Camille Paglia on Lena Dunham

Approximate Reading Time: 3 minutes

Camille Paglia broke on the national public scene with the publication of her magnum opus Sexual Personae back in 1990. It was originally her weighty and quite serious doctoral thesis, at Yale University, some 20 years previously. Since its commercial release, I have had the guarded ambiguity-laden relationship with her we all like to place under the heading of “love/hate.” Ever wary of Paglia’s inevitably brash, seemingly liberal pronunciamentos, always to my ear, as well, vaguely self-congratulatory, what I brace for, always, are crypto-fascist eruptions.

These days she seems to have found at least one rhetorical nesting place in which to opine regularly, that is, with the National Enquirer of the proto-progressive left, “Salon.” Indeed, she falls well into line, as she puts it, with her “perspective as a fervent supporter of the ruggedly honest and principled Bernie Sanders.” Unhappily (in the French sense), she says so even as she steps without a skosh of trepidation and embarassment away from her prior position towards Donald Trump. He was a “carnival barker.” Now, she thrusts toward a much more accommodating stance, in a paroxysm of self-revision (perhaps in fear—and I say this knowing that la bohème de l’académie springs with predatory zeal when so accused—of not having gotten on board soon enough to embrace the inexorability of The Donald’s earth-scorching march on Philadelphia this summer). It seems now, conversely to mere weeks ago, he (or should we be considering any reference or adversion with an upper case pronoun, usually reserved for kings, God, and Jesus or Mohammed, and call Him “He?”… I would prefer Trump, or His Trumpness, or Trumper, or El Trumperino) is to be viewed differently. According to a reassuring la Paglia, as she informs her public that “[his] fearless candor and brash energy feel like a great gust of fresh air, sweeping the tedious clichés and constant guilt-tripping of political correctness out to sea….Trump is his own man, with a steely ‘damn the torpedoes’ attitude.” And she does so with an equal insouciance to the appearance of a public reversal, like any seasoned pol intent on righting the meaning of truth.

However, I am not here to challenge her on what was, indeed, a refreshing and validating expression of opinion by she who must be heard in the very same column in today’s Salon (I Was Wrong About Donald Trump). Though, briefly I have to admit it is inviting to point out the myriad aspects of Trump’s public persona that are signifiers of a wholly insupportable inhumane tendency—qualities the foremost diva of the academy elects to overlook in her 180-degree reassessment.

By David Shankbone - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19316880

Lena Dunham, by David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19316880

Rather I am here to take what is to me a godsend of an opportunity to quote her on another curious phenomenon in this day of grotesque judgments by the establishment as to what constitutes newsworthiness. Never mind as to what constitutes worth of any sort that is substantiated by reality, and validated by any kind of rigororous epistemological scrutiny. I speak of one of my personal bêtes noires, Ms. Lena Dunham.

Quite simply, let me quote Camille without comment. I could not have said it better. Having observed that Ms. Paglia has seemed to have overlooked Ms. Dunham while doing a “superb job of analyzing contemporary figures,” one of the professor’s admirers ask her point blank for her “thoughts on this young woman who fancies herself The Voice of her generation:”

On the one hand, I believe that each generation has the unchallengeable right to create its own aesthetic and to carve its own idols. On the other hand, as Gwendolen Fairfax darkly remarks to Cecily Cardew in the great tea-table confrontation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, “On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.”

Lena Dunham belongs to the exhibitionistic Andrea Dworkin school of banner-waving neurotic masochism. The body is the enemy, a tainted lump whose limitations and afflictions the public must be forced to contemplate in grisly detail. We must also witness, like hapless medieval bystanders at a procession of flagellants, just how unappetizingly pallid Caucasian flesh can be made to be without cracking the camera lens. The torpid banality of Dunham’s utterances (reverently accorded scriptural status by the New York Times) is yet another matter. I am woman–hear me kvetch!

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Progress is Our Most Important Product

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

I’ll go out on the proverbial limb, the one I hate being on the end of, and state what some of you may tell me is the obvious.

