounded brothers, who look like whipped
dogs! And the point is that Hillary's relationship with her family
has always been bad, really bad! You can't understand what's going
on with her relationship with Bill until you understand that. But,
no, the media are all "Saint Hillary"--wonderful wife--wonderful
mother.
In fact, she's a far more interesting character. She's not a
lesbian. Okay? No, it's more complex than that. She is, I have said,
a Protestant nun, and she's closer to Evita than to anything else. I
was the first to compare her to Evita: Now everyone notices that.
She thinks she speaks for the common people. That woman should not
be anywhere near our government, okay? --because look at the guys
she surrounds herself with--those geeks, those eunuch geeks! She
loves eunuch geek men.
TWQ: Like who?
PAGLIA: Oh my God, look at them all! Sidney Blumenthal, Ira
Magaziner, Harold Ickes--they all look alike. They are all weird
Ichabod Crane men, all high IQ men who have no natural virility,
okay? It's really weird. She loves to have her little cabals with
them. And the other one--the lawyer David Kendall--they're all
alike, and they all bond with her. They're all joined at the hip
with her! She's the one who has been calling the shots in all of
this. She's the one with the hard-line strategy: "Don't settle with
Paula Jones." She's the one down the line who's been the mastermind
of a lot of this stuff. That woman is an authoritarian who should be
kept out of dem-ocratic government. She's a tyrant who thinks she
knows what's best for the people. She's Orwellian in her attitude
toward the rest of humanity. I think she's a great spokesman for
women's and children's rights, I really do. I think she should be
shepherded off to the proper position--which is making speeches and
then retiring to her hotel room to sulk and then getting into the
limousine to go on to the next speech. That's all that woman can do!
Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia, Camille Paglia is a culture critic, libertarian
feminist, and columnist for the Internet magazine Salon. She is also
the author of four books including Sexual Personae: Art and
Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art and American
Culture; and Vamps & Tramps.
------------------
Mykl
~~~~~
"If you really want to know what's going on;
then, you have to follow the money trail."
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Interview: I Told You So!
Camille Paglia sounds off to TWQ editor Charlotte Hays about the
feminist establishment, the Clinton scandals, and why Gloria Steinem
is out of touch
TWQ: The first question I want to ask you is about Monica. Is she a
vixen or a victim? Did she get what she wanted?
PAGLIA: Well, Monica Lewinsky herself bores me silly because she is
a kind of a prototype of a narcissistic and spoiled American girl
that I have been seeing develop over the last twenty-five years as a
teacher--not at my school, the University of the Arts, where most
people don't have those kinds of economic advantages. But I
certainly saw this coming from my first job at Bennington College
and later as a visiting instructor at Wesleyan and Yale. And I have
been warning about this for years and saying that we are raising up
a whole generation of young people who are completely removed from
any sense of the outside world. To me, the most damaging thing
Monica did to herself was her response to Barbara Walters' early
question: "When you went to the White House as an intern, were you
interested in politics?" And Monica Lewinsky is so shallow and her
family is so shallow that she said, "No, not at all,"-and in a very
high and superficial voice that you would use having a drink off
Rodeo Drive or something. I was just amazed at that! Our educational
system at the primary and secondary level is so flawed that we have
girls who would go to the White House as a tremendous career
opportunity for themselves and come out of that experience in
Washington undented by any sense of wider political or historical
realities.
TWQ: What would you advise her to do?
PAGLIA: I would advise Monica Lewinsky to get the hell off the
public stage before she damages the cause of women any further.
TWQ: What has been her impact on the establishment feminist
movement?
PAGLIA: Ohhh, I have been in hog heaven over that! Never, never did
I dream that Gloria Steinem would shoot herself in every one of her
eight feet-but she did over Monica Lewinsky!
Christina Hoff Sommers was an early warrior in this battle, and we
were together in all of this in the early 1990s. And now, of course,
a horde of other women have come onto the scene, and we no longer
have to take all the abuse. Christina and I have for years tried to
get people to see that the feminist establishment did not speak for
all women.
In fact, I'm the one who coined the term "feminist establishment."
