Obama surfs through
The Obamas are a warm vision for the White House -- but he should
strive toward full transparency. Plus: Yes, I still like Sarah Palin!
By Camille Paglia
Nov. 12, 2008 | Dazed and confused. A week after the election of
Barack Obama, millions of American news junkies are in serious cold
turkey, the big bump of withdrawal from two years of addiction to the
dizzying ups and downs of a campaign that threatened never to end.
Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was "unelectable."
Obama's 8 million vote margin over his Republican opponent --
miraculously sparing us endless litigation and chad counting -- was
an exhilarating testimony to his personal gifts and power of
persuasion. And the formidable Michelle Obama, with her electric
combo of brains and style, is already rewriting first ladyhood. The
warm partnership of the Obamas (wonderfully caught by the camera as
they disappeared offstage after his victory) has set an inspiring
standard for modern marriage.
Yes, it's true we know relatively little about Barack Obama, and his
triumph is a roll of the dice. But John McCain (like Bob Dole) was a
major Republican misfire -- a candidate of personal honor and heroic
sacrifice who was woefully inadequate for the times. McCain's
lurching grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis made him look
like a ham actor on a bender. In debate, McCain was always pugnacious
but too often bland or rambling, and he often missed glaring
opportunities to score off Obama's vagueness or contradictions.
McCain's brusque treatment of his long-suffering wife, Cindy, was
also off-putting -- nowhere more so than after his concession speech,
when he barely remembered to give her a perfunctory hug. Probably no
one is more relieved by McCain's defeat than Cindy, who seemed too
frail and tightly wound for the demanding role of first lady. Now she
can slip away once more into blessed privacy.
No one knows whether Obama will move to the center or veer hard left.
Perhaps even he doesn't know. But I have great optimism about his
political instincts and deftness. He wants to be president of all the
people -- if that is possible in so divided a nation. His natural
impulse seems to be toward reconciliation and concord. The big
question will be how patient the Democratic left wing is in demanding
drastic changes in social policy, particularly dicey with a teetering
economy.
As I've watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through
crowds, I've been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and
pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. A
photograph of Obama body surfing on vacation was widely publicized in
August. But I'm talking about big-time competitive surfing, as in
this stunning video tribute to the death-defying Laird Hamilton (who,
like Obama, was raised fatherless in Hawaii). Obama's ability to stay
on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to
engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American
surfer.
In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly
disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing
with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as
every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it
were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for
many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a
tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were
never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering,
fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth
certificate never gained traction.
But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly
requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate
and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document
and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form"
certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg
Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has
Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely
available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration
propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the
costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that
finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply
admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.
Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William
Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather
Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat
about Ayers' association with Obama a year ago -- a theme that most
of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until
this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn't have cared less.
I was irritated by Hillary Clinton's aggressive flagging of Ayers in
a debate, and I accepted Obama's curt dismissal of the issue.
Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The
mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this
year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up
ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in
recent years have been "pallin' around" with Ayers, in Sarah Palin's
memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have
been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. Blame for the
failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the
conservative talk shows, which use the scare term "radical" with
simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from
scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi.
Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002
documentary "The Weather Underground," from Netflix. It was riveting.
Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant
whitewash, the full extent of the group's bombing campaign is
dramatically demonstrated. It's not for everyone: The film uses
gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to
the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate's smiling corpse, bathed in
blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse
destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has
enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin
Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.
Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic
juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real
revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the
same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of
course I had heard of Dohrn -- hers was one of the most notorious
names of our baby-boom generation -- and I knew her black-and-white
police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or
interacting with others. Well, it's pretty obvious who wears the
pants in that family!
The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable,
attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a
1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson
murders: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner
in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim's
stomach. Wild!" And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a
decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American
citizens and both private and public property?
"The Weather Underground" never searches for answers, but it does
show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely
high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her
reading the collective's first public communiqué ("Revolutionary
violence is the only way") is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of
her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized,
I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer's table
while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene -- with
Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket -- was
tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her "Klute" period, androgynous shag.
Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being
put away on ice for a long, long time.
Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and
approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers,
one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of
some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too
busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah
Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional
level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-
life views.
How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal
of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional
accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible
that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of
those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates,
in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that,
when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from
their elbows.
Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic,
anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released
during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle.
A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile
rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology --
contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and
independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower
1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois
provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.
I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the
national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart
she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are
the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-
out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big
whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She
uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-
bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice
advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife,
mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in
feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it,
particularly into the more traditional Third World.
As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared
to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy!
What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John
Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John
Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of
Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on
everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from
Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal
bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of
governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of
the Obama presidencies.
The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking
comedown for an energetic Alaskan -- nothing but droning committees
and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her
governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard
Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his
California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream
media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see
Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
On the culture front, I was startled to read of the death last week
of Yma Sumac, the virtuoso five-octave Peruvian singer who seems like
a legendary figure of the misty past. Sumac's 1950 debut
album, "Voice of the Xtabay," made a tremendous impact on me as a
child. My family attended her performance (with her company of 20
artists) at the Binghamton Theatre in what was probably 1951. I still
have the yellowed clippings and program, which lists songs eerily
mimicking the sound of the Andean winds and earthquakes. The cover
image of "Voice of the Xtabay" with a glamorous Sumac in the pose of
a prophesying priestess against a background of fierce sculptures and
an erupting volcano, contains the entire pagan worldview and nature
cult of what would become my first book, "Sexual Personae," published
40 years later. Thank you, Yma!
News items: My article "Final Cut: The Selection Process for 'Break,
Blow, Burn'" has just been published in the Fall 2008 issue of Arion
at Boston University. It is available online at Arion or via that
invaluable international site, Arts & Letters Daily. No more Mr. Nice
Guy: I've taken the gloves off against John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and
the rest of that insufferably pretentious crowd. For real English
used in a vital, vigorous contemporary way, see the new book of poems
by my colleague Jack DeWitt, "Almost Grown," which deals with cars,
gals and brawls -- American culture at its finest!
My keynote lecture for the Theodore Roethke Centenary Conference,
held at the University of Michigan last month, has gone to press for
the forthcoming issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. The lecture
is called "Dance of the Senses: Natural Vision and Psychotic
Mysticism in Theodore Roethke." One of my main points: I'm sick of
the insipid bourgeois neuroticism in current, careerist American
poetry. Bring back the psychotics!
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each
month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send
questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and
town will be published unless you request anonymity.
from: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/index1.html
