The Million Mom March: What a crock!
National policy shouldn’t be set by packs of weeping white women led by Rosie O’Donnell.

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By Camille Paglia

May 17, 2000 | The big political news of recent weeks has been the slow slippage in national poll numbers toward the Republican presidential candidate, Gov. George W. Bush. While Democratic spokesmen are putting on a brave face and predicting a reversal after this summer’s conventions, the most startling movement has been on the part of married women and young people away from Vice President Al Gore.

As a biology-minded social analyst, I had one of my usually reliable “click” moments last week as a TV camera caught Bush trotting jauntily down the steps of an airplane and literally swaggering, hands dangling like a gunslinger, across the tarmac. The same primal principle of animal vitality that gave a still-raw Bill Clinton the juice to rout an aging, waffling, lackluster president in 1992 and then a burnt-out, snappish, half-mummified Senate majority leader in 1996 is starting to favor Bush.

Gore, meanwhile, for all his showy chest-puffing, is coming across as an effete, pretentious, mealy-mouthed candy man on the licorice umbilical from feminazi Big Mamas.

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Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.

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Last Sunday’s Million Mom March, the gun-control protest organized (as the major media is finally admitting) by the sister-in-law of Hillary Clinton’s longtime lawyer pal and hatchet woman, surly Susan Thomases, may not do the Democrats much good this year, when the electorate is in a mood, as during the humiliating 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis, to restore military credibility to the U.S.

It doesn’t take a weatherman to figure out that the average citizen doesn’t want national policy determined by packs of weeping women led by a shrill, dimwitted talk-show host (Hillary sycophant Rosie O’Donnell).

Yes, there are terrible problems with random violence in the U.S., though the incidents are not nearly as numerous as inflammatory media accounts make it seem. But are guns the problem or merely the symptom?

The Million Moms would do much more for this country if they would focus on the breakdown of family and community ties that produce sociopaths like the goons who shoot up schools and day-care centers. It was parental irresponsibility and neglect, and not simply the availability of guns, that were ultimately at the root of the Columbine massacre, where home-barbecue propane tanks had been converted into bombs.

The problem with gun-control laws is that they only work on already law-abiding citizens. Although I don’t own guns, I respect those who do. And I venerate the armed woman as a transcendent symbol of independent female power — from ancient goddesses like the Venus Armata or the knife-wielding Hindu Kali to the pistol-packing babes of “Charlie’s Angels.”

Neither do crime statistics from other countries carry much weight with me. Only the U.S. has a complex Bill of Rights with a First Amendment guaranteeing “freedom of speech” and a Second Amendment guaranteeing “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” which remain our protection against government tyranny. It’s no coincidence that this most heavily armed nation in the world is also the most individualistic and entrepreneurial, with incandescent creativity in the high-tech field that has transformed the economy.

While the Millions Moms’ demand that citizens be prevented by law from buying more than one weapon per month seems to me blatantly unconstitutional, I’m not so clear about why the gun lobby feels that pro forma registration of all firearms would necessarily be a first step toward government confiscation. And surely the production and sale of heavy-duty, military-style automatic weapons should be better tracked. But the general discussion has been so clouded by kneejerk, urban-liberal media bias that trying to achieve national consensus seems more remote than ever.

As I file this, Mayor Rudy Giuliani still hasn’t withdrawn from the New York Senate race, which he should ethically have done two weeks ago to allow his party to get its act together before its May 30 convention. I’ve always felt that the quick-witted, dynamic, fresh-faced Rep. Rick Lazio, with his practical congressional experience, would make a much more formidable opponent to the cynical, jaded Hillary Clinton, whose only way to win would be to inflame racial passions against Giuliani, tearing up my home state in the despicable way now par for the course for Democratic operatives.

By the way, I thought the mayor’s wife, Donna Hanover, acted like a horse’s ass in her melodramatic press conference last week, as she hammily keened about past acts of “personal intimacy” with her spouse. Eve Ensler’s off-Broadway “The Vagina Monologues” (a p.c. squawk fest where white ladies exorcise their bourgeois pudeur) has evidently gone to her head.