Ubiquitous
2015-07-30 11:03:48 UTC
Trump's a carnival barker, but funnier than Stewart. Richard Dawkins is
a joke. Sanders and Drudge earn approval
In part one of our three-day conversation with Camille Paglia, the
brilliant cultural critic talked Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton and the odd,
persistent return of 90s political correctness. Today she takes on
even hotter-button topics: Religion and atheism, Jon Stewarts Daily
Show legacy, liberals and Fox News, and presidential candidates Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Youre an atheist, and yet I dont ever see you sneer at religion in
the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will.
What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens
and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for
faith?
I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last
book, Glittering Images, that Sneering at religion is juvenile,
symptomatic of a stunted imagination. It exposes a state of perpetual
adolescence that has something to do with their parents theyre still
sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile
atheist out there when I began publicly saying I am an atheist, on my
book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S,
because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started
coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities,
which they werent bold enough to do before. But the point is that I
felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great
respect for religion in generalfrom the iconography to the sacred
architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at
the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.
Im speaking here as an atheist. I dont believe there is a God, but I
respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a
complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and
human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has
produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging
to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief
system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics
applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there
that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great
tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer
have the central status they once had in education, because we have
steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.
The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack
of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people
in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and
yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of
Southern conservatives.
But yes, the sneering is ridiculous! Exactly what are these people
offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer artand the whole
history of spiritual commentary on the universe. Theres a tremendous
body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be
called cosmic consciousness. It has to be remembered that my
generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism,
which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every
directionyou had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi
Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So
I really thought we were entering this great period of religious
syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But
all of a sudden, it disappeared! The Asian religions vanishedand I
really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow
environment where theyre peppered with images from mass media at a
particularly debased stage.
There are no truly major stars left, and I dont think theres much
profound work being done in pop culture right now. Young people have
nothing to enlighten them, which is why theyre clinging so much to
politicized concepts, which give them a sense of meaning and direction.
But this sneering thing! I despise snark. Snark is a disease that
started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has
proliferated since. I think its horrible for young people! And this
kind of snark atheismlets just invent that term right nowis stupid,
and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens book
God is Not Great was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of
the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and
the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful
chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he
sold the book and then didnt write onehe talked it. It was an
appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute
fraud to be talking about religion. He appears to have done very
little scholarly study. Hitchens didnt even know Judeo-Christianity
well, much less the other world religions. He had that glib Oxbridge
debater style in person, but youre remembered by your written work,
and Hitchens written work was weak and wont last.
Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal
vendetta, and again, hes someone who has never taken the time to do
the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been
based on the pre-Christian religions. My first book, Sexual
Personae, was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it
began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of
Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, Ive been studying
Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the
close of the Ice Age. In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the
scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of
religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native
American view. Im not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in
the pre-Christian era.
You mentioned Jon Stewart, who leaves the Daily Show in two weeks.
Theres handwringing from folks who think that he elevated or even
transcended snark, that he utilized irony very effectively during the
Bush years. And that he did the work of critiquing and fact-checking
Fox and others on the right who helped create this debased media
culture? Whats your sense of his influence?
I think Stewarts show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of
contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I
hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that
filter of sophomoric snark. Comedy, to me, is one of the major modern
genres, and the big influences on my generation were Lenny Bruce and
Mort Sahl. Then Joan Rivers had an enormous impact on meshes one of
my major role models. Its the old caustic, confrontational style of
Jewish comedy. It was Jewish comedians who turned stand-up from the old
gag-meister shtick of vaudeville into a biting analysis of current
social issues, and they really pushed the envelope. Lenny Bruce used
stand-up to produce gasps and silence from the audience. And thats my
standarda comedy of personal risk. And by that standard, Im sorry,
but Jon Stewart is not a major figure. Hes certainly a highly
successful T.V. personality, but I think he has debased political
discourse. I find nothing incisive in his work. As for his influence,
if he helped produce the hackneyed polarization of moral liberals
versus evil conservatives, then hes partly at fault for the political
stalemate in the United States.
