Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  The supreme irony of the Times’ vacuous coverage is that the early 1990s banquet-hall photograph of the unmarried Rowanne Brewer and Donald Trump illustrating it is the sexiest picture published in the mainstream media in years. Not since Melissa Forde’s brilliant 2012 Instagram portraits of a pensive Rihanna smoking a cigarillo as she lounged half-nude in a fur-trimmed parka next to a fireplace have I seen anything so charismatically sensual.

  Small and blurry in the print edition, the Brewer-Trump photo in online digital format positively pops with you-are-there luminosity. Her midnight-blue evening dress opulently cradling her bare shoulders, Rowanne is all flowing, glossy hair, ample, cascading bosom, and radiant, lushly crimson Rita Hayworth smile. The hovering Trump, bedecked with the phallic tongue of a violet Celtic floral tie, is in Viking mode, looking like a triumphant dragon on the thrusting prow of a long boat. “To the victor belong the spoils!” I said to myself in admiration, as seductive images from Babylon to Paris flashed through my mind. Yes, here is all the sizzling glory of hormonal sex differentiation, which the grim commissars of campus gender studies will never wipe out!

  Hey, none of this should make Trump president. But I applaud this accidental contribution by the blundering New York Times to the visual archive of modern sex. We’ve been in a long, dry-gulch period of dully politicized sex, which is now sputtering out into round-the-clock crusades for transgender bathrooms—knuckle-rapping morality repackaged as hygiene. An entire generation has been born and raised since the last big epiphany of molten onscreen sexuality—Sharon Stone’s epochal and ravishingly enigmatic performance in Basic Instinct (1992). Maybe we need Trump the movie mogul most of all. Forget all that Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom tsuris—let’s steer Trump to Hollywood!

  * [Salon.com column, May 19, 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee.]

  RELIGION

  69

  JESUS AND THE BIBLE*

  I’m a right-wing, pro-life, Christian, Republican extremist. In your column, you said you were an atheist. The Old Testament of the Bible predicted the coming of Jesus as the Savior of all mankind, and all of those detailed predictions, written hundreds of years before, came to pass. What if the Bible is true? Where would you spend eternity? Thanks and may God bless you.

  Thank you for your challenging question. I respect the Bible as one of the world’s greatest books, based on a magnificent body of oral poetry. It is a fundamental text that everyone, atheist or believer, should know. It speaks profoundly to everyone at each stage of life. And of course its hero sagas, from Moses to Christ, have been absorbed into the Western fine arts tradition.

  But I do not accept the Bible as divinely inspired. Indeed, most scholars would agree that the New Testament was purposefully written as a point-by-point response to the Old Testament to prove that Jesus was indeed the Messiah whose arrival had been forecast for centuries. Therefore the details of Jesus’ life and experiences were tailored and shaped to echo the language and imagery of the Old Testament.

  Personally, I do believe there was a historical Jesus. The evidence is fragmentary but to me convincing that a charismatic, itinerant preacher of his name was swept up into the cruel politics of the Roman occupation of fractious, rebellious Judaea. Furthermore, as a literary critic, I hear a very distinct speaking voice in the sayings attributed to Jesus. This was a brilliant poet who was able to find simple, universal metaphors (a coin, a tree, a mustard seed) to convey spiritual truths to the masses. He was also a performing artist with startling improvisational gifts. Whether or not he himself thought he was the Messiah is unclear. A solid general education today should include Siddhartha (the Buddha), Jesus, and Mohammed, all of whom radically changed the world.

  In regard to your question about eternity, I am a naturalist who reveres the cosmos and the vast organic cycle. Despite their superior consciousness, human beings, like plants and animals, simply decay to revitalize the earth. I see nothing depressing in that; on the contrary, it is an affirmation of the life force. My philosophy is very similar to that of Amerindians, who saw godlike forces in every rocky outcropping and storm. I also like the attitude of feisty, progressive Katharine Hepburn, who said, “I don’t fear death. It must be like a long sleep—delicious!”

