R E C E N T L Y
Should an economist wear a short, tantalizing black dress to work?
Prozac is for wimps
The nanny trial, "Boogie Nights" and feminist writing about men
Martha Stewart, I salute you
Men and their discontents
Why we leer at JonBenet
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
New Year's wish for the Reverend Al
Unzipped
Bestseller Hell
Sexpert Opinion
Word by Word
Unzipped
The Awful Truth
Right On!
Sound Salvation
Spice of Life
Ask Camille
This land is our land
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ CAMILLE+PAGLIA +| PAGE 2 OF 2
Dear Camille:
President Clinton made some statements about a worldwide
banning of all aspects of human cloning. Everyone, at least in theory, has
the right to procreate in the usual way, therefore I cannot see how anyone
can be denied the right to totally reproduce themselves. There would have
to be guidelines governing what you could and could not do regarding
cloning yourself, or it would be a social nightmare, but to denounce cloning
totally is surely a retrograde scientific step. How can they ban it anyway?
Is it possible for any nation to fully control all scientific
experiments? Surely somewhere in the world, someone who wants to clone
themselves, is going to find someone else who will have the technical,
biological expertise and the will to do so. What do you think, Camille?
Regards,
Ray Mutton Dear Ray Mutton:
As a libertarian, I totally agree with your position that everyone has the
right to procreate (or to abort) as he or she wishes. While cloning may
raise troubling questions about a future Big Brother state where reproduction
is farmed, there are no ethical grounds whatever for stopping the present
development of this technology.
Given the impact of early childhood experiences and ever-changing culture, no
two individuals would ever be fully alike anyhow. While cloning might seem to
make heterosexual relations unnecessary (and has already been hailed for that
by a few demented lesbian ideologues), in fact over time it would
progressively weaken a genetic line. Exogamy -- marrying or breeding outside
the kinship group -- helps to suppress birth defects by introducing stronger
hereditary characteristics.
Looking down the intergalactic line a thousand years, "Ask Camille" prophesies
that many are the clones to come!
Dear Camille:
Can you help me hatch a plan to lure Gore Vidal back to his native shores?
Granted, tempting anyone away from the Amalfi Coast is a mighty task, but
clearly we would all be culturally better off with more Gore in our lives.
The obvious solution is an appointment to the Senate when someone
appropriate moves on, but beyond that my ideas slow to a trickle. News
anchor? Studio boss? Head of PBS? Help!!
A concerned citizen Dear Concerned:
The quarter-century self-exile of Gore Vidal in Europe has been a disaster for
the American cultural scene. But it's too late now: The 68-year-old Vidal's
been gone too long and has lost his sharp sense of the convoluted national
issues, warring personalities and expanded media landscape here.
I revere Vidal as the kind of cultivated, sophisticated, fearlessly witty gay
man who simply doesn't exist any longer in the United States. Like
scholar, musician and political activist Edward Said, Vidal is a true man of
the world in the old 18th century sense, when my heroes, the philosophes
and libertines, ruled Enlightenment Paris.
Only an intellectual and aesthete of Vidal's stature could have scornfully
attacked and stopped the destruction of the Ivy League humanities departments,
for example, by the noxious influx in the 1970s of jargon-choked
poststructuralism, which has deadened the natural instincts and robbed the
creativity of a whole generation of students.
Dearest Oracle:
Any predictions (or wishes) for the New Year? For instance, who's going to win the Super Bowl? (I've heard you're a big football fan.)
Your humble servant Dear Humble:
I have no predictions for the Super Bowl, since it's usually the feeblest
performance of the postseason. The poor players, forced to stand around all
day until they get tight and nerved out, are mere accessories to the
grandiose, drunken commercial extravaganza of it all.
However, I am enormously enjoying the playoffs as usual, with their emotional
intensity and traditional regional rivalries. Yes, I have been a fanatical
football fan since childhood, and I call football "my only real religion."
See my article "Gridiron Feminism," in The Wall Street Journal (Sept.
12, 1997).
The "Ask Camille" wish list for 1998:
I wish that Geraldine Ferraro will run, run, run straight into the U.S.
Senate.
I wish that President Clinton will continue his excellent educational initiatives
but that we will get the hell out of Bosnia.
I wish that the puling cowards of this loathsomely partisan, stalemated U.S.
Congress would get off their butts and produce substantive health-care reform,
after Hillary Clinton's totalitarian fiasco of five years ago.
I wish that Patricia Ireland of N.O.W. will continue to make the goofy
tactical mistakes she made in 1997.
I wish that the drinking age will be lowered again to 18, to release young
people from paternalistic bondage.
I wish that the wonderful, strong, sharp nose of "The X-Files" star Gillian Anderson
will become a new plastic-surgery model for American girls, with their tedious
Sandra Dee button-nose fetish.
I wish that someone besides me would notice that Anne Heche looks exactly like
Ellen DeGeneres' mother and that, as usual, lesbo love is All About Mom.
I wish that sturgeon could be reintroduced to American rivers, so that the
price of caviar would fall.
I wish that a chain of smoked, tangy, pulled-pork barbecue pits would open up
nationwide.
I wish that Raquel Welch would be given her own TV series as a female James
Bond.
I wish that American media liberals would stop repeating the absurd claim that
people are "born gay," when the scientific evidence for it is slight and
unreliable.
I wish that the shameless Paglia wannabes of upper-crust academe -- at whom New
York trade publishers, trying to reproduce the success of "Sexual Personae,"
threw big advances in the past few years only to see their garbled books flop
miserably -- will continue to eat dirt.
I wish that PC-cowed music critics would realize that k.d. lang is a lousy
interpreter of other people's songs and that she is constitutionally incapable
of delivering any sound except oppressive, mournful keening.
I wish that Ani DiFranco would drop the Liza Minnelli, aren't-I-cute, puppy-dog mannerisms, junk her tired, 1970s-era, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, feminist
platitudes, lay off the unbearably monotonous Indigo Girls strumming, broken
only by occasional smacking of her guitar like a piñata, and concentrate on
the great craft of song construction, to which she seems to pay no attention
whatever.
I wish that Gwyneth Paltrow and Daisy Fuentes would go away.
Get it off your chest. Ask Camille.
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