I dont demonize Fox News. At what point will liberals wake up to
realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long? They
controlled the major newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and T.V.
networks. Its no coincidence that all of the great liberal forums have
been slowly fading. They once had such incredible power. Since the
rise of the Web, the nightly network newscasts have become peripheral,
and the New York Times and the Washington Post have been slowly fading
and are struggling to survive.
Historically, talk radio arose via Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s
precisely because of this stranglehold by liberal discourse. For
heavens sake, I was a Democrat who had just voted for Jesse Jackson in
the 1988 primary, but I had to fight like mad in the early 1990s to get
my views heard. The resistance of liberals in the media to new ideas
was enormous. Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but
thats simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk
ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells.
They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone
else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. Its so
simplistic!
Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of
liberal thought in the media. When the first secret Planned Parenthood
video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media
was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was
released. But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative
talk shows on radio and television. It was a huge and disturbing
story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of
censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were
trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of
Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive
rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and
immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the
conduct of Planned Parenthood officials. But heres my point: it is
everyones obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both
liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a
full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.
What is your media diet like?
The first thing I always turn to is the Drudge Report, which Ive done
around the clock since the birth of that page. In fact, my column in
Salon was the first to take the Drudge Report seriously as a major new
force in the media. I loved it from the start! Its tabloid format is
greatso easy and accessible and such a pleasure to read. Im so happy
that Matt Drudge has kept that classic design. Silly people claim hes
stuck in the past, but thats absurd. Drudge is invoking the great
populist formula of tabloids like the New York Post and the New York
Daily News, which were pitched to working-class readers. Andy Warhol,
who came out of a working-class immigrant factory family in Pittsburgh,
adored the tabloids and reproduced their front pages in big acrylic
paintings. The tabloids were always the voice of the people. I admire
the mix on Drudge of all types of news stories, high and low. The
reason that nobody has been able to imitate Drudge is because hes an
auteur, stamping the page with his own unique sensibility and
instincts. It must be exhausting, because he must constantly filter
world news on a daily basis. Hes simply an aggregator, not a news
source, but he has an amazing sense of collage. The page is fluid and
always in motion, and Drudge is full of jokes and mischief.
So I begin with that, and then I check the New York Post, the New York
Times, Salon.com, Lucianne.com, and Arts & Letters Daily. The
Washington Post online is far more ideologically diverse than the
printed newspaper ever was. Ill look at British papers of opposing
sides, like The Guardian and The Telegraph, and Im a big fan of the
tabloid Daily Mail. I like Google News a lotI can type in a topic
like Hillary and get a whole range of articles, both liberal and
conservative, including on obscure fringe web sites. I think its an
absolute civic obligation for people to at least briefly review the
full political spectrum of viewpoints on any major issue.
I was looking back at some of your old Salon columns, and was surprised
to see some kind words for Donald Trump. There was one in particular
when you were quite delighted by the way Trump went after Rosie
ODonnell on The View.
[laughs] Well, my view of Trump began in the negative. When he was
still relatively unknown nationally, he jackhammered a magnificent Art
Deco sculpture over the main doorway of the Bonwit Teller department
store on 5th Avenue. It was 1980, and he was demolishing the store to
build Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had offered to take
the sculpture, but Trump got impatient and just had it destroyed. I
still remember that vividly, and Im never going to forget it! I
regard Donald Trump as an art vandal, equivalent to ISIS destroying
ancient Assyrian sculptures. As a public figure, however, Trump is
something of a carnival barker.
But as a provocateur yourself, you must admire the very interesting his
game he is playing.
So far this year, Im happy with what Trump has done, because hes
totally blown up the media! All of a sudden, BOOM! That lack of
caution and shooting from the hip. Hes not a president, of course.
Hes not remotely a president. He has no political skills of any kind.
Hes simply an American citizen who is creating his own bully pulpit.