  * [Reader question (name deleted), Salon.com column, January 14, 2009.]

  70

  THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION*

  ’Tis the season to think about religion. The highly commercialized holidays blanket the cultural landscape in America from mid-November to New Year’s Day. Believers and nonbelievers alike are assaulted from every direction by Christmas carols and relentlessly cheerful Yuletide decorations. For many gays, end-of-year family gatherings force a more somber assessment of the individual’s relationship to clan, country, and faith.

  In the general wreckage of gay activism as practiced by an arrogant elite in the ’80s and early ’90s, religion remains a supreme problem. Leftism, from the French Revolution to this day, has never managed to woo the working class away from religion. On the contrary, religion is most powerful among the poor and dispossessed, to whom it gives a philosophical system and cosmic view, vast, consoling, and beautiful.

  If, as Karl Marx claimed, religion is “the opium of the people,” keeping them in a docile state of passive acceptance of their suffering, it is also the visionary drug of artists, spurring them to brilliant and enduring achievements in pictures, words, and music. Any honest educator outside the airless ghetto of post-structuralism has to acknowledge the intricate interrelationship of art and religion, ever since humans first traced animal shapes on the walls of caves.

  Gay activists’ open hostility to religion has been a political and intellectual disaster, galvanizing the Christian far Right to mobilize at the grassroots level of town councils and school boards. Civil rights leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King succeeded by appealing to spiritual rather than secular values. During the ’60s rebellion against organized religion, I rejected the authoritarian dogma, sexual rules, and artistic censorship of American Catholicism. As a professed atheist, however, I have never lost respect for religion, which remains far more sustaining than secular humanism for far more people.

  A good test of the relative weight of religion and gay activism occurred in early October when Pope John Paul II held four open-air Masses in metropolitan New York and Baltimore. The gay press made loud noises about planned protests. The result? A papal triumph—and a big gay fizzle. Much of the gigantic crowd welcoming the pope in rain-soaked Central Park consisted of devout Hispanics. A sunrise concert was given by Roberta Flack, Natalie Cole, and the Boys Choir of Harlem. In his sermon to this exuberant, multiracial congregation, the conservative pope called for international cooperation to help the poor.

  Amid heavy media coverage, a major gay protest went virtually unreported, even by the usually obsequiously pro-gay New York Times. Six men cleverly invaded Saks Fifth Avenue and unfurled a long white banner from a sixth-floor window facing St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where a huge crowd waited for the pope to arrive to recite the rosary. The sign read, CONDOMS SAVE LIVES. Gay newspapers reported a child asking, “What’s that, Dad?” and her father replying, “Those are bad people.” When police arrested the protesters and tore down the banner, the crowd cheered.

  This incident unfortunately illustrates the prevailing mediocrity and hypocrisy of gay activist thinking. First of all, considering how many gay men are still having unprotected sex after a decade of “safe sex” education, that sign belongs on the Stonewall Inn, not at St. Patrick’s. Second, the “lives” that religion saves are spiritual not physical—a crucial distinction Plato himself pioneered. Third, only cultural illiterates, given this splendid opportunity for public theater, could come up with such a dull, feeble slogan, redolent of reactionary ’50’s Betty Crocker caretaking.

  Gay activists’ obsession with bits of latex sealed
in desensualized foil packets (which they want to force into public schools) is a defense mechanism to avoid thinking about their own contaminated flesh. Catholic theology is more complex, taking in both Jesus’ ministry to the lepers—who represent any diseased, despised, or ostracized group—and the doctrine of original sin, which symbolizes our shared mortality, a universal condition. Gay activists’ rage against the church is displaced guilt. It is certainly not the church, which counsels premarital chastity and heterosexual monogamy, that spread AIDS around the world.

