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
Wisdom in a bottle:
"BINGE DRINKING" AND THE NEW CAMPUS NANNYISM
O Auntie Mame!
I once again find myself in the spin cycle over the latest phase of screaming
campus hysterics: "Binge Drinking." Though I'm the first person to call the recent
death of the Lousiana State University student at the center of this episode a real tragedy, the
doting uber-mothers and fathers of Clean Campus Living are now on a new
warpath -- probably since date rape and heterosexual AIDS have lost their
novelty as crusades. Thankfully, I'm beyond their clutches, as I graduated
from my university-cum-nursery school a couple of years back. My question to
you, Madam Oracle, is: Do we need any more campus babysitting for "boys"
and "girls" who 20 years ago, at their age, were considered very much ADULTS?
Where's the common sense in these fools? Sounds like Carry Nation wields a
sledge hammer, not an ax, these days!
Quick -- Pass me the poppers!
Shaken, Not Stirred
Dear Shaken:
The cultural savvy of Salon readers is well-demonstrated by your raffish
sobriquet alluding to one of my favorite scenes in "Auntie Mame," where
Mame's schoolboy nephew perkily mixes a very professional martini for the
flabbergasted banker, Mr. Babcock: "Stir, never shake--it bruises the gin!"
The authoritarian Big Mommy and Daddy who run the summer camps we call
colleges can't decide what a student is these days: A thinking, breathing,
exploring, risk-taking adult? Or a cash cow haltered and hidebound by the
thick parental checkbook? I say let the herd out of the barn, and let the
hooves fall where they may! Growing up means being allowed to take a tumble
in your own dung.
The absurdity of the Louisiana State University case is that alcohol was
banned on campus, as if the latter were in Puritan Salem rather than Xanadu
Baton Rouge, La. Thus LSU students are forced to chug-to-the-max off campus to
sustain their high and then endanger their lives and others' by driving home
in a sodden state.
"Binge drinking" is a Dionysian response to Apollonian overcontrol of another
area of life. I have always strongly opposed the draconian raising of the
legal drinking age to 21 in this country, a highly politicized and
infantilizing measure that deprived the majority of young people of their
freedoms in order to constrain a tiny, careless minority responsible for
traffic accidents.
Alcohol, with its ancient history and its standardized, quality-controlled
modern commercial production, is far preferable to drugs or pills as a tool
of youthful experimentation. Manipulation of mood and alteration of
consciousness are important first stages in higher education -- as long as one
is not destroyed by them. Identity is developed by a temporary dissolution
of the mental structure imposed by parents, teachers and other adults.
Creativity in the arts especially profits from that dangerous, exciting
fluidity. Teetotalers may be the spine of the nation, but drinkers are its
heart and balls.
European universities would never dream of meddling in their students'
private lives. But American universities have reverted to "in loco parentis"
It's not binge drinking that's the problem -- it's the banality and mediocrity
of American higher education that produces students' desperate lust for
gusto. I have certainly seen many talented people destroyed by alcohol and
drugs. But as William Blake said, "The road of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom."
My sympathies are with the orgiasts -- like Oscar Wilde, who quipped, "Work is
the curse of the drinking class." And like Patsy Stone of "Absolutely
Fabulous," whose Ivana-blonde image, with a vodka bottle plastered to her
lips, is printed on one of of my favorite T-shirts. In vino veritas!
Dear Camille:
What is your take on the American South? By that I mean, what do
you make of a former left-wing scholar like Eugene Genovese currently extolling the
South, particularly the ante-bellum South, as a legitimate source of pre-
(and perhaps post?) modern thought in America? Are writers like Fitzhugh
and the Agrarians the antidote to milquetoast Anglo-American culture?
Can the South still save us from the myopic Cartesian world of Descartes,
Locke, etc.? Can this tradition unite the pre-modern pagan (I suspect
you fall here, Camille), the pre-modern Christian, and the
post-modernist? The South's instinctive rejection of abstract claims of
equality, along with its praise of the martial arts, must place it
somewhat near to your heart, no?
Lost in Atlanta
Dear Lost:
I appreciate your question, since I've just finished watching the
double-video version of the restored print of D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic, "The
Birth of a Nation." Like Leni Riefenstahl's masterful documentaries for
Hitler, "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia," Griffith's film is an example of
a technically pioneering and cinematically brilliant work that is difficult
to admire because of its blatant racist ideology.
Based on a novel and play called "The Clansman" (as in Ku Klux Klan), "The
Birth of a Nation" is historically significant because it captures the
intense political resentments of the defeated South that have never entirely
gone away, despite the passage of so many generations. The Kentucky-born son
of a Confederate Army cavalry officer, Griffith took his father's angry view
of the Civil War and its economically chaotic aftermath and was genuinely
bewildered by the NAACP-organized protests against his commercially
successful major film.
My own personal experience of the South has been limited to driving by car
several times with my family to visit relatives in Florida. These trips were
made in the mid- to late-1950s before the construction of the vast interstate
superhighways, so that we slowly went from town to town along old roads that
gave us a gritty sense of everyday life.
As Italians, we were aliens, and we were made to feel it. In fact, our New
York State license plates (we were living in Syracuse) were apparently
interpreted to mean "Jewish" -- so our trips provided a surprising lesson in
anti-Semitism as well.
