Now, the reason I'm getting so much attention: I think it's pretty obvious that we're in a time where there's a kind of impasse in contemporary thinking. And what I represent is independent thought. What I represent is the essence of the Sixties, which is free thought and free speech. And a lot of people don't like it. A lot of people who are well-meaning on both sides of the political spectrum want to shut down free speech. And my mission is to be absolutely as painful as possible in every situation.
So I've been attacking what I regard as the ideology of date rape. At the same time as I consider rape an outrage, I consider the propaganda and hysteria about date rape equally outrageous from the Sixties point of view, utterly reactionary from a Sixties point of view. And I will continue to attack it. And I will continue to attack the well-meaning people who think they're protecting women and in fact are infantilizing them. Right now in the current SPIN, I'm going after a few other things, like battered women and snuff films. And I'm going to be as painful as possible, until Gloria Steinem screams!
The problem of the last twenty years is that people think that "liberal" and "conservative" mean something. The liberal and conservative dichotomy is dead. The last time it was authentic was in the Fifties, when there really was an adversarial voice coming out of people I really respected, the New York Jewish intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and the people of Partisan Review. There was an authentic liberal versus conservative dichotomy at that time. But my generation of the Sixties, with all of our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses. We have to face that. And we have to look for something new right now.
The situation right now is that we have on one side people who consider themselves leftists but to me, as far as academe is concerned, are phonies, people who have absolutely no credentials for political thinking, have no training in history, whose basic claim to politics is simply that nothing has happened to them in their lives. A lot of these people have money. I'm sick and tired of these New Historicists with trust funds. I'm so sick and tired of it. And because they're pampered, their whole lives have been comfortable, because they've kissed asses all the way to the top, they have to show they're authentic by pretending sympathy for the poor lower classes, the poor victims.
The whole thing is nothing but a literary game. I'm exposing it. And I'm exposing it from the inside. I attended a public university, Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton, which was sort of like Berkeley East at that time, seething with real radicals. I know what real radicals look like--and they did not go on to graduate school. When I got to Yale for graduate school--I spent four years there and barely survived that experience--it was the last point that scholarship in literary studies was authentic, when it was solid. And it began to wander away from that base in the last twenty years. It's something I'm trying to reform at the present time.
What we have right now is this ridiculous situation where if you criticize liberals, people say, "She's a conservative!" Now, what kind of a lack of information is this about intellectual history? Liberalism is only 200 years old. There are other points of view on the world besides that of liberalism in its present decayed condition. We of the Sixties were often in revolt against liberals. Lenny Bruce, when he recited all those dirty words, was trying to offend liberals, not conservatives. So in the present situation I don't know what to call myself. I would maybe say "libertarian" or something like that. I'm trying to create a new system--I call it "Italian pagan Catholicism." But that may be too esoteric! I'm thinking that I want to bring about an enlightened center. I would like to call it, maybe, "pragmatic liberalism," that is, a liberalism that has learned the political lessons of the past twenty-five years.