Wowlebrity, social critic, and professional provocateur Camille Paglia did a three-part interview with Salon in which she takes on Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, atheism, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show legacy (she’s NOT a fan), liberals and Fox News (GET OVER IT, LIBS), and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not surprisingly, she finds Trump’s PT Barnum schtick completely captivating – very ’60s, very Lenny Bruce. Read the whole thing here, but check out the Trump bits below.
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 O’Donnell 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 I’m 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, I’m happy with what Trump has done, because he’s totally blown up the media! All of a sudden, “BOOM!” That lack of caution and shooting from the hip. He’s not a president, of course. He’s not remotely a president. He has no political skills of any kind. He’s 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 comedian–and to me he’s more of a comedian than Jon Stewart is! Like claiming John McCain isn’t a war hero, because his kind of war hero doesn’t get captured–that’s hilarious! That’s like something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! It’s so startling and entertaining.
To me, it feels very 1960s. These sudden disruptions, as when the Yippies would appear to do a stunt–like when they invaded Wall Street and threw dollar bills down on the stock exchange and did pig-calls! I’m enjoying this, but it’s throwing both campaigns off. None of the candidates on either side know how to respond to this kind of wild spontaneity, because we haven’t seen it in so long.
Politics has always been performance art. So we’ll see who the candidates are who can think on their feet. That’s 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 couldn’t 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 I’m saying is that the authentic 1960s were about street theater–chaos, spontaneity, caustic humor. And Trump actually has it! He does better comedy than most professional comedians right now, because we’re 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 didn’t work.
Our politicians, like our comedians, have been boring us with their canned formulas for way too long. So that’s why Donald Trump has suddenly leapt in the polls. He’s a great stand-up comedian. He’s anti-PC–he’s not afraid to say things that are rude and mean. I think he’s doing a great service for comedy as well as for politics!
(via Salon)
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