My brief glimpses of Southern black life were chilling -- the toilets and water
fountains marked "Colored" and "Whites Only"; the ramshackle, one-room
roadside houses with walls of ancient, weatherbeaten planks whose see-through
gaps let in the wind and rain. Forty years later, I can still feel my vague
panic at imagining what it was like to have been trapped in those
circumstances.
Mixed up with these anxious impressions was the overwhelming sensuality of
the torrid Southern heat, the humid haze hanging over the dusty fields, the
acrid smell of Spanish moss that draped from overarching trees. And then the
abundant, luscious food -- spicy, vinegar-tart pulled-pork barbecue; delicately
herbed, batter-fried chicken; thick-cut home-cured ham and bacon; hot
biscuits and grits running with farm-fresh butter; bulging mesh sacks of
sweet, fragrant Georgia pecans in the shell, sold along with fireworks and
Confederate flags at highway stands.
The South, with all its complex permutations from inbred mountain hollers and
hard-scrabble red-clay family farms to ancestral tidewater estates and
stately Greek Revival plantation mansions, is obviously a closed realm of its
own, haunted by ghosts of the past. Its most acclaimed literature is
characterized by a persistent gloomy atmosphere of Gothic decadence, from
Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.
I've often wondered if it was the theory of decadence in my own book, "Sexual
Personae," that led to its quick acquisition by the great Yale University
Press editor, Ellen Graham, a stately Southerner of the formidable
iron-magnolia school, who saw something in the bulky manuscript that others
didn't (it had been rejected by seven publishers and five agents). Southern
women of every social class seem to have a toughness, resilience, and verbal
brio that put whiny Northeastern feminists to shame.
The Agrarian sensibility that you cite shaped the New Criticism, which began
in the 1930s and dominated American literary studies from the 1940s through
the late 1960s, when I entered graduate school. Cleanth Brooks, a classic
Southern gentleman and premiere New Critic, stressed formalistic internal
analysis of the text. In college, I detested Brooks' famous book, "The
Well-Wrought Urn," for what I regarded as its sentimental, namby-pamby,
desexed, high Protestant moralism. Brooks was one of the principal implicit
targets of my doctoral dissertation (also called "Sexual Personae"), with its
deliberately lurid pagan themes.
Three decades later, after the atrocities of jargon-filled, nakedly careerist
poststructuralism and postmodernism, I have a quite different view of Brooks
and his fellow critics. They were honest, ethical, deeply learned men who
genuinely loved literature and who had a Southern feeling for nature (the
material frame of existence ignored by the solipsistic school of Foucault).
It's also obvious that, over the same 30 years, American politics has slowly
shifted away from the Northeastern patrician establishment (Harriman,
Rockefeller, Kennedy) and big-city bosses (Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley),
first toward
the Southwest and California (Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan) and now toward the
South (Clinton, Gore, Gingrich).
The tail-between-his-legs withdrawal of Joe Kennedy from the Massachusetts
gubernatorial race last week -- as well as the recent shameful midterm
resignation of Staten Island's U.S. Representative Susan Molinari to become a
TV host -- dramatizes the Northeastern demoralization and decline.
The consequences of the present cultural shift toward the New South will not
be fully understood for many years. While the Northeast may be
intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, there may also be reason to worry if
the South's legacy of stirring visions and grisly nightmares becomes national
property .
Dear Camille:
As a military man, I have followed the recent battles over the admittance
of women to the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute with great
interest. I am generally opposed to their admittance, but not necessarily
for the reasons one might think -- that I am some Neanderthal misogynist.
On the contrary, I find that most of these test cases result in a lessening
of standards in order to accommodate the egalitarian mindset which says
that anyone can do anything if they only set their minds to it (and heaven
forbid if we were to hurt their self-esteem if we tell them that they can't
after all!).
An example would be the army's current physical fitness tests
where women receive the exact same score as men for doing considerably less
push-ups or sit-ups. Unfortunately, a fin-stabilized armor-piercing
discarding sabot round for a M1A1 tank weighs the same whether it is
"person"-handled by a man or a woman. As a result of misguided policy,
organizational effectiveness is held hostage to social-policy whimsy. Any thoughts on the subject?
Colonel Bob
Dear Colonel Bob:
I'm very happy to pass along to Salon readers your vigorous protest against
the out-of-control political correctness of the Pentagon hierarchy, who are
indeed compromising military readiness in their zeal for misguided social
experiments. Woman's advance in society, which is the proper aim of
feminism, should not take precedence over the nation's defense.
The sexual double standard now tolerated in physical fitness tests (in fire
departments as well as the military) is a reactionary embarrassment. Women
under fire in a real war would have to do a lot more than push computer
buttons.
In this relatively recent period of American dominance (the United States
wasn't even a world player until after World War One), misty-eyed liberals
imagine that wars are a thing of the past. But history shows that war
regularly breaks out and escalates over border disputes, ethnic rivalries,
and imperial ambitions.
All it would take for global politics to veer toward disaster is a protracted
climate change (caused by a serious weather shift or a Krakatoa-size volcanic
eruption polluting the atmosphere), which would reduce food production and
destabilize the economy. Law and order are far more fragile than liberals
like to think. Unchecked police power certainly leads to abuses (as in the
outrageous recent torture of a Haitian immigrant in a Brooklyn police
station), but a strong military deserves unanimous support from across the
political spectrum.
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered? Ask Camille.
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