In “Glittering” return, Paglia lets loose -- Salon, Kerry Lauerman

[bsteadman]

In “Glittering” return, Paglia lets loose

The provocative Salon vet talks about her dazzling new book, "Real Housewives," and who's getting her vote

Salon
Kerry Lauerman
10/10/2012

View the complete article at:

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/cami...tering_images/

Excerpt (color emphasis added):
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Next: I know you’ve got thoughts on the election.

You’re getting an exclusive, because I haven’t said a word about this publicly. Journalists have tried to get me to comment, and I’ve refused, because I’ve been saving it for Salon!

OK: Who are you going to vote for?

I am voting for the Green Party.

Oh, you are? I don’t even know who the Green candidate is. Who is it?

Jill Stein — a doctor from Massachusetts. Now, I wouldn’t be voting Green if Roseanne Barr had won the nomination, but Stein is a solid and sensible candidate. I don’t agree with everything the Green Party says, but I’m in tune with many of its basic positions. I’m remaining a registered Democrat because I still hope for the reform of my party. If the Republican candidate were Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, I would certainly not be voting Green; I would be voting for and contributing to Obama again, as I did in 2008. There are three people on the political landscape whom I absolutely loathe — Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Dick Cheney — that delusional and mendacious war-monger. But I think that Mitt Romney is a moderate — like Nelson Rockefeller, who as governor of New York poured money into the state university system that educated me. Romney is an affable, successful businessman whose skills seem well-suited to this particular moment of economic crisis. Hence I want to use my vote to make a statement about my unhappiness with the Democratic Party and the direction it has taken. The biggest issue for me is the Obama administration’s continuation of endless war, war, war. I denounced the Iraq incursion before it even happened.

I remember that — it was in an interview with David Talbot for Salon.

It was when the cowardly major media were totally accepting the government line and the flimsy evidence that Colin Powell presented at the United Nations. It was only after the invasion had been launched — and the non-discovery of any weapons of mass destruction — that the media woke up and began its way-too-late critique. I have been revolted by the silence of the liberal mainstream media about Obama’s expansion of war — even beyond our pointless continued presence in Afghanistan. After 9/11, I was for bombing the hell out of the mountains of Afghanistan until Osama Bin Laden was caught or blown to smithereens. I certainly never believed that land troops should be used in Afghanistan. Good lord, look at the evidence of history — how ridiculous! Not only the defeat of the Soviet Union there — it goes all the way back to Alexander the Great! But the Libyan incursion is another example. The mainstream media behaved like robots as Hillary Clinton and Samanatha Power and who knows who else put pressure on Obama to go into Libya. What are we doing there? It’s absolutely madness! Then, all of a sudden, when the whole thing blows up and our ambassador is killed, Hillary is in a funk. Oh, dear, how could this have happened? In a country that we helped!

And what is the administration’s response to the murder of our ambassador? Nothing. Do we have a presidency or not? The ambassador’s journal was lying on the floor for CNN to find, and it took weeks for the FBI to get there and spend a day — after sensitive documents were stripped long ago. The State Department has clearly become a morass of political correctness. Hillary and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice should resign. Of course the mainstream media were mum for weeks about the Libyan scandal. And that just empowers the right-wing in the country. The media’s pampering and protection of Obama over the years simply led to his weakening — which was on excruciating public display at his first debate with Romney, who landed blow after blow.

So, the first reason I’m voting Green is the state of endless war. Second is the appalling rise in the military and domestic use of drones. I bought Medea Benjamin’s protest book about drones, and I agree with her. There is reason for great concern about the use of drones for police surveillance in the United States. This Democratic administration has gone very deep into the weeds here in offering incentives to local police departments to acquire drones, which are a serious threat to our civil liberties and right to privacy — which liberals should be defending. We’re on our way toward a Big Brother society.

My third reason for going Green is the creeping totalitarianism of Obamacare, which Jill Stein as a physician is rightly skeptical about. I began denouncing the Obamacare bill in my Salon column within two months after Obama’s inauguration. And I was also criticizing the President’s imprisonment within an insular circle of advisors who were not of sufficient quality and experience as administrators or strategists to sustain his presidency. If Democrats and their cohorts in the mainstream media had listened to me and begun criticizing the administration early on, there would have been ample time for a course correction and Obama would now be sailing into reelection.

But the childish naivete of so many supposedly well-educated liberals was shown by their complete failure to notice or remark on the most glaringly obvious deficiency in Obamacare: You cannot possibly expand medical coverage to millions of people without also expanding medical training and funding new clinics and hospitals. The total absence of that in the bill was ludicrous. And you still hear mush-minded liberals saying all the time in the media, “Oh, what about this nice provision or that?” When any of those things could have been easily dealt with by free-standing bills passed with bipartisan support.

The way liberals lay down flat to accept this massive, totalitarian takeover of the American medical system was shocking to me. Let’s remember how Bob Dylan broke out of folk music into the public sphere with his great song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which was about the fascist intrusion of Big Brother government. It was about the FBI and the CIA and the police — faceless bureaucracies — intruding into our private lives. What in the world has happened to the Democratic Party? Its passivity towards this awful takeover of our lives by a know-it-all government, as shown by the way Obama has governed by constantly going around Congress — appointing czars and one new layer of bureaucracy after another. And hardly a peep of protest from liberals. It’s like the movie of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” — Democrats have turned into the Eloi; they’re like sheep. They hear a signal, and it’s like pre-programmed spin in their heads — they just trot like sheep in one direction. I am voting Green in protest against the systemic corruption of my party.

Well, thanks for the exclusive. Totally agree on two subjects, Afghanistan and the growing surveillance state. But it seems like those are issues brought up — we raise them, other progressives raise them a lot — but part of why it never comes up is because the Republicans are completely complicit and would likely be worse in both of those areas.

