Showing posts with label Camille Paglia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Camille Paglia. Show all posts

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Dr. Camille Paglia Knows That Sgt. Jimmy Crowley Will Have Another Beer at the White House Before Obama's Public Option Gets Articulated


Salon is a pretentious word for a beer and wine guzzle and gum flap. Its roots are in the Italian neoclassical age ( late 16th century) when everyone who was anyone was agog over Horace, Cicero, Virgil and Catalus.

Groups of people who could read met in a big open room and read Latin poetry and discussed the beauties of the tropes and truths of the sentences. The French went apey over the salone gatherings of the Italians and aped the tradition from the 17th Century on and then the children and grandchildren of Yankee Puritans and immigrant swell-wannabees played Salon. They still do.

I attend a Salon every morning up at Kean Gas where worthies gather to exercise their gums over events and ideas large and small. This gathering includes teachers, lawyers, ComEd workers, Peoples Gas clerks, Cops, Firefighters, Nurses and Ward precinct captains. Invariably my faults and peccadillo's are tossed back upon my positions to poison the well of dispute -nonetheless, my helot's thoughts get free voice. Last Friday, I had the pleasure to 'salon' with Beachwood Reporter and NBC Chicago web-meister Steve Rhodes - a rock-ribbed liberal of the old school and young man with a lode of intellectual and literary gold to mine. I was bested in dispute and at Eight Ball no end by Rhodes and other 'bright young things' - and that is as it should be. It was the best of salons.

Salon ( Clique my Post Title) is also a slick magazine that features agreed upon smart-set contributors and sanctioned opinion-slingers. Ever-weepy and whiny Joan Walsh, an endlessly dull harpy and MSNBC head-shaker, holds this tent's center-post. However, the absolute best writer and only original thinker at this salone ( in deference to the Professor's Italian Heritage) is Camille Paglia.

I know of Dr. Pagila due to my trade as a has-been English teacher. Camille Paglia always extends the context - the breadth and depth of her reading never posts limits on her mind's ability to articulate without cant or bigotry.Dr. Pagila is openly gay yet not given to strident agenda netting. She is a former Catholic who respects the beauty, mystery and majesty of the Faith. She is a feminist who never allows simple-minded association to grab for the broad brush and repaint the house.

This week Dr. Paglia went right to the root of the Obama White House's failure to articulate why Health Care Reform must be accepted by every American without a careful examination of the guts of the agenda. Paglia writes that Obama Care's root problem could be witnessed a few weeks ago in the Gates/Crowley nonsense and distraction. Pagila states,

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.

Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?

Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about "black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed -- which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.


A salon is a big open room. Camille Paglia seems to be the only Salonista willing to welcome the helots who drink coffee with me at Kean.

God Bless, Dr. Paglia.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin - Cammy You are My Kind of Gal! Well, Gal Pal Anyway. . .Look, I'm with Sappho Too. . .




Camille Paglia is great teacher of literature. I was OK. Ms. Paglia is a common sense Feminist; I am a devout sexist. Ms. Paglia is a devotee of Sappho (attracted to women) and so am I!

I'd buy her a beer the size of Connecticut

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.


Cammy, when and if you hit Chicago, I'll spring for steak that would gag Keith Olbermann and shut-up Chris Matthews . . .for a moment. We'll double! We can even take in some South American tunes.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

John McCain: Cammy Paglia is Bullish for Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as Obama VP Gal Pal!




But I've come to feel that Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius is Obama's best bet. She is a polished public presence who epitomizes that cordial, smoothly reassuring, and blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century. An Obama-Sebelius pairing would be visually vibrant and radiant, like a new day dawning.
Camille Paglia

That old bull dyke can write! When an in-your-face lesbian feminist with the brains of Tolstoy and the ability to make John Donne something more than a dead old white guy speaks, the trendy elites perk up their ears. Joe Biden my Aunt Bridgey! That tired speech lifter will always be a back bencher. I was huge Joe Biden fan until I learned that he was even lazier and more ambitious than the plungers in my Honors English Class back in 1988. Joe, they were grade hungry, but fought the inclination to lift passages without citing them according to MLA standards.

Paglia gives Biden and Jim Webb the brush off and really lays into Senator Clinton - according to the same script followed at MSNBC, Move0n.org, Daily Kos and teh Obama Campaign. Stayed tuned to U.S. Attorney Pat Fitzgerald - Obama might be turning in his elegant wardrobe for the same orange jump-suit that Bob 'The Kite Runner' Creamer of Huffington Post wore in Terra Haut, Indiana. From what I hear Tony Rezko is singing like a canary - or that Brazilian babe that you write about at the close of your essay.

Do, clique my post title for Camille's fine piece ( too sexist?) on Barack's VP choice.

Camille, like the weasely little Stanly Fish who was OH, SO! collegial with Billy 'The Bomber' Ayers and his odious old lady Bernadine Dohrn while looting the State of Illinois as titular smart guy for University of Illinois at Cement City ( Chicago. Campus), wears Obama's pledge pin.

John McCain, thank God, has no such BOHOs hanging around his Campaign. McCain does not need parsