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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille:
After listening to much of "Judge" Ken Starr's testimony at this morning's
(Nov. 19) hearing on impeachment, I am wondering more now than ever if I am
the only person who perceives this man to be a fat, chubby queen, jealous
of President Clinton's accomplishments, looks and sexual conquests? As a geeky
queer high schooler, I remember being jealous of handsome, successful
athletes, but as they say, I got a life.
Starr, on the other hand, seems to be carrying on a personal crusade,
smug and fleshy with the smile of an old auntie who feels powerful because
she's peeked into her nephew's bottom drawer. Listening to the
Lewinsky-Tripp tapes, I found the gals' selfishness, greed and
self-importance refreshing; Starr on the other hand, seems to be the evil
queen intent on wreaking havoc, with no apparent motive other than some
petty jealousy written across his every gesture.
Am I nuts? You may have commented on this already, but if not, please advise!
Krazy About Kenneth
Dear Krazy About Kenneth:
Independent counsel Ken Starr's marathon one-day testimony before the fractious Judiciary Committee, which was televised around the world, must have made the U.S. government look like an "I Love Lucy" set overrun by jackasses. All American citizens should feel profoundly embarrassed.
Leaving aside the question of Rep. Henry Hyde's astonishingly clumsy and sneeringly partisan chairing of the session, I agree with you that there is something damnably odd about Starr's sexual persona. Your analogies of "chubby queen" and "old auntie" aren't far off the mark. I don't really accept the now-familiar charge that Starr is "jealous" of Clinton; rather, Clinton represents for Starr all the slippin' and slidin' decadent elitism of our vainglorious 1960s generation -- which has mightily screwed up in taking command of the Ship of State.
Starr is a bungler. He's disorganized, erratic and imaginatively limited. As a prosecutor, he's blown a case where there is, in my view, overwhelming evidence of official misdeeds in half a dozen different areas, including foreign fund-raising. And he's destroyed his own career in the process: By the quirky "Peter principle," Starr rose to his level of incompetence. As a Democrat and civil libertarian who voted for Bill Clinton twice, I'm furious that the independent counsel never delivered to Congress his findings, however mixed, about the White House's blatantly unethical pirating and stockpiling of opponents' FBI files.
You are rightly picking up something queasily feminine in Starr's self-presentation. Starr on TV made me see a shadowy Freudian family romance: He has physically absorbed a genteel, long-suffering, idolized mother, even while he still struggles to sustain the imperial authority of a feared father's judgmental moralism. It's a death match between emotion and logic -- with Clinton, like a battered teddy bear, the sibling proxy. Starr's twinkly, dimply, compulsive smiling (which my partner Alison compares to NOW president Patricia Ireland's) is false: It's a desperate papering over of some deep psychic schism, not just in the family but in the general culture.
We of the turbulent 1960s thought we were at war with the establishment, but it turns out that our bitterest quarrel was with each other. Our psychodrama remains unresolved, even as we hurtle toward retirement age, bankrupting Social Security in the process. Elvis and Evita -- oh, I mean Bill and Hillary -- have shamed themselves by their arrogant mishandling of their jobs, but so have their conservative persecutors and age-mates, the Damp Blobby Twins, Newt and Ken.
The dynamics of the 2000 presidential election are already being shaped by the implosion of the capital's political and media elite. Some rough beast is slouching toward Washington to be born: Will this cleansing energy emanate from frontier-style Texas or somewhere else in the storm cell of American nature?
Dear Camille:
I'm curious about your response to the photos of Hillary Clinton in the
current Vogue.
Although she looks lovely, are she and Oprah setting a new ideal for
intelligent women to become physical works of art? Isn't this playing into
the crippling obsession with perfection? Now we're supposed to be wives,
supermoms, CEOs and have time to whip ourselves into size 2 oblivion?
Where's the fun? Where's the humor? She deserves to feel good about herself,
but are we supposed to assume this will turn Bill on and thereby fix his
roving eye after years of Hillary playing the role of UberWife?
A Fan
Dear Fan:
Superbutch Hillary does "female" best when she's sexually most isolated. My fave star moment was when she turned up for her Starr chamber courthouse rendezvous in a black velvet opera coat trimmed with Napoleonic gold braid. In catty "All About Eve" terms, I'm tickled that premenopausal Hillary's put big-boobed, moist-lipped, upstart Monica in her place in Vogue's portfolio of reactionary royalist portraiture. All that's missing is a liveried footman presenting Monica's head to the queen on a satin pillow.
However, I share your concern about Vogue's fashion fascism in remaking Oprah Winfrey, who in the indefatigable promotion of her new film "Beloved" (which gossip columnist Liz Smith decrees has "bombed") seems to have misjudged the public's ability to absorb the schizophrenic duality of Oprah as fabulous celebrity reclining on a Madame de Pompadour chaise longue and Oprah as heir to African-American misery and oppression, iconically embodied in Time's grisly, full-page, sepia publicity shot of her as "Beloved's" ex-slave Sethe with back scarred from whipping.
What also bothers me is the way the Northeastern major media continue to hurtle on in their naked bias toward favored figures like Hillary, whom Vogue is shamelessly canonizing. People can't seem to think straight about women, can they? The mother imago blurs and blinds. Why is it, for example, that the front-page headline of the Nov. 24 National Enquirer is "Chelsea Clinton Collapses" -- while the major media piously refuses to mention or "exploit" Chelsea except when her father cynically uses her as a photo op?
For months, the tabloids have been reporting that Chelsea has been rushed repeatedly to California hospitals because of mysterious, crippling, abdominal pain. If these rumors are untrue, it's the obligation of the national press to investigate and say so. If they are true, then Chelsea's mother -- not just her philandering father -- bears some responsibility for inflicting an impossible emotional burden on her daughter.
I agree with most of Hillary's policy positions on feminism and social services, but I loathe her sanctimony and hypocrisy -- and I am incredulous at the supposedly sophisticated media mavens who won't admit that the empress has no clothes.
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