In 35 short years, we’ve gone from “The Great Communicator” to, well, hmmm, “The Great Reality Show Host?” This pathetic slog we all endure (apparently; our existences are beset and so many of us have persevered through genuine trauma, nay tragedy, and death awaits us all, it’s true, but still, there are iDevices and a new Tesla model coming out…, but except for the whatever percentage it is, what is it anyway? 99% 98% as little as 95% Here on Amazon marked down for you today only to 78% I mean how many people are really truly and honestly suffering daily, fighting for subsistence, strung out, addled, stricken with stubborn and unresponsive diseases, living in poverty… well not here on Facebook, nay nay, we just come here to have shpilkes about all the actual people who do, of which any number is too many, and rail and get snarky with one another, and sling vulgarities or bloat ourselves in a superior way because those inferior specimens running for President are just, I mean, de trop when it comes to vulgarity; I even heard a joke, pretty lame, about how if he’s elected Bernie Sanders will be the first President to sign significant legislation into law or more likely yet another Executive Order that will go nowhere with a mustard stain on his shirt… where was I ? oh, at the pathetic slog we all endure), this “life” as we call it, is no longer what has always been understood by serfs and philosophers alike is no longer that, but a big reality show in which we’re all extras, with feature parts that are archived for as many people as you’ve indulgently allowed yourself to have as friends on your social medium of choice with photos, videos, and bad audio, some of which has probably been illegally pirated.

And reality tv was not really a genre until the 70s (discounting Allen Funt’s initial efforts with Candid Camera, which dates to 1948, when the number of tv sets could still be numbered in the thousands). PBS aired the groundbreaking An American Family, which let it all hang out, including the outing of their adolescent son, in 1973. Regularly scheduled prime time programming that falls solidly under the rubric began in 1979 and 1980 with the airing of “Real People” and “That’s Incredible” which, as the Writer’s Guild of America puts it, “took the camera fully out of the studio to capture people in their real-life settings.”

I’ll remind you at this point that Ronald Reagan had already been Governor of California, with his first term beginning in 1967, serving two terms. And more than a “great communicator” he had been and was, in actuality, a great huckster, being advertising spokesman for a number of brands, but most notably the major brands of Chesterfield cigarettes (back in the 50s, when smoking was still safe) and then, more famously, because he did it on television, for GE—kind of forming a complete circle, from the products that could give you lung cancer to the company that made the x-ray machines that could detect it in your body.

The Republicans invoke Reagan’s name with reverence, as if he did not do the things he did (raise taxes, legalized immigrants, and suborned illegal gun traffic, with some drug trade thrown in, with known terrorists), but did set a model for the modern major Republican candidate. And they repudiate Trump, because he is an enormous vulgarian—indisputably, and without mussing a hair on his lacquered head—as if that were not the cause of the reverence in which he is held by the “rank and file” (the term applied, in a headline, by the NYTimes, probably with a big grin on the face of the editor who cooked up that particular combination of words) despite the imprecations of titular head of the party until they settle on a nominee, Mitt Romney.

All this by way of solving the challenge of what do we do with a problem like The Donald. And all this, I would suggest—here I am, fully out on the end of that limb—in actuality a mere evolutionary cycle, kind of an attenuated one if you ask me, given that most politicians are ready to flip on their steadfast positions in as little as a 24-hour period since last asked to state that position for the record.

History is fun, so let’s backtrack a little further, a small bit of evidence to further anchor my indubitably trivial and unaccountable point.

I’ve seen no mention of it, as, I mean, it is four years ago after all, and who can remember what happened four days ago any longer—I mean long term memory is so yesterday, you know what I mean—but recall for a moment Mitt Romney’s “presidential” excursion to our closest ally (measured in terms of countries predominantly white, Christian, Anglophone, and of which we used to be a colony), and he proceeded to tick off the British hoi polloi, amuse the gentry and the establishment over just how “American” he revealed himself to be, and was suitably otherwise snubbed by the UK media. No one mentions that, and yet we have progressed. The British (I mean the people… apparently, who really knows?) have decided that it would be best if the UK immigration control simply didn’t even allow Donald Trump to cross the border (and that was long before the current cascade of vulgar trumpery).

It’s not a new era at all my friends, it’s what we like to call in the United States progress. Let’s just not call it Progressive shall we, otherwise both Bernie and Hillary might start getting some really bad ideas to try out.

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When Did You Stop Beating Hillary Clinton?

Approximate Reading Time: 5 minutes

[Please note the date on this entry to my journal of several years. In a month, it will be eight years that I wrote this. How much has changed in the passage of the preponderance of two presidential terms. Barack Obama did go on to win the nomination of the Democrats and proceeded to win in the general election. He cannot, alas, run again. As it has always been in the nature of these things, some things, as much as they change, remain the same. A lot of the other faces have changed, but not so in the case of one famous face, that of Hillary Clinton. She faces yet again, with the same air at once wistful and challenging of inevitability, another contest for the nomination, with the added weight of potential historic precedence the greater stake (in many ways—the present contest, as fraught as it is with aspects of surreality, is really not of significantly different historical import; there have been despots and demagogues, barons and brigands aplenty in our political history). I cannot say I’d make exactly the same arguments now I would have made with my aggressive friends back then, as described here, and I certainly don’t wish it to be inferred that what I said then constitutes my personal endorsement—given the worth of that, I can’t make too much of this; better to make nothing of it at all—of any other candidate now.