When I went out on my first publicity tour after Sexual Personae and
in my early articles in 1990, 1991, 1992, I drilled that phrase in
every interview. I kept on saying, "feminist establishment, feminist
establishment"-to try to drive that wedge into media consciousness
and to make them understand that the leaders of the feminist
organizations based in Washington and New York not only did not
speak for all women but they did not speak for all feminists either.
They were as divorced from the actual historical currents within
feminism as the leaders of the Communist Party were in the Politburo
or the more recent Soviet Union, where they were living like the
dukes of the Romanovs.
At any rate, year by year, my campaign to portray--correctly
portray--the feminist leaders as out of touch with women has really
succeeded-and they helped me enormously! I feel that my record, in
terms of my feminist responses to the various sexual scandals from
the early 1990s, is now being proved to have been the correct one.
In 1986, for heaven's sake, in my own university, I lobbied for the
adoption of moderate sexual harassment guidelines, but at the same
time I felt there was a fascist extremism in feminism coming out of
Catharine MacKinnon that was pushing these things toward
authoritarian extremes that I, as a libertarian, could not support.
And so in 1991, I was the only feminist out there who was attacking
Anita Hill! One week into those hearings, I wrote a piece for the
Philadelphia Inquirer that begins, "Anita Hill is no feminist
heroine." And I felt Clarence Thomas was quite right: He was the
victim of a high-tech lynching. Then when Paula Jones came along in
1994, I was the only feminist immediately out there saying, "I find
her case credible." I was on the "Larry King Show" in May 1994--that
transcript is in my book, Vamps & Tramps. I went against Eleanor
Smeal, who was saying, "This is just a put-up job by the right
wing,"--the same thing Hillary tried all last year. And I said, "Oh,
really? Well, Anita Hill's case was a put-up job by the feminist
establishment."
It's comical the mess that Steinem made over Monica Lewinsky, but
the real hypocrisy was in the Paula Jones case in 1994. If in fact
the feminist establishment had responded with principle rather than
with expediency-in trying to protect their own conspiratorial
associations and affiliations with the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party (to which I belong) --if they at that time had
spoken out and put pressure on the President, on the President's
lawyers, and said that this is a very disturbing charge that Paula
Jones is making, then Clinton's legal team might have been in a mood
to settle and have persuaded the Clintons to settle at that time and
spared the nation all of this endless controversy which has
diminished everyone. It has diminished America in the eyes of the
world, it has diminished the stature of the U.S. government, it has
diminished the office of the presidency, and it has poisoned the
atmosphere so that young people no longer feel like going into
politics-which is going to damage us for decades. It's going to make
this country politically vulnerable in the world if we cannot get
strong, idealistic people to go into politics. The Monica case is
like the cow that has long left the barn! It was the Paula Jones
mess that I think historians are going to focus on.
TWQ: What about Juanita? Do you believe Juanita Broaddrick's
accusation that Bill Clinton raped her in Little Rock when he was
attorney general of Arkansas?
PAGLIA: Okay, my feeling about the Juanita Broaddrick case is not
unlike what I felt about the Anita Hill charges. That is, Anita Hill
came forward ten years after the fact, making very trivial charges
about conversations that made her uncomfortable--when the poor man
didn't lay a hand on her, apparently. And I felt that it was like
the surveillance of a police state, with Hill coming out ten years
later at a crucial moment for Clarence Thomas and making charges
about conversations at lunch! I thought that was a fascist trend in
American politics, and this seems to me the same thing: twenty-one
years later, even if Clinton is guilty, this is un-American, okay?
It's undemocratic to say, "This is the final straw; if this had been
known, he should have been driven from office." Her charges might
well be true. However, as a feminist, I have to say that I have
serious questions about the kind of judgment that was shown by her
at that age. The story that she told Lisa Myers of NBC--that she and
Clinton met briefly at a political gathering two hours from Little
Rock, and that Clinton encouraged her to call him. She did that when
she was going to Little Rock and he said, "Well, I'll meet you in
your hotel room."
Now, excuse me: As far as I'm concerned, by any rational measure,
her consent to meet him in a hotel room conveyed to him-especially
since he hadn't ever heard from her or met with her before-that she
wanted to have sex with him. All right now, he was wrong and brutal
in his behavior, and if it were within the statute of limitations,
then I think he deserved prosecution for what became an assault. I'm
not excusing his behavior in that room, but for heaven's sake, give
me a break! That a mature married woman had no idea, was totally
stunned when he began kissing her at the window! Now, women cannot
behave like this. It was too muddled.