He speaks in the great populist way, in the slangy vernacular. He
takes hits like a comedianand to me hes more of a comedian than Jon
Stewart is! Like claiming John McCain isnt a war hero, because his
kind of war hero doesnt get capturedthats hilarious! Thats like
something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! Its so startling
and entertaining.
Its as if the stars have suddenly shiftedbecause were getting a
mix-up in the other party too, as in that recent disruption of the
NetRoots convention, with all that raw emotion and chaos in the air.
To me, it feels very 1960s. These sudden disruptions, as when the
Yippies would appear to do a stuntlike when they invaded Wall Street
and threw dollar bills down on the stock exchange and did pig-calls!
Im enjoying this, but its throwing both campaigns off. None of the
candidates on either side know how to respond to this kind of wild
spontaneity, because we havent seen it in so long.
Politics has always been performance art. So well see who the
candidates are who can think on their feet. Thats certainly how I
succeeded in the early 1990s. Before that, the campus thought police
could easily disrupt visiting speakers who came with a prepared speech
to read. But they couldnt disrupt me, because I had studied comedy
and did improv! The great comedians knew how to deal with hecklers in
the audience. I loved to counterattack! Protestors were helpless when
the audiences laughed.
So what Im saying is that the authentic 1960s were about street
theaterchaos, spontaneity, caustic humor. And Trump actually has it!
He does better comedy than most professional comedians right now,
because were in this terrible period where the comedians do their
tours with canned jokes. They go from place to place, saying the same
list of jokes in the same way. But the old vaudevillians had 5,000
jokes stored in their heads. They went out there and responded to that
particular audience on that particular night. They had to read the
crowd and try out what worked or didnt work.
Our politicians, like our comedians, have been boring us with their
canned formulas for way too long. So thats why Donald Trump has
suddenly leapt in the polls. Hes a great stand-up comedian. Hes
anti-PChes not afraid to say things that are rude and mean. I think
hes doing a great service for comedy as well as for politics!
Does Bernie Sanders remind you at all of the other side of the 60s
ethos? That rumpled, socialist Clean Gene?
Totally! Its been such a long timeI thought it was gone forever!
Bernie Sanders has the authentic, empathic, 1960s radical voice. Its
so refreshing. Now, Im a supporter of Martin OMalleyI sent his
campaign a contribution the very first day he declared. But I would
happily vote for Sanders in the primary. His type of 1960s radical
activist style descends from the 1930s unionization movement, when
organizers who were sometimes New York Jewish radicals went down to
help the mine workers of Appalachia resist company thugs. There are so
many famous folk songs that came out of that violent period.
When I was in collegefrom 1964 to 1968I saw what real leftists look
like, because a lot of people at my college, which was the State
University of New York at Binghamton, were radicalized Jews from
downstate. They were very avant-garde, doing experimental theater and
modern dance, and they knew all about abstract expressionism. Their
parents were often Holocaust survivors, so they had a keen sense of
history. And they spoke in a very direct and open working-class style.
Thats why, in the 1990s, I was saying that the academic leftists were
such fraudssitting around applying Foucault to texts and thinking that
was leftism! No it wasnt! It was a snippy, prim, smug bourgeois
armchair leftism. Real 60s radicals rarely went to grad school and
never became big-wheel humanities professors, with their fat salaries
and perks. The proof of the vacuity of academic leftism for the past
forty years is the complete silence of leftist professors about the
rise of the corporate structure of the contemporary universitytheir
total failure to denounce the gross expansion of the administrator
class and the obscene rise in tuition costs. The leading academic
leftists are such fraudstheyve played the system and are retiring as
millionaires!
But what you see in Bernie Sandersthat is truly the voice of populism.
I love the way he says, This is not about me, its about youits
about building a national grassroots organization. That is perfect!
I doubt Sanders can win a national election with his inflammatory
socialist styleplus you need someone in the White House who knows how
to manage a huge bureaucracy, so Im pessimistic about his chances.
However, I think that he is tonicto force the Democratic party, which
I belong to, to return to its populist roots. I applaud everything that
Sanders is doing!
