A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Who is really to blame for the
historical scar of black slavery?
O Wise One,
I would be most interested to know if you think the U.S. government
should apologize to African-Americans for the existence of the institution
of slavery.
P.S. Keep THINKING, Camille. It certainly sets you apart from most
public voices in America today.
Over it in D.C.
Dear Over it:
An apology can be extended only by persons who committed the original
offense. Slavery was a commercial operation tolerated but not invented by
government. Therefore the government cannot logically apologize for it.
Second, the United States consists today of a diverse population, much of
which had no connection whatever to the slave-holding era. Italian
immigration, for example, did not begin en masse until after the Civil War.
All four of my grandparents were born in Italy; my mother did not arrive
here until the 1930s. My people had nothing to do with the African slave
trade, nor did most Asian immigrant groups.
Third, slavery was a worldwide phenomenon that still exists undercover in
some Third World countries. It has been estimated that as many as nine out
of 10 people living in classical Athens were slaves. Euripides' play, "The
Trojan Women" (made into an all-star movie by Michael Cacoyannis), is all
about the wretched enslavement faced by the queen and princesses of fallen
Troy. The movie "Spartacus," starring Kirk Douglas, is based on a real-life
rebellion of slaves in ancient Rome, where slavery was the norm. The Aztecs
of pre-Columbian Mexico not only enslaved but ritually slaughtered conquered
peoples in staggering numbers.
Fourth, any official apology out of Washington, D.C., must be coordinated with
apologies from all of the nations of West and Central Africa. Without the
active collaboration of Africans, who did the actual reconnoitering,
kidnapping and transporting of tribal young along caravan routes to commercial
ports on the West African coast, the slave trade would not have flourished as
it did. Slavery was an established feature of African culture, long before
white men arrived. From the Nuremberg trials to "Schindler's List," we are
used to critiquing individuals' implication in or moral response to the
arrest, abuse and extermination of innocent fellow citizens. Why should
African history remain immune?
Fifth, this whole issue illustrates the bankruptcy of liberal identity
politics, which has sharpened racial consciousness in this country to a
dangerous degree. Apologies are empty gestures; substantive reform must be
our aim. The state and federal government should be more concerned about
decaying public education and the disgusting physical conditions of
inner-city neighborhoods. We need public clinics to provide walk-in medical
services to the poor. We need job-training programs and better public
transit so that the poor can find work where it exists in the suburbs.
Finally, we need a more sophisticated multiculturalism that stops reductively
identifying African-Americans as former slaves and instead introduces the
young of all races to the enormity and complexity of world civilizations.
Let Swahili, Hindi and Chinese be taught in our primary schools; let
geography, with its crazily ever-shifting national borders, be memorized; let
the full range of human history be revealed, with all its atrocities.
Western imperialism is not the serpent that brought evil into paradise. The
obsession with slavery -- abolished here nearly a century and a half ago -- is
itself a form of enslavement.
O Beneficent One!
As I sauntered into my office this morning, I happened upon a
henpecking ceremony featuring the always interesting
"I'm-liberal-but-the-Supreme-Court-has-gone-too-far!" discussion. Three
of my colleagues were "disgusted" at the recent Supreme Court
decision that overturned the anti-porn Communications Decency Act. I endured the sapless
this-country's-chastity-is-at-stake-here-missy! tongue-lashing when I
disagreed with their premise that pornography on the Internet would
cause children to grow up to be violent rapists (I suppose this means
girls as well as boys). What is your opinion on the Supreme Court's
wise decision?
Freedom fighter
Dear Freedom Fighter:
I love your term "henpecking ceremony"! As a disciple of the Cambridge
School of Anthropology (Sir James George Frazer, Jane Harrison, et al.), I'm
always delighted to find yet more rituals beneath the nubby surface of modern
life. "Henpecking ceremony" will unquestionably find a permanent niche in my
vocabulary.
You can probably imagine my attitude toward the Communications Decency Act,
since I have devoted most of my adult life to Communications Indecency -- from
arguing, against heavy opposition, for the first appearance of "muff-diving"
in a Yale University Press book (it's in the Walter Pater section of "Sexual
Personae") to my introducing the term "cold douche" to the sober pages of
the Boston Globe (re: Woody Allen).
Pornography is on the Internet because the sexual imagination cannot be
caged. Establishment feminists, in league with Christian conservatives, got
Playboy and Penthouse out of the convenience-store chains and now find
porn leaping out at them on the home front. Go, Dionysus, go!
I favor the development of a voluntary international code that would allow
parents to use special software to block unwanted cyberspace material. But
the desire to "protect" children from foul images or language is ultimately
authoritarian. It's premised on the sentimental Rousseauist/Wordsworthian
view of children as immaculate saints whom corrupt adults contaminate. I
follow the Sadean/Darwinian/Freudian view that sex and aggression are
innately intertwined. If children are clever enough to be surfing the
Internet, they deserve to be rewarded with the lurid truth about life. And
antsy teenage boys are better off poring over naked ladies and naughty
hypertext than popping pills, overturning gravestones, spray-painting
swastikas on synagogues or chicken-racing down the interstate.
