Interview with the Vamp

Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Reason: One of the strangest things about the response to you is how you've been embraced by conservatives--not libertarians, actual conservatives, even those who would abhor many of your views.

Paglia: I wouldn't say I've been totally taken up by them because after all I'm attacked in Commentary--Elizabeth Kristol attacked me. I love the way Vamps & Tramps was attacked by both Commentary and The Nation, from right and left.

But I think that many conservatives, like many priests, seem to like me. I don't think it's because they agree with my views but because they are just invigorated by my discourse. I've constantly said, about Rush Limbaugh, for example--even though he and I don't agree politically, I have always respected him because I feel that he is a principled thinker--I think that any true intellectual finds it stimulating to listen to a principled thinker, a person who has a vigorous independent mind, a new way of approaching contemporary issues. It helps you to reexamine your assumptions and firm up your assumptions. And I think that's what's missing from our culture right now.

For example, in early 1994 I was invited to speak at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and there was a dinner with the policy fellows, about 50 people in the room. Highfalutin' media people and academic people. During this meal, Rush Limbaugh came up casually--some woman who was a radio person in Connecticut mentioned that her competition was Rush Limbaugh, and there was a snicker throughout the entire room.

Well, I lost it, I went totally bananas. I lit into them, and I said: "This is outrageous, this kind of demonization of Rush Limbaugh! How many people in this room have actually listened to his program?" One hand, all right? "How many people here have looked at his books, which are bestsellers?" No one. "You are supposed to be here at the Kennedy School of Government as experts in contemporary politics, contemporary cultural issues, right? Do you understand that when you have that attitude toward Rush Limbaugh, you are insulting and demeaning and excluding the millions of his listeners? There's an entire world out there in America that you have no knowledge of!"

Of course, everything I said that evening was a prophecy, because later in the year when the Republican sweep went through and Rush Limbaugh was celebrated in Washington, I'm sure my words came back to haunt many of those people. Suddenly all the media were like, "What happened? We don't understand any of this at all!"

Anyone who had been listening to Rush Limbaugh, monitoring what was going on on The Rush Limbaugh Show with an open mind, would not have been surprised with the Republican sweep. One saw it building for years. There was no surprise in that sweep to anyone who had been intelligent enough to be interested in the general culture outside of this Washington-New York-Cambridge insular, arrogant little coterie.

Reason: You're proud to say you watch television.

Paglia: I love television. I love soap operas. I love The Young and the Restless. It's my favorite show. I love everything about television. The ads. I love the glitzy part of TV. I love Hard Copy. I learn a lot of things from Hard Copy. You'd be surprised. Television to me is the culture.

In point of fact, that is where politics is being decided, for good or for ill. The TV screen is now like the national community forum. It's a way that people test out candidates. Without television, Clinton could have never won the presidency. We watched him being tested over time.

I just don't believe that television has been negative. In fact Marshall McLuhan quite correctly pointed out--a thought I had independently--that Hitler could never have risen if television had existed, because Hitler would not work well on TV. He was primarily an orator. If you really look at him up close, he looks ridiculous. So I think especially now with C-SPAN--my God, what a change! C-SPAN has allowed us to really look unedited at major news events, even minor news events, and then to compare how they're reported on the major network news shows. We see that kind of naked bias and manipulation of the news that I was very aware of as a student of TV and an admirer of TV.

Reason: In a lot of your writings, you have at best an ambivalent and at the extreme a very hostile view of the professional workplace, of office life. I'm curious about that.

Paglia: I've had a tremendous struggle, just because of my personality type, with doing well in that kind of a group situation. I feel very claustrophobic in an office environment. One of the first jobs that I got fired from was at a payroll office. I hated being in this large room with other people. I got fired because I wasn't good at it.

What I am talking about is the committees that I have been forced to sit on in the academy. I do not work well in meetings or committees. I'm an inflammatory type. I get very impatient. I think people are wasting time. My attitude toward committees is, "Just give me all the work and I'll do it! I'll do it in less time than it takes us to talk about what we're going to do!" I'm terrible.

It's not that I have a hostility to office life, it's just that I'm personally temperamentally unsuited to that kind of just sitting there for hours letting your rear end go dead. I'm very restless physically. I want to be moving. I don't like to be kept in a room with people for that long.