For me this passage of roiling thoughts has, as I hope it has for you as well, mainly historical interest, and gives not so much perspective as a tiny tiny insight into human nature.]

2008April04 11:28 AM

It is now a few weeks ago, over dinner at Casablanca [a now defunct Harvard Square restaurant/bar and an institution] after a matinee at the A.R.T. [American Repertory Theater, on the Harvard campus], when the conversation inevitably, and regrettably, turned to the ongoing campaign for the Democratic Party candidacy for President. We were a party of eight, waiting for a ninth, and nevertheless into our appetizers when an inevitable, and regrettable, chorus arose from the rest of the party—ostensibly, or at least apparently, all liberal of mind, if not merely Democrat of mind. The only solidarity seemed to be an understood antipathy for and opposition to the presumptive Republican candidate, Mr. John McCain.

Most of the party, save for my wife [now deceased—she died six weeks after the dinner party described here], are my elders I believe. I know that my two dearest friends among them, 68 and 72 respectively, are. The relevance of this slight difference in age may be non-existent. I do know that what was shared, and ultimately articulated as the discussion progressed, was that all members of the party, save for my wife, was a vocal and adamant belief, that, whether for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama regardless, any individual (and presumably this would include as well any absent representative advocates for the candidacy of McCain) in the United States, if not the world, must accept the existence of an innate misogyny. It was neither clear, nor necessary to delineate, the importance of the gender of any such individual. There seemed to be a tacit assumption that the propensity towards such an anti-female bias would be stronger in the male, but the relevance of this, too, is likely non-consequential.

My opposition to, nay, my repugnance for, as opposition is too neutral a descriptor, has been vociferous whenever the occasion has arisen. My predisposition is well known to my friends, as, indeed, the most heated discussions on this very subject—my repugnance and consequent opposition, for cause, to her candidacy—have occurred among us, usually on social occasions. Three times, at three other meals, as it happens (two breakfasts, in the kitchen of my house in Provence, and a dinner, in their dining room) the topic, which seems inescapable of late in their company, erupted into a rare heated argument.

In short order, it became clear that the wife of this couple of friends felt I was being not just unfair, but without cause entirely. Indeed, the argument was that, being a man, I found it repugnant to consider that a woman was fit to govern in the highest office. Nothing being further from the truth, indeed, I do wonder sometimes that we’d be better off with the lopsided balance of power, in terms of gender of our lawmakers and those who execute those laws, tipped entirely in the other direction—with a significant majority among the women of our society.

To put it most simply, I just can’t stand Hillary Clinton’s politics, wihch are of the order of opportunism and casuistry. She is inveterately a politician. This is, in itself, not a deficiency, as all those who run for office must practice politics, which to state it as simply as I can, consists in the ability to reconcile a statutory advantage in seeking to gain office with the will of the people being governed in the larger context of some mutually agreeable ethical framework. It is when politics becomes an end in itself, politics being the means of effecting good governance, usually through the imposition of rules that are not onerous or inhumane, and the enforcement of those rules, and leaving politics strictly to the process of shaping those means—through laws and rules and mandates and statutes and imposts—and not using politics as a lever for aggrandizement, material gain, or entitlement of those in the vocation of the exercise of poitical activities. At some point, even the most canny, wily or even-handed of successful politicians should put the process aside, and attend to the legislation of the codes that govern us, or to the execution of one’s duties in a post to which one has been elected or appointed—with no prejudice or favoritism determined by one’s personal ideological bent, especially not with the objective in mind of the attainment of wealth or power or privilege in excess of any existing societal mandate.

And again, quite simply, I am not sure and have never been that Hillary Clinton (or her husband for that matter, to bring up an operative irrelevancy) is sufficiently pure in this admittedly flawless conceptualization of what politics is about. I am not sure, indeed, that she is anything approaching purity as a political creature. For me politics is about winning, but without shedding the prior mantle of one’s humanity. It is winning, but not at any cost, or by any means.

