R E C E N T L Y
America's New Age obsessions: The good, the bad and the inner child-y
Tom Cruise is no cruiser
Celebrities' fatal attraction to public sex
Bill's victory stogie: Just a cigar?
Behind the baffling bevy of beautiful boys
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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
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Dear Camille:
I'm a young gay man, and while I don't think I look particularly faggy, I must either be kidding myself or hanging around in the wrong places. Twice in the last week I've been called a faggot while running in a nearby park that's a gay enclave here in Denver.
My initial reaction when this happens is usually to assume the (entirely unsatisfying) position of the moral high ground, pitying these boys for their stupidity. But then I get real and want a good comeback. Both times the perpetrators were groups of young men going by in cars, so it's got to be something that I can get off before they're gone at 35 mph. Any suggestions?
-- Wanting to fight back in Denver
Dear Wanting:
You're in a perilous position here: Please see the end of "Easy Rider" (1969), where two sun-weathered farmhands in a passing truck blast motorcyclists Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to smithereens with a shotgun. My advice to you, as to any woman jogger harassed by guys on foot or in a car, is to keep right on going and not try to tangle with the primitive, hunting/stalking impulses at work here.
Beware the irrational mob dynamics of men in groups -- an issue I have raised in regard to drunken fraternity parties, where nice boys from good homes can end up raping and pillaging like marauding Huns. When I was younger and at the crazed height of my Amazon feminism, I went after every pest who bothered not just me but any other woman. Today, with so much social instability and road rage and so many automatic weapons in circulation (shooting skills are no longer required to maim or kill), I would advise the virtues of the fox: Keep running and go to ground.
Social change is a slow, difficult process. When it's just you against a group in a raw, unpoliced public space, mere words will change no minds but only inflame. You need some mantras of the "This too will pass" kind to quell your rage when such harassment occurs. The 17th-century (and often homoerotic) divine George Herbert has a wonderful poem called "The Quip," where he describes the allegorized temptations of the world ganging up to jeer at him. Again and again, his reaction is silence, with the intense inner refrain: "But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me."
Perhaps you also might rethink either your running style or your favorite stomping grounds. You have been put at risk by gay activists' refusal to frankly face the consequences of flagrant, aggressive cruising in public parks, which inevitably arouses the hostility of male teens who are often the subject of it. Anthropologically speaking, one kind of animalistic behavior has bred another here. Until common sense returns (when hell freezes over?), I'd say watch your butt!
Dear Camille:
While the Western world screams indignantly at India's recent nuclear bomb tests, I can't help wondering aloud if the same deafening uproar would've followed a nuclear test by Israel. How about you?
-- Ziad in Kuwait
Dear Ziad:
The dangerous destabilization of Asia may be the worst bequest of the Clinton administration, with its over-absorption in domestic issues and its clumsiness and vacillation in foreign policy. The American media also deserve much blame for obsessing for months on the once-juicy but long-stale Monica Lewinsky story and ignoring ominous developments in Indian politics -- a direct result of President Clinton's shortsighted technological aid to Chinese military power in the region.
The whole world should be concerned about even a localized arms race, which can slide us into an uncontrolled era of international thuggery. Clouds of radioactive dust respect no boundaries and can poison air and water and mutate human and animal DNA for generations to come.
But the haughtiness with which the White House lectured India after its bomb tests was outrageous. Since when do Western nations call the shots in the global arena? The British Empire is long over. London relinquished Indian intervention 50 years ago; will Washington now resume it? India and Pakistan don't need American permission to take steps to ensure their own national security.
You ask about probable reactions to a nuclear test by Israel -- whose nuclear arsenal is a discreet given. Of course, there would be no "deafening uproar," since the American major media and government are overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
The current "peace process" is a glaring misnomer. There may be no peace in the Mideast for a century or more; the burden of bloody memory is too great. Europe's guilt over its barbaric persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, led to its brutal displacement of Palestinians from their own land after World War II, when the modern state of Israel was carved out of the British protectorate.
If I were a Jew, "Never again" would be my motto, and I would use any means necessary to assure the survival of the ever-embattled Jewish people. But if I were a Palestinian, I would be equally fanatical in seeking redress for the insulting injustice with which my property and patrimony were stolen by Europeans salving their own uneasy consciences.
How can these two positions ever be reconciled? Pessimism seems inevitable. But the idea of American neutrality in the region is a joke. Billions of American dollars continue to flow to one side only, increasing the already drastic disparity between the Israeli and Palestinian standard of living and prolonging Israeli intransigence on sensitive issues like new settlements or the status of Jerusalem, sacred to three faiths.
When American political sentiment and military might are so partisan in the Mideast, we cannot be surprised that Islamic nations covet nuclear weapons. Hence the domino effect -- which led Islamic Pakistan to set off its own fusillade of nuclear tests -- could come rippling back at us sooner than we'd like.
Dear Camille:
What happened? Why is everyone (especially movie stars and college professors) now a Tibetan Buddhist? We have friends who turned their home into a meditation center. Now we never see them because they have a heavy schedule of retreats, workshops, teachings, meditations and worldwide travel to more of the same. (It appears to be a religion that requires not only piles of money, but access to tremendous amounts of leisure time.)
Is this some kind of boomer fad? Or is it a fundamental change in Western thought?
-- Unenlightened
Dear Unenlightened:
I am pleased as punch with the sudden spiritual revival of the 1990s. Yes, fashion victims turn everything into skin-deep masquerade, but overall the change has been an enormous improvement from yuppified 1980s materialism and greed.
When I was lamenting in my writings and lectures of 1991 that young people no longer had contact with Hinduism and Buddhism (which had suffused 1960s culture), I did not dream that rescue was so near. Westerners who flip-flop completely into Asian ways are usually out of control of their psychic lives and hence hardly provide appropriate models. What we need instead is a massive integration of Western and Asian forms of thought: We must harmonize the two, for each has its own strengths and areas of blindness.
My proposal for putting the study of world religions at the center of multicultural reform of education was once rejected as outlandish or "neoconservative," yet the idea now seems to have wings. One sees it being freely borrowed (of course without acknowledgment) even by such people as that PC chameleon and ruthless academic operator, Martha Nussbaum. In conclusion, in response to your question, I think that obnoxiously Buddhist movie stars are a small price to pay for a visionary new bridging of East and West.
Confused by the modern age? Ask Camille.
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