--
Is Obama the cause or a symptom of America's terminal illness?
a joke. Sanders and Drudge earn approval
In part one of our three-day conversation with Camille Paglia, the
brilliant cultural critic talked Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton and the odd,
persistent return of 90s political correctness. Today she takes on
even hotter-button topics: Religion and atheism, Jon Stewarts Daily
Show legacy, liberals and Fox News, and presidential candidates Donald
Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Youre an atheist, and yet I dont ever see you sneer at religion in
the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will.
What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens
and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for
faith?
I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last
book, Glittering Images, that Sneering at religion is juvenile,
symptomatic of a stunted imagination. It exposes a state of perpetual
adolescence that has something to do with their parents theyre still
sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile
atheist out there when I began publicly saying I am an atheist, on my
book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S,
because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started
coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities,
which they werent bold enough to do before. But the point is that I
felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great
respect for religion in generalfrom the iconography to the sacred
architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at
the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.
Im speaking here as an atheist. I dont believe there is a God, but I
respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a
complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and
human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has
produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging
to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief
system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics
applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there
that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great
tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer
have the central status they once had in education, because we have
steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.
The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack
of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people
in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and
yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of
Southern conservatives.
But yes, the sneering is ridiculous! Exactly what are these people
offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer artand the whole
history of spiritual commentary on the universe. Theres a tremendous
body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be
called cosmic consciousness. It has to be remembered that my
generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism,
which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every
directionyou had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi
Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So
I really thought we were entering this great period of religious
syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But
all of a sudden, it disappeared! The Asian religions vanishedand I
really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow
environment where theyre peppered with images from mass media at a
particularly debased stage.
There are no truly major stars left, and I dont think theres much
profound work being done in pop culture right now. Young people have
nothing to enlighten them, which is why theyre clinging so much to
politicized concepts, which give them a sense of meaning and direction.
But this sneering thing! I despise snark. Snark is a disease that
started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has
proliferated since. I think its horrible for young people! And this
kind of snark atheismlets just invent that term right nowis stupid,
and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens book
God is Not Great was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of
the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and
the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful
chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he
sold the book and then didnt write onehe talked it. It was an
appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute
fraud to be talking about religion. He appears to have done very
little scholarly study. Hitchens didnt even know Judeo-Christianity
well, much less the other world religions. He had that glib Oxbridge
debater style in person, but youre remembered by your written work,
and Hitchens written work was weak and wont last.
Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal
vendetta, and again, hes someone who has never taken the time to do
the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been
based on the pre-Christian religions. My first book, Sexual
Personae, was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it
began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of
Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, Ive been studying
Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the
close of the Ice Age. In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the
scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of
religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native
American view. Im not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in
the pre-Christian era.
You mentioned Jon Stewart, who leaves the Daily Show in two weeks.
Theres handwringing from folks who think that he elevated or even
transcended snark, that he utilized irony very effectively during the
Bush years. And that he did the work of critiquing and fact-checking
Fox and others on the right who helped create this debased media
culture? Whats your sense of his influence?
I think Stewarts show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of
contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I
hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that
filter of sophomoric snark. Comedy, to me, is one of the major modern
genres, and the big influences on my generation were Lenny Bruce and
Mort Sahl. Then Joan Rivers had an enormous impact on meshes one of
my major role models. Its the old caustic, confrontational style of
Jewish comedy. It was Jewish comedians who turned stand-up from the old
gag-meister shtick of vaudeville into a biting analysis of current
social issues, and they really pushed the envelope. Lenny Bruce used
stand-up to produce gasps and silence from the audience. And thats my
standarda comedy of personal risk. And by that standard, Im sorry,
but Jon Stewart is not a major figure. Hes certainly a highly
successful T.V. personality, but I think he has debased political
discourse. I find nothing incisive in his work. As for his influence,
if he helped produce the hackneyed polarization of moral liberals
versus evil conservatives, then hes partly at fault for the political
stalemate in the United States.
