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Real superpower in a godless universe
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Sept. 22, 1999 |
The major media were guilty of their usual elitist provincialism as they paid enormous attention to Floyd when it was a Category 4 storm threatening the vacation resorts of the Caribbean or the Florida coast, where so many affluent New Yorkers or their retired parents own property. As the storm weakened slightly and turned north toward the Carolinas, however, the Manhattan media lost interest -- as if rural Southerners don't have the same claim to national attention and concern. Hence it was poetic justice when Floyd ended up smacking metropolitan New York with record rains that turned the streets into rivers, snarled traffic and emptied the skyscrapers. By early this week, the media woke up from their trance and headlined North Carolina's terrible suffering with its floods of "almost biblical proportions," as a local official put it. Television pictures have been unable to capture the full extent of Hurricane Floyd's destruction, since it was both scattered and widespread. As a resident of one of the southeastern Pennsylvania counties declared a disaster zone last week by the federal government, I feel lucky to have escaped the worst effects of Floyd, which pelted us with torrential rain and knocked out power to a quarter million customers, including me. Many homes and businesses in the area were gutted by dangerously overflowing streams, and hundreds of people who lost everything have had to seek shelter elsewhere. Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs. Hence my disdain for the prissy social constructionism of poststructuralism and postmodernism, which are blind to nature and which produce such shallow, jaded minds in faculty as well as students. High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces. Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every other Wednesday.
On the political front, I'm relieved that Hillary Clinton and her tag-along hubby and cub have gotten the hell out of my old neck of the woods in central New York, where I grew up and where my family is still centered. Pristine Skaneateles Lake, for example, where the Clintons briefly "vacationed" (those people can't draw a tranquil breath since it entails self-examination), looms large in my personal history. I cheered when I heard that the irascible owner of Doug's Fish Fry in Skaneateles satirically vowed he would not serve the interlopers (despite civil rights laws about public accommodation) on the grounds that the Clintons are "intoxicated with power." As I picked up my fish platter and steamed clams at Doug's wildly popular East Syracuse branch on a visit in August, I enthused to the bemused cashier, "Please tell Doug that we're behind him!" Salon reader Bob Carlson writes to ask about the "sympathetic" article on Hillary in the October Esquire where Tom Junod calls her "the most interesting sexual persona of our time." While I naturally approve of all invocations of my own terminology, I must say that this piece is one of the gushiest pots of creamed tripe since Wayne Koestenbaum did his affected pirouettes around the hapless Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Psychological analysis requires deep cultural immersion as well as acute powers of observation, little of which is apparent here. Esquire, once a showcase for masculine sophistication, should be embarrassed by this syrupy exercise in sycophancy, which is studded with fake sexual plums that would choke a starving goat. Carlson also asks why Hillary "inspires an unprecedented, visceral hatred." Liberal Democrats like to claim that dislike of Hillary is simply reactionary fear of strong women. But it's Hillary's own record of hypocrisy, pretension, manipulation and deceit that repels. When feminist superwonk Susan Faludi and I went head to head on the Phil Donahue show in 1992, the one thing we beatifically agreed about was our warm support of Hillary Clinton, fresh video footage of whom Donahue ran for our comment: It was the very day that Hillary's smiling mask slipped and she made her immortal, head-tossing quip, "Well, I could have stayed home and baked cookies!" -- a sardonicism that nearly cost the Clintons mainstream support. If such "visceral hatred" exists, it should be directed against the major media, who have wrapped Hillary in a glamorous partisan fog since she arrived on the national scene. Into her have been projected the frustrated dreams of aging women journalists, those who fell for the first brave promises of feminist ideology and have slowly, decade by decade, hit the big chill of careerist melancholy, as their value has fallen on the sexual marketplace and as their husbands escape to younger, more nubile women. Militant, mechanistic, calculating Hillary is the standard-bearer of a demoralized white, upper-middle-class feminism that left many women with high status but little personal happiness. Hence Hillary's ultimate triumph must be assured, by hook or by crook.
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