  True radicals committed to revolutionary principles should be able to find a more thrilling poetry for their banners. Mottos I would have liked to see fly on violet satin over St. Patrick’s: PENIS POWER; LONG LIVE GAY LOVE; PARADISE NOW; SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL; FLESH AND FANTASY; THERE IS NO GOD; EAT OF MY BODY; SEX IS SACRED; ART, PLEASURE, SEX; DIONYSUS LIVES; BRING BACK BABYLON; PAGANS UNITE; DISOBEY AUTHORITY; FREE YOUR MIND.

  Until gay activism gets over its adolescent scorn for religion, gays will continue to lose ground in the culture wars. The great world religions contain thousands of years of accumulated human experience and spiritual symbolism. To compete with that wealth, gays must take ideas more seriously and directly engage the general discourse. Modern reform, from Martin Luther to Rousseau and Marx, shows that all fundamental change begins in the mind. Right now it’s that old-time religion, not liberal activism, that has won the people’s hearts.

  * [Last Word column, The Advocate, December 26, 1995.]

  71

  CULTS AND COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:

  RELIGIOUS VISION IN THE AMERICAN 1960S*

  1. ECLIPSE BY POLITICS

  Commentary on the 1960s has been massive. Law and politics in that turbulent decade are well-documented but remain controversial, and the same thing can be said of contemporary innovations in mass media and the arts. One major area remains ambiguous or poorly assimilated, however—the new religious vision, which for a tantalizing moment in the American Sixties brought East and West together in a progressive cultural synthesis. Its promise was never completely fulfilled, for reasons I will try to sketch here. But the depth and authenticity of that spiritual shift need to be more widely acknowledged.

  A political model currently governs interpretations of the Sixties because of the enduring reform movements born in that period, including environmentalism, feminism, and gay liberation. Their mobilizing energy, as well as the organizational style that would also be adopted by antiwar protests, initially came from the civil rights movement sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In that crusade, it must be remembered, ordained Protestant ministers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., played a leading role, as they also had in nineteenth-century abolitionism. The civil rights movement, with its hymns and anthems, appealed not just to secular standards of social justice but to a higher moral code.

  Political expression on the Left in the American Sixties was split. Radical activists such as Students for a Democratic Society (1960–68) drew their ideology from Marxism, with its explicit atheism. But demonstrations with a large hippie contingent often mixed politics with occultism—magic and witchcraft along with costumes and symbolism drawn from Native American religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. For example, at the mammoth antiwar protest near Washington, D.C., in October 1967, Yippies performed a mock-exorcism to levitate the Pentagon and cast out its demons. Not since early nineteenth-century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature-worship and sex-charged self-transformation. It is precisely this phantasmagoric religious vision that distinguishes the New Left of the American 1960s from the Old Left of the American 1930s and from France’s failed leftist insurgency of 1968, both of which were conventionally Marxist in their indifference or antagonism to religion.

  Members of the Sixties counterculture were passionately committed to political reform, yet they were also seeking the truth about life outside religious and social institutions. Despite their ambivalence toward authority, however, they often sought gurus—mentors or guides, who sometimes proved fallible. One problem was that the more the mind was opened to what was commonly called “cosmic consciousness” (a hippie rubric of the Sixties), the less meaningful politics or social structure became, melting into the Void. Civil rights and political reform are in fact Western ideals: Hinduism and Buddhism, by extinguishing the ego and urging acceptance of ultimate reality, see suffering and injustice as essential conditions of life that cannot be changed but only endured. Alteration of consciousness—“blowing your mind”—became an end or value in itself in the Sixties. Drugs remade the Western world-view by shattering conventions of time, space, and personal identity. Unfortunately, revelation was sometimes indistinguishable from delusion. The neurological risks of long-term drug use were denied or underestimated: the most daring Sixties questers lost the ability to articulate and transmit their spiritual legacy to posterity.