I dont demonize Fox News. At what point will liberals wake up to
realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long? They
controlled the major newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and T.V.
networks. Its no coincidence that all of the great liberal forums have
been slowly fading. They once had such incredible power. Since the
rise of the Web, the nightly network newscasts have become peripheral,
and the New York Times and the Washington Post have been slowly fading
and are struggling to survive.
Historically, talk radio arose via Rush Limbaugh in the early 1990s
precisely because of this stranglehold by liberal discourse. For
heavens sake, I was a Democrat who had just voted for Jesse Jackson in
the 1988 primary, but I had to fight like mad in the early 1990s to get
my views heard. The resistance of liberals in the media to new ideas
was enormous. Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but
thats simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk
ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells.
They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone
else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. Its so
simplistic!
Now let me give you a recent example of the persisting insularity of
liberal thought in the media. When the first secret Planned Parenthood
video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media
was kept totally in the dark about it, even after the second video was
released. But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative
talk shows on radio and television. It was a huge and disturbing
story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of
censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were
trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of
Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive
rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and
immediately felt there were serious breaches of medical ethics in the
conduct of Planned Parenthood officials. But heres my point: it is
everyones obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both
liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a
full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.
What is your media diet like?
The first thing I always turn to is the Drudge Report, which Ive done
around the clock since the birth of that page. In fact, my column in
Salon was the first to take the Drudge Report seriously as a major new
force in the media. I loved it from the start! Its tabloid format is
greatso easy and accessible and such a pleasure to read. Im so happy
that Matt Drudge has kept that classic design. Silly people claim hes
stuck in the past, but thats absurd. Drudge is invoking the great
populist formula of tabloids like the New York Post and the New York
Daily News, which were pitched to working-class readers. Andy Warhol,
who came out of a working-class immigrant factory family in Pittsburgh,
adored the tabloids and reproduced their front pages in big acrylic
paintings. The tabloids were always the voice of the people. I admire
the mix on Drudge of all types of news stories, high and low. The
reason that nobody has been able to imitate Drudge is because hes an
auteur, stamping the page with his own unique sensibility and
instincts. It must be exhausting, because he must constantly filter
world news on a daily basis. Hes simply an aggregator, not a news
source, but he has an amazing sense of collage. The page is fluid and
always in motion, and Drudge is full of jokes and mischief.
So I begin with that, and then I check the New York Post, the New York
Times, Salon.com, Lucianne.com, and Arts & Letters Daily. The
Washington Post online is far more ideologically diverse than the
printed newspaper ever was. Ill look at British papers of opposing
sides, like The Guardian and The Telegraph, and Im a big fan of the
tabloid Daily Mail. I like Google News a lotI can type in a topic
like Hillary and get a whole range of articles, both liberal and
conservative, including on obscure fringe web sites. I think its an
absolute civic obligation for people to at least briefly review the
full political spectrum of viewpoints on any major issue.
I was looking back at some of your old Salon columns, and was surprised
to see some kind words for Donald Trump. There was one in particular
when you were quite delighted by the way Trump went after Rosie
ODonnell on The View.
[laughs] Well, my view of Trump began in the negative. When he was
still relatively unknown nationally, he jackhammered a magnificent Art
Deco sculpture over the main doorway of the Bonwit Teller department
store on 5th Avenue. It was 1980, and he was demolishing the store to
build Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had offered to take
the sculpture, but Trump got impatient and just had it destroyed. I
still remember that vividly, and Im never going to forget it! I
regard Donald Trump as an art vandal, equivalent to ISIS destroying
ancient Assyrian sculptures. As a public figure, however, Trump is
something of a carnival barker.
But as a provocateur yourself, you must admire the very interesting his
game he is playing.
So far this year, Im happy with what Trump has done, because hes
totally blown up the media! All of a sudden, BOOM! That lack of
caution and shooting from the hip. Hes not a president, of course.
Hes not remotely a president. He has no political skills of any kind.
Hes simply an American citizen who is creating his own bully pulpit.