Yet, it would seem, her gender trumps any inherent argument based merely on what is accessible in the public record and in the archives of the news of public media. There seems to be an argument based solely on the presumption that for women we are long past some appointed hour wherein, in the words of a song by Stephem Sondheim, “It’s our time, breathe it in/Worlds to change and worlds to win./Our turn, we’re what’s new,/Me and you, pal,/Me and you!” It’s a kind of expectant feminist manifest destiny, sometimes with little or no regard for the character of those who will enact the transition to the better future envisioned. Rather, I get the sense, even among the most realistic critics of seemingly gender-tainted opponents of this particular woman for this particular nomination, that gender trumps all other criteria, including ethics, and purely on the grounds of it’s being “our time” it’s better to have a woman than a man if there is otherwise no other discernible difference in their political character.

Naturally, I repudiate such an assumption, and see any critique not as sound argument, but an attack, and it is of the order, in this case, with the indictment ringingly (sometimes—if there are enough empty wine glasses on the table) delivered in mixed company, of a variation of a classic interrogative, the question impossible to answer convincingly in a court of law, “Oh! So when did you stop beating Hillary Clinton?”

Never, of course, is the answer, because I never started. It is for her opponent to beat her, strictly speaking, in the political arena. And with any luck, he will.

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Trump: What A Nomination Means

Approximate Reading Time: 7 minutes

To me it means simply that if the American people who bother to vote in primary elections and caucuses choose him before other candidates, he should be the nominee. In the end, it has nothing to do with my preferences.

In most instances, if the President was selected on the criterion of personal preference, there would be, as there has been in totalitarian countries historically, only one nominee, and voting would be pro forma, when it isn’t—as well—mandatory (it was Donald Trump, incidentally, who pointed out recently that he is not sure he is for the health care “mandate” as it would mean that having insurance would be mandatory—he can be faulted for many things, but a very small kudo to him for his sensitivity to the language as the general populace should understand it). I get the impression, especially when paying heed to the most vociferous of Hillary Clinton opponents, who are not necessarily feeling the Bern, which seems to aggravate the effects of the Hill venom, or the most ardent of Tea Party endorsers, that this is precisely what they would prefer. And that preference for one candidate, one vote, clearly is heedless of the meaning of that foundation of the system of government called democracy.

Personally I would naturally be most comfortable, which means in my case that I would be most free of anxiety and worry, if the person I thought most appropriate for the office of President of the United States were simply appointed to office. However, I find myself questioning the intent of anyone who becomes a drummer for a candidate, and closes himself or herself off from even the simple request that “enough is enough” already, and to let the cards play as the players see fit to bid or bet on them.

There is no lack of passionate intensity among the acolytes and partisans of any one candidate. All have at least some.

In the social media, arguments fly like bees sensing pollen in the next field over swollen with herbage, but disoriented by the nerve toxins in the herbicides that abound invisibly in the air. No matter the candidate, commentators with the deliberate mien of their sagacity or merely outrageous in their certitude find platforms and are quoted ad nauseam in the feeds of the broadcast media, the ones that measure their subscribers in the hundreds of millions. Where individuals measure their self-worth on the volume of their followers or their connected relations with others, all of whom are “friends.” Permission to believe is found, refreshed daily, in virtual venues with names like Alternews and USUncut. The channels of information are chock full of truth, unsluiced because of the freedom of speech, all speech, any speech.

The bottom line for me, more than ever, and all thanks to the general air of mass hysteria that has taken over the land of netizens and tv watchers, is that this is a democracy. Every citizen is entitled to his or her vote. Everyone is entitled to his or her preferences.

In an odd sort of way, and I can imagine whatever I may about what is really going on the heads of people I don’t know in the least, but in the end I still have no idea, they accept with perfect equanimity my views. My views, which when we get down to cases (or at least I do in those occasional bouts of honesty I impose upon myself), are fairly predictable for my socio-economic set and background and my history as a resident of the rabidly liberal northeast corridor localized in eastern Massachusetts and particularly in that citadel of progressive mania, Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT, and one of the biggest bubbles on the continent.

I am well-off, and socially minded. I am highly educated and likely in a tiny minority at the upper reaches of some scale of measurable intellectual capacity. I believe in reason more than I believe in faith. I believe in that which is called Natural Law, more than I believe in the possibility of being saved personally. I believe humans should live ethically, and that ethics are, in a sense, not so much a solipsism as self-evident and derivative of natural law.

I believe we are not so much an accident on the planet as the result of perfectly deducible sets of determinable, but hardly determinative combinations and recombinations of organic molecules and genetic signalling. And I believe we are as likely to evolve into some other life forms in the fullness of time, as likely as it would have been to anticipate that we would make an appearance on the planet’s surface in the fullness of time were we to go back far enough prior to our emergence on the stage of the grand selective lottery.