Wait a minute, hold it, no! Listen — a huge point I want to make is that the protest against the surveillance state has, with only a few exceptions, been mainly coming from the Right and not from the Left! Talk radio has been seething with this issue for years. A good example is talk-show host Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny,” which was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller three years ago and yet got very few mainstream reviews. Democrats have got to wake up! This is why the Republican Party has gained and why the Democratic Party is in disarray — because the Democrats have lost one of their key signature issues from 1960s leftism. Why has the GOP become the freedom party?

CONTINUED IN REPLY BELOW

[bsteadman]

CONTINUED FROM ABOVE

A lot of the people who were critical of the growth of surveillance under Bush no longer care about it under Obama. That’s true. But you’re saying that it’s up to the Left, and the Democrats, to change that?

Yes. The Left must retake this issue of personal freedom and civil liberties. Over the last 20 years, freedom has become a conservative watch word, and liberals have lost their claim to it. There is a huge difference between contemporary upper-middle-class bourgeois Democratic liberalism and the fire-breathing 1960s leftism that was the mood of my college years. After all, it all began with the free speech movement at Berkeley! But liberals have now been trained to be docile and obedient. Last month, I was the featured speaker in a debate about gender roles at the Yale Political Union. At the dinner at Mory’s beforehand, the very bright and talented student organizers were telling me about how every academic year begins with a counseling session where they are instructed about the nature of sexual “consent.” So I said to them, do you understand that there is a level here of surveillance and control of your private lives that at the University of Paris would be considered grotesque? Why should the administration of any college be telling young people the way they should be interacting with each other? But these very able and promising students have been brought up in a culture of smothering paternalistic observation and control. It’s so authoritarian! But the students have been taught not to question it. To a ’60s libertarian dissident like myself, it’s really alarming.

But don’t you think the two parties have converged, have moved in the same direction, on surveillance and authoritarianism?

As someone who listens to talk radio, I must tell you that the issue of personal freedom and resistance to a swollen totalitarian government has become primary on the Right. Yes, the two parties have converged in their support of Wall Street and the military. But as with Richard Nixon going to Communist China, it may be only a Republican president who could close our excess number of military bases around the world. Why is there never a public review of our obscenely costly global presence? I believe in a strong military and in adequate funding for training and armaments, but we are seriously over-extended right now. This is where I completely agree with the Green Party. We are still stuck in a hopelessly outdated Cold War model.

And all that foreign aid — I’m sick of it! We go on and on throwing money down every corrupt rat hole in the world! Our tax dollars should be going to upgrade inner-city schools or paying for medical care for the elderly. Why aren’t Democrats in the forefront of proposing budget cuts in unnecessary government expenditures? They’ve sure made it so easy for Republicans to tag Democrats as reckless tax-and-spend liberals. And too many Democrats have fallen for the administration’s canard that we can restart the economy through more government spending.

So then, why not vote for Romney?

I cannot cast a vote for a party that cast so many votes in the primaries for the vile Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum! The Democrats may be naive about institutions and economics, but the Republicans seem to be culturally and psychologically naive in imagining for a single second that Newt Gingrich is a deep and erudite thinker! I watched that boomlet happen, and I thought, “What world do Republican voters inhabit if they mistake Gingrich’s glib, snickering, tittering snarkiness for depth and learning?”

No, the Republican Party has become very provincial in terms of culture. Nelson Rockefeller, in contrast, was a collector of first-rate abstract art! That’s one of the things I’m trying to remedy with my book. One of my target audiences is home-schooling moms — whose powerful voices I heard calling into conservative talk radio at the dawn of the Tea Party. They are formidable and capable personalities whom feminism has foolishly ignored.

I don’t like the situation where the Democratic Party is the party of art and entertainment, the party of culture, while the Republicans have become the party of economics and traditional religion. What that does is weaken both sides. One of the themes in my book is the current impoverishment of the art world because of its knee-jerk hostility to religion, which is everywhere. That kind of sneering at religion that Christopher Hitchens specialized in, despite his total ignorance of religion and his unadmirable lifestyle, was no model for atheism. I think Hitchens was a burden to atheism in terms of his decadent circuit of constant parties and showy blather. He was a sybaritic socialite and roué — not a deep thinker — whose topical, meandering writing will last. And I’m no fan of Richard Dawkins’ sniping, sniggering style of atheism, either.

A responsible atheist needs to be informed about religion in order to reject it. But the shallow, smirky atheism that’s au courant is simply strengthening the power of the Right. Secular humanism is spiritually hollow right now because art is so weak. If you don’t have art as a replacement for the Bible, then you’ve got nothing that is culturally sustaining. If all you have is “Mad Men” and the Jon Stewart “Daily Show,” then religion is going to win, because people need something as a framework to understand life. Every great religion contains enormous truths about the universe. That’s why my ’60s generation followed the Beat movement toward Zen Buddhism and then opened up that avenue to Hinduism — which is why the Beatles went to India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Then it all disappeared, when people became disillusioned with gurus. But spiritual quest was one of the great themes of the ’60s that has been lost and forgotten — that reverent embrace of all the world religions. This is why our art has become so narrow and empty. People in the humanities have sunk into this shallow, snobby, liberal style of stereotyping religious believers as ignorant and medieval, which is total nonsense. And meanwhile, the entire professional class in Manhattan and Los Angeles is doping themselves on meds and trying to survive in their manic, anxiety-filled world. And what are they producing that is of the slightest interest? Nothing. Nothing is being produced in movies or the fine arts today (except in architecture) that is not derivative of something else.
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