He speaks in the great populist way, in the slangy vernacular. He
takes hits like a comedianand to me hes more of a comedian than Jon
Stewart is! Like claiming John McCain isnt a war hero, because his
kind of war hero doesnt get capturedthats hilarious! Thats like
something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! Its so startling
and entertaining.
Its as if the stars have suddenly shiftedbecause were getting a
mix-up in the other party too, as in that recent disruption of the
NetRoots convention, with all that raw emotion and chaos in the air.
To me, it feels very 1960s. These sudden disruptions, as when the
Yippies would appear to do a stuntlike when they invaded Wall Street
and threw dollar bills down on the stock exchange and did pig-calls!
Im enjoying this, but its throwing both campaigns off. None of the
candidates on either side know how to respond to this kind of wild
spontaneity, because we havent seen it in so long.
Politics has always been performance art. So well see who the
candidates are who can think on their feet. Thats certainly how I
succeeded in the early 1990s. Before that, the campus thought police
could easily disrupt visiting speakers who came with a prepared speech
to read. But they couldnt disrupt me, because I had studied comedy
and did improv! The great comedians knew how to deal with hecklers in
the audience. I loved to counterattack! Protestors were helpless when
the audiences laughed.
So what Im saying is that the authentic 1960s were about street
theaterchaos, spontaneity, caustic humor. And Trump actually has it!
He does better comedy than most professional comedians right now,
because were in this terrible period where the comedians do their
tours with canned jokes. They go from place to place, saying the same
list of jokes in the same way. But the old vaudevillians had 5,000
jokes stored in their heads. They went out there and responded to that
particular audience on that particular night. They had to read the
crowd and try out what worked or didnt work.
Our politicians, like our comedians, have been boring us with their
canned formulas for way too long. So thats why Donald Trump has
suddenly leapt in the polls. Hes a great stand-up comedian. Hes
anti-PChes not afraid to say things that are rude and mean. I think
hes doing a great service for comedy as well as for politics!
Does Bernie Sanders remind you at all of the other side of the 60s
ethos? That rumpled, socialist Clean Gene?
Totally! Its been such a long timeI thought it was gone forever!
Bernie Sanders has the authentic, empathic, 1960s radical voice. Its
so refreshing. Now, Im a supporter of Martin OMalleyI sent his
campaign a contribution the very first day he declared. But I would
happily vote for Sanders in the primary. His type of 1960s radical
activist style descends from the 1930s unionization movement, when
organizers who were sometimes New York Jewish radicals went down to
help the mine workers of Appalachia resist company thugs. There are so
many famous folk songs that came out of that violent period.
When I was in collegefrom 1964 to 1968I saw what real leftists look
like, because a lot of people at my college, which was the State
University of New York at Binghamton, were radicalized Jews from
downstate. They were very avant-garde, doing experimental theater and
modern dance, and they knew all about abstract expressionism. Their
parents were often Holocaust survivors, so they had a keen sense of
history. And they spoke in a very direct and open working-class style.
Thats why, in the 1990s, I was saying that the academic leftists were
such fraudssitting around applying Foucault to texts and thinking that
was leftism! No it wasnt! It was a snippy, prim, smug bourgeois
armchair leftism. Real 60s radicals rarely went to grad school and
never became big-wheel humanities professors, with their fat salaries
and perks. The proof of the vacuity of academic leftism for the past
forty years is the complete silence of leftist professors about the
rise of the corporate structure of the contemporary universitytheir
total failure to denounce the gross expansion of the administrator
class and the obscene rise in tuition costs. The leading academic
leftists are such fraudstheyve played the system and are retiring as
millionaires!
But what you see in Bernie Sandersthat is truly the voice of populism.
I love the way he says, This is not about me, its about youits
about building a national grassroots organization. That is perfect!
I doubt Sanders can win a national election with his inflammatory
socialist styleplus you need someone in the White House who knows how
to manage a huge bureaucracy, so Im pessimistic about his chances.
However, I think that he is tonicto force the Democratic party, which
I belong to, to return to its populist roots. I applaud everything that
Sanders is doing!
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Is Obama the cause or a symptom of America's terminal illness?