And I believe that Donald Trump has the same potential inevitability as any other candidate who, by accident or design, for a lark or for some nefarious purpose unknown even to himself or herself, who, for all we know, had no motive for running that he or she is at all aware of consciously. Indeed, in the case of Donald Trump, I believe it’s possible he, in bare acuality, has not an idea or even an atom of a kernel of a concept as to what makes him do anything. And all that being said, is to say not very much more than we can say about any of his supporters. And as for other candidates and their supporters, I’m not sure that because we can delineate a cogent argument that seems to posit in a thesis and at once to constitute a proof as to its coherency as logic, that such arguments, in a democracy, are worth any more than a feeling deep in one’s heart that the other guy or gal is the right one, not when the curtains close behind the voter in the ballot booth.

I believe there are far fewer chips than one would infer from the aggregate energy of all the handwringing arguments and all the casuistry, all the passionate invective, all the frustrated anguish and all the anger. The country is young, but still old enough to have gone through this closing in on half a hundred times over our history that began in a period set three centuries ago, when life was profoundly different in terms of the nature of the quotidian and the sophistication and leverage provided by the prevailing technologies of the time. We will still elect a president and what chips there are, however many there are, will fall where they may, as they always have fallen.

Fact is, the country was founded, in terms of principles of the structure of government with a sharply divided, largely dualistic and dueling set of theories. We are still divided, though along different lines. We shed blood periodically as parties on either side of whatever divide defines our present epoch—and as it has repeatedly in all previously discernible epochs. And perhaps, there will be blood. Yet again.

But, despite the dire sense of both sides that there is some Manichean division that with victory for one side of the other will mean that white will prevail over black, or black over white, or red over blue, or vice versa, or, using whatever semiotic figures you like, that there will be a prevailing order—even though there is none now, and has not been for some time, if ever, perhaps even when we separated ourselves from England and struck out into the world, no longer a colony, for sure, but a sovereign nation, which we remain—and that the other side will lose, our side or theirs no matter. As if the outcome will mean the extinction of roughly half the populace of a profoundly large country with not a small number of citizens, with no clear majority holding an unequivocally clear position standing on undisputed ground.

We live in a time of political paralysis, of stymied hopes, of dashed plans, and unbalanced forces pitted increasingly against one another. We’ve lived in such a time before. Before we always suffered the torment of the irresolution that follows when the great engine of compromise, which assures that progress will occur, however slowly and incrementally—or we would not be where we are now, which is no longer, and mainly for good and not for ill, were that engine not in a state of ready revival as it has always proven to be. We are poised on a tipping point, as it has become stylish to call it, though I mean it in a much more mundane and less precipitous, hence less dramatic, sense. Once we tip into that necessary realm of painstaking—in few other contexts does the word assume literal meaning so forcefully—compromise. It will happen as it has always happened. It even happened under the “impossible” circumstances of most of the tenure of President Obama. It will happen, or not, of course, under a President Trump, or a President Clinton. And it will likely be no less difficult than it would be under a Rubio or a Sanders.

Here are the bare facts, at least insofar as they pertain to me. This I know for sure. If you feel you are in a different position, and there’s reason to think that attaining such a position is possible through a duplicable process, you have a responsibility to share the algorithm, as they say. But for now, I manage to live, more and more readily each day, knowing that there is not a thing I can do, not a word I can say, and not a dollar I can spend that will alter the selection of delegates to represent this or that candidate come convention time in any state in which I am not a resident. I could not alter the outcome in South Carolina for either party in South Carolina, no matter how much I might have wanted to, which was not at all. Any more than I can do so in the thirteen states (and one territory) of Super Tuesday casting their ballots even as I sit here typing.

It must be enough to accept that however you vote, whatever your reasons for doing so, it will have an impact on the outcome, however infinitesmal that impact, though it will not measurably change the outcome that results from all the votes of all the voters, on whom you can have no impact whatsoever. I get no solace knowing that whatever the range of emotions that rise within me—usually uncontrollably, as I’d just as soon pay no attention whatsoever to this race or to any of the candidates, and even less so to their supporters (who are the agents of encouragement to behave in such provocative or egregious or predictable ways)—they will not determine who is President on January 20, 2017. The great test is not accepting the panoply of feelings that are inevitable, and good or bad, from hearing the results on election day this November. The great test is merely accepting the result. It is part of the experience of being a citizen. And if that isn’t a conscious choice, given the state of affairs as they have been, not for the past ten months, or even ten years, but likely for your entire life, you have no reason to complain at all. It certainly won’t matter to President Trump, if that’s who we get.

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