As for porn "causing" rape: This connection has never been factually
established, despite feminist claims to the contrary. The imagination has
its own laws. I suspect porn reduces the overall level of sexual assault, in
fact. The presence of stacks of porn magazines in criminals' homes proves
nothing, since millions of those magazines are in circulation everywhere.
Adults prowling online chats to lure naive young people into real-life
encounters is another matter entirely. No law can control that. It's up to
parents to convey to their children just how dangerous the world is -- and how
vigilance, prudence and self-defense are each person's responsibility. That
American middle-class families are failing in this rudimentary task is obvious
from the number of dumb, whiny, white girls who find college dating too
taxing to figure out without grievance committees and lawyers bucking them
up.
Dear Camille:
For the past half decade I have been the chair of a mid-sized university
department. A current debate at my particular ivory tower is the balance
between civility and freedom of speech. In the '60s I believed in
free everything, but lately I have started to believe that unrestricted
speech can do more harm than good. I have seen abusive e-mail from a
tiny minority effectively stifle open discussion on our campus network.
Much of this abuse seems to have no other purpose than to deliberately
hurt other people. A few of our students (full of rage for no
discernible reason) have found a way to inflict pain on others with
little risk of consequences. As the guy in charge, I'm not sure how to
react to this situation (although I'm leaning toward pulling the plug).
Your thoughts?
Middle-Aged White Male
Dear Middle-Aged,
Your fascinating story unfortunately leaves out some crucial details. That
tyrannical "tiny minority": Are they commandos of the left or the right?
Are the issues sexual, racial, academic? Naturally, since this is America,
I assume that no genuinely substantive philosophical or artistic matter is at
stake. (Pardon my pique: When BBC Radio interviewed me last week about
Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," I couldn't help but reflect on how monotonously
provincial "serious" media inquiry is in America, where I must endlessly
comment on post-adolescent crises involving date-rape and sexual harassment.)
It's also unclear from your letter what concrete "harm" has resulted from the
"abusive" messages in question. Is the main problem a dwindling of "open
discussion" on e-mail, or are you more concerned about the "hurt" and "pain"
that milder e-mail users claim to be experiencing? And what exactly is the
nature of the affront? Are students being mocked by name for their
parentage, intellect, appearance or shoe size? Or are they being unjustly
vilified as racist, sexist, homophobic Neo-Nazis?
From the information you discreetly provide, I can't tell if your university
is beset by hysterical, infantile ignoramuses, like the ones I confronted in
the pampered, rosy flesh at Brown University in 1992 or at Haverford College
this past spring (where the problem children were pouty Bryn Mawr lesbians
and Bloomingdale's feminists with the mental focus of fruit flies) or if you
simply have the good fortune to be nurturing a new generation of savvy,
no-holds-barred satirists in the coruscating image of Lenny Bruce.
That your university is debating the recently fashionable dichotomy between
"civility and freedom of speech" gives me chills. What does "civility" mean
here? A genuine concern for the common good, or merely bourgeois decorum,
etiquette, good manners? Unfortunately, as in the immigrant era of the
19th century, the latter is always the last resort of a snobbish power
elite that is losing its grasp on its own culture. "Civility" is now the
ultimate hypocritical badge of the politically correct, those big old beached
whales of the WASP establishment and their soulless wannabes, the
Foucault-loving assimilated Jews of fast-track, theory-mad academe. I
thought we got rid of smarmy civics lessons when Doris Day lost her
virginity.
If there's anything needed on American campuses these days, it's the
liberation of the individual voice from administration and faculty oversight
and "guidance." I believe in Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp," the raw impulse
to freedom that my 1960s generation heard in Beat poetry and
African-American music. Rock 'n' roll is rude, rude, rude!
Today's timid, thin-skinned, overprotected, white, middle-class students need
a good shot of vitriol up the kazoo -- to inoculate them against life's hard
knocks. Let them study C-SPAN's coverage of House of Commons sessions in the
British Parliament, where the catcalls, jeers and jibes nearly drown out the
speakers, who have been trained in a far more resilient, aggressive and
humorous style of discourse. The
answer to offensive speech is stronger speech -- not curtailment of speech from
above.
The real issue you are facing as chairman may be a larger one involving the
utter futility of on-campus arguments, which seem to be five to 10 years
behind events in the rest of the world. What looks like a student e-mail
problem may really be a faculty problem, which needs to be systematically
addressed. If the faculty itself is intolerant of dissent and fails to
provide a model for intelligent, witty public debate, then students can't be
blamed for grunting and blithering like Beavis and Butt-head. The truth shall set you free. Ask Camille.
Footnote: For Michel Foucault as "white bread and mayo," see my academic exposé, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders," in "Sex, Art, and American Culture," page 232. Foucault's writings on "power" conveniently ignore Hitler and the Nazi occupation of France, which Foucault and his fellow, shrewdly passive post-structuralists did precious little about.
The Phallic Guns of July (06/24/97) Hanging is too good for Timothy McVeigh (06/10/97) Fly girl as cry girl (05/27/97) Is Anne Heche another vampirish Yoko Ono? (05/13/97) Why I Go For Women With Big Beaks (04/29/97) The Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love (04/15/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