TWQ: You have been very critical of the feminist view of rape. They
seem to think it's rape if somebody looks at you crossways. Is this
going to change because of the Clinton scandals?
PAGLIA: Well, the recent controversy at Harvard, where the faculty
was assembled to vote on a charge of sexual misconduct by a student,
shows that the PC attitudes are very deeply entrenched in a lot of
places in this country. In terms of sexual harassment and date rape
issues, we're in a terrible muddle right now. It's completely
confused. The only thing that can be seen clearly is that the
authority of the feminist establishment to speak about sexual
matters is now over.
Unfortunately, this has led many other people to say, as Michael
Crichton did in his recent Playboy interview, "Feminism is dead."
That's a disaster! That's the ultimate damage inflicted by the
hypocrisy of the feminist establishment. Feminism is not dead, but
the word "feminism" has become very tarred because of these selfish
women who seem to think that all women are somehow pro-choice
members of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Just recently,
Gloria Steinem opened her mouth again and stated that "Mrs. Dole
does not speak for women." And I thought, "After all this time,
Gloria Steinem! Your views do not speak for all women either! Not
all women are of your particular social elite Manhattan clique!" So
I think we're beginning all over again.
TWQ: You said that the first female president will be somebody who
has her sexual persona straight. Could that be Elizabeth Dole?
PAGLIA: No, I don't think so. Unfortunately. I had great hopes for
her, watching her over the years, but her recent announcement of an
exploratory committee was such a disaster.
TWQ: Why?
PAGLIA: It was one of the worst things I have ever seen on
television, by any politician, I have to say. And the media gave her
a free pass on it. There's no doubt about it. Because she is a
woman, people are very leery about applying to women a standard of
critique that you apply to a man. It was just a canned version of
her normal speech. The sprightly tone and the giddiness and the
coming out into the audience were completely inappropriate for that
particular context where she was walking among media people-very
cynical media people who were watching with an air of disgust with
their cameras and their notepads. It was just a replay of the
after-dinner speeches she has been giving for years. She failed to
understand that, if she is going to be a statesman, then she has to
behave in a statesman-like manner now and that her presentation has
to be issues-oriented. I found it condescending--that going up to
people and touching them on the shoulder. I think she's a credible
vice presidential candidate, but one expects them to be able to step
into the shoes of the president. We need a far more commanding
figure.
Christine Whitman has it. Here's a woman who is a real sportswoman,
who comes out of a mandarin background, but she has that manner--the
manner of command. I've seen her come out to the cameras with other
governors from the White House and stand there in the portico and
give forceful statements to the press and so on. That woman's got
it! Now the problem is her rather moderate position on abortion
which may make her unpalatable to a lot of Republicans. But there's
a woman who is ready to step into the presidency. Similarly, Dianne
Feinstein has the manner. She was mayor of a very fractious city and
has a lot of experience--which Hillary Clinton does not!--no
experience whatsoever with any political matter outside of sitting
inside the White House with her sunglasses on making phone calls to
her Yale law school friends.
TWQ: Should Hillary run for the Senate?
PAGLIA: No, absolutely not! She has no talent whatever for that! The
med-ia, you'd think, would have learned their lesson because of the
Clinton debacle, but they went right ahead in a big stampede and
promoted Hillary Clinton, way beyond her abilities. She has no
ability to be a senator. She has no ability to work on a team.
Basically, she is a coterie-type personality. What she would be
ideal for is what she is doing now-which is to go out into the world
and to be a spokeswoman for highly educated Western career women and
to fight for women's and children's rights or as an
ambassador-at-large for the UN. That's her appropriate role. I want
to fall on the floor laughing--imagining Hillary Clinton working
well in the Senate with everybody else! Oh, give me a break! I've
already joked in print that they would need to build her a private
cloakroom on the Mall. This is not a woman who has any ability to
deal with the mass of humanity. She is the most arrogant, the most
moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on the
earth--and it is just a joke that the media have allowed this to go
on as long as it has.
TWQ: Why did it take us so long to see what Bill Clinton is really
like?
