R E C E N T L Y The decline of pop culture (09/29/98) Ken Starr: The illicit child of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill (09/15/98) Male troubles: Bill Clinton, Matt Drudge and Mark McGwire (09/01/98) I serviced the president and all I got was this lousy Martha's Vineyard souvenir (08/18/98) Swinging with the sodomites (08/04/98) - - - - - - - - - - A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright I'll write the book of love (10/09/98) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Hedging their butts (10/09/98) Left Hook By Joe Conason Hypocrite of the House (10/05/98) Right On! By David Horowitz Clinton's amen chorus (10/12/98) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor If I write a salacious story in the first person, will readers assume it's about me? (10/06/98) On Television By Joyce Millman Teen spirit: TV's wise kids and puerile adults (10/12/98) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik Remember when it was fun to read the Web? A look back (10/13/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? (10/09/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Prince's unfairly maligned second film mixes swank screwball comedy with uptown sass (09/29/98) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Recipes make the woman (09/24/98) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A --- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled --- Do Bill and Hillary swing? Dear Camille: Are the Clintons swingers? They seemed to miss much of the fun of the '60s and '70s, and perhaps are trying to catch up. Just seems like a plausible explanation for this whole damn mess. James Dear James: The Clintons are tunnel-vision workaholics with a Messiah complex. No matter how they trim, plot, spin and screw up, they believe in their overwhelming virtue and others' diabolic envy. Yet it's the Clintons themselves who take the serpent's pleasure in outwitting others through manipulation and distortion of language. Bill longs to swing, but he's got the guilts, so he has to pay and pay at the office. His solicitous secretary must shoehorn gals into his datebook, while a phalanx of guards, valets and other uniformed nannies minds the doors and cleans up the piddle puddle. Hillary's a Protestant nun who found her melancholic cavalier in Vincent Foster (cf. the impractical, shilly-shallying Ashley Wilkes), but who prefers men-as-children -- a condescending habit of mind she got en famille when she played lady of the manor to her two foot-shuffling, forelock-tugging younger brothers (serfs who trembled before paternal tyranny). Psychologically, Hillary's too tough a nut for most of the media to crack. I stand by my early Salon portrait of her as "the first drag queen" (which the New Republic asked me to expand into a March 4, 1996, cover story that made Clinton sycophants like Linda Bloodworth-Thomason foam at the mouth). Hillary's unresolved, internal gender wars have brought a herd of stampeding hippopotami (Tripp, Lewinsky, et al.) upon us. We keep trying to turn the channel, but this ashcan-school situation-comedy is stuck in reruns. Dear Camille: I am a young white man who has recently moved to an African-American ghetto in a large Northern city. I consider myself uncommonly unprejudiced. Nevertheless, I understand why I'm virtually the only white person here: It's like living in a third world country, with all its chaos and danger and dirt. I appreciate the soulful, pre-capitalistic orientation of black culture, and am very ambivalent about the prospect of an anal, Northern European monoculture, but I wonder if the assimilation of all African-Americans into the mainstream might be best for all of us. What do you think? Brendan Farrell Dear Mr. Farrell: Inner-city African-Americans inhabit the same tenement culture as immigrant Jews or Italians did in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when Northeastern and Midwestern cities were sharply divided into teeming ethnic strongholds. Economic advancement inevitably brings dilution of ethnicity. By definition, assimilation means absorption. Middle-class African-Americans are currently debating, in many genres and forums, how much of their historical Southern agrarian identity to retain or discard. In the last half century, older American inner cities gradually became scenes of Beirut-like devastation. The primary reason for this was the shift of the national economy from industry to the white-collar service sector. Urban blacks no longer have reliable access to factory jobs (as did my immigrant grandfather, for example, who was a shoeworker). Chester, Pa., located on the Delaware River not far from where I live outside Philadelphia, was once a thriving city based on shipbuilding, which further expanded during World War II. It is now a virtual ghost town, riven by decay and crime. Because the business tax base has shrunk, the school system for the city's overwhelmingly black children is grossly underfunded. Only the state or federal government would have the resources to help Chester. After the Great Migration earlier in this century, when millions of blacks moved north to escape persecution and poverty, the social classes intermingled. In the immensely creative Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, professional, middle-class blacks lived near manual laborers, partly because property sales to blacks or Jews were officially or covertly prohibited in "restricted" communities outside the city. Decade by decade since segregation was banned, middle-class blacks have understandably fled the crime-filled inner cities to make better lives for their families, leaving the working-class, welfare-dependent "third world" that you describe. The U.S. government's hypocritical attitude toward drugs (bourgeois Prozac and Ritalin are fine; heroin and crack are not) has created a social catastrophe, destabilizing urban economies by making a joke out of the work ethic: Why put in 40 hours a week at minimum wage when you can score gold jewelry and a luxury car with a few wholesale drug deals? Furthermore, the Washington political establishment, for its own preening self-image, is addicted to dispensing foreign aid, exporting billions of our tax dollars that should be salvaging the inner cities. No American city street anywhere should be permanently strewn with trash and broken glass. Too many areas of Philadelphia on the periphery of booming Center City (with its gleaming, green skyscrapers) are filled with block after block of abandoned, fire-hazard buildings that should long ago have been torn down and turned into public parks. Social justice demands a Marshall Plan for America's inner cities. I'm sick to death of reading about the fractious Balkans, which have been imploding for a thousand damned years. We have problems of equal or greater importance at home. The bottom line must be decent education, housing, sanitation and medical care for the poor. There is enormous opportunity here for young, idealistic politicians of both parties to design master plans for urban economic redevelopment. But it would require leftists to acknowledge the fertility of capitalism, and it would require conservatives to recognize that it is government's duty to provide a safety net for every citizen. N E X T_P A G E | Can a penis-adoring man find domestic bliss with a woman?