  The source material in this area is voluminous but uneven in quality, partly because Sixties chronicles at their most colorful often rely on anecdote and hearsay. Hence, much of the present essay is provisional. My aim is to trace lines of influence and to suggest historical parallels—an overview that might aid teachers in the U.S. and abroad who are interested in developing interdisciplinary courses about the Sixties.

  2. CULTS ANCIENT AND MODERN

  Tens of thousands of young people in the American Sixties drifted or broke away from parents to explore alternative world-views and lifestyles. A minority actually joined communes or cults. These varied in philosophy and regime from the mild to the extreme. The true cults that proliferated in the American Sixties and early Seventies resemble those of the Hellenistic and imperial Roman eras. Such phenomena are symptoms of cultural fracturing in cosmopolitan periods of rapid expansion and mobility. Consisting of small groups of the disaffected or rootless, cults are sects that may or may not evolve into full religions. Hence, the cult phenomenon even at its most bizarre demonstrates the sociological dynamic of the birth of religions, as they flare up, coalesce, and strengthen or sputter out and vanish. A cult is a foster family that requires complete severance from past connections—kin, spouses, friends. Membership in cults may begin with a sudden conversion experience where an individual feels that ultimate truth has been glimpsed. This may lead to zealotry, the conviction that the cult view is the only possible view, which therefore must be promulgated to the benighted or is too refined to be understood by others. A persecution complex and siege mentality may result: cult members feel that the world is the enemy and that only martyrdom will vindicate their faith.

  During the Hellenistic and imperial Roman periods, transnational mystery religions competed with the established state religions of the Olympian or civic gods, whose official worship was public and often located in city centers. The mammoth dissemination of Olympian images in sculptures and artifacts has resulted in Greco-Roman religion, from the excavation of Rome at the Renaissance, being portrayed by neoclassicism as stabler or more uniform than it was. Mystery religions, which generally produced fewer and less monumental stone or chryselephantine idols, offered personal salvation through initiation into an enlightened group bound by some special secret, often involving the promise of an afterlife, a recompense for present miseries. Hence mystery religions had great appeal to the powerless and dispossessed.

  The major Mediterranean mystery religions—of Dionysus, Demeter, Isis, and Mithras—anticipated, influenced, or vied with Christianity. Compared to the sometimes dryly contractual veneration of the Olympians, mystery religion was characterized by a worshipper’s powerful identification with and emotional connection to the god. Christianity, based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, one of many itinerant preachers in Palestine, emerged from a proliferation of splinter sects in Judaism, among which were the Essenes, who left the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in jars
found just after World War Two in caves near Qumran in Israel. The Essenes, ascetic and celibate hermits with an apocalyptic theology, were a cult by any modern definition. The American Sixties, I submit, had a climate of spiritual crisis and political unrest similar to that of ancient Palestine, then under Roman occupation. But this time the nascent religions faltered under the pitiless scrutiny of modern media. Few prophets or messiahs could survive the deglamorizing eye of the invasive TV camera.

  Yet a major source of cultic energies in twentieth-century America was the entertainment industry: the Hollywood studio system, cohering during and just after World War One, projected its manufactured stars as simulacra of the pagan pantheon. Frenzied fans (a word derived from the Latin fanatici, for maddened worshippers of Cybele) had already been generated by grand opera in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when castrati sang female roles and were the dizzy object of coterie speculation and intrigue. Modern mass media immensely extended and broadened that phenomenon. Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion could be seen in the hysterical response of female fans to Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. Eroticism mixed with death is archetypally potent: there were nearly riots by distraught mourners after Valentino’s death from a perforated ulcer at age thirty-one in 1926. The rumor that Elvis lives is still stubbornly planted in the culture, as if he were a demigod who could conquer natural law. Tabloids have touted Presley’s canonization as the first Protestant saint. The same myth of surviving death is attached to rock star Jim Morrison, whose Paris grave has become a magnet for hippies of many nations.