PAGLIA: The media are to blame. They dropped the ball, okay? They
dropped the ball over the Gennifer Flowers thing. That's the one
they should have pursued. If I hear one more time, "Well, she went
to the Star and many people dismissed her." Why did she go to the
Star? She went to the Star, for heaven's sake, because that tabloid
was the only one that would give her an airing of her views! I mean
all other media were in such a hurry to sweep the Republicans out of
office that they overlooked all kinds of stuff that they knew about,
including the Broaddrick case, at that time in 1992.
The media are the guilty party in all this! Then the feminist
establishment, after that. They were so biased. In the early 1990s,
the majority of journalists were and still are Democrats, liberal
Democrats, and they wanted Bush out of office. They wanted the
Republicans out so they played this game, and then the snake turned
around and bit them in the ass! That's why the media have been
obsessed with this story for so long. They realized they had been
rooked, that they had been suckered! They had been taken! They had
been seduced and abandoned by Clinton himself. So I thought, well,
one good thing has come out of this--the media have really learned
to be much more neutral in their political positions.
But no, oh no, no, no! The Hillary senatorial story took off in this
giant balloon, and once again there was manipulation of the news to
turn at-tention away from the impeachment disgrace of Bill Clinton.
So the media have learned nothing! And neither has the Hollywood
establishment.
TWQ: Will the Clinton marriage last after they are out of the White
House?
PAGLIA: I have no idea. You know, they know each other best. She has
no friends. All this talk about her great female friendships! She
has no friends aside from him. I think they are a dysfunctional
pair. I just don't see what they would do apart from each other. I
happened to be in the convention hall in 1996 for Clinton's second
nomination (I was in Chicago for the "Oprah" show) and I saw Hillary
making her speech. I looked up and saw Chelsea: The spotlight was on
her, smiling and applauding her mother on the podium. And I saw
sitting next to her what I thought was a prison matron or an FBI
agent--a mean-looking woman, fierce and unsmiling. Later I learned
it was Hillary's mother! Here's Hillary giving the speech, one of
the high points of her life, and her daughter is applauding and
smiling and these people are giving her standing ovations, and the
mother was there, brutally ungiving. And that is the whole story of
that family, okay?
Hillary is a mess. And her family was a mess, and the media won't
touch it. The media will not go near the mess of Hillary's family!
Those brothers, the walking wounded brothers, who look like whipped
dogs! And the point is that Hillary's relationship with her family
has always been bad, really bad! You can't understand what's going
on with her relationship with Bill until you understand that. But,
no, the media are all "Saint Hillary"--wonderful wife--wonderful
mother.
In fact, she's a far more interesting character. She's not a
lesbian. Okay? No, it's more complex than that. She is, I have said,
a Protestant nun, and she's closer to Evita than to anything else. I
was the first to compare her to Evita: Now everyone notices that.
She thinks she speaks for the common people. That woman should not
be anywhere near our government, okay? --because look at the guys
she surrounds herself with--those geeks, those eunuch geeks! She
loves eunuch geek men.
TWQ: Like who?
PAGLIA: Oh my God, look at them all! Sidney Blumenthal, Ira
Magaziner, Harold Ickes--they all look alike. They are all weird
Ichabod Crane men, all high IQ men who have no natural virility,
okay? It's really weird. She loves to have her little cabals with
them. And the other one--the lawyer David Kendall--they're all
alike, and they all bond with her. They're all joined at the hip
with her! She's the one who has been calling the shots in all of
this. She's the one with the hard-line strategy: "Don't settle with
Paula Jones." She's the one down the line who's been the mastermind
of a lot of this stuff. That woman is an authoritarian who should be
kept out of dem-ocratic government. She's a tyrant who thinks she
knows what's best for the people. She's Orwellian in her attitude
toward the rest of humanity. I think she's a great spokesman for
women's and children's rights, I really do. I think she should be
shepherded off to the proper position--which is making speeches and
then retiring to her hotel room to sulk and then getting into the
limousine to go on to the next speech. That's all that woman can do!
Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia, Camille Paglia is a culture critic, libertarian
feminist, and columnist for the Internet magazine Salon. She is also
the author of four books including Sexual Personae: Art and
Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art and American
Culture; and Vamps & Tramps.
------------------
Mykl
~~~~~
"If you really want to know what's going on;
then, you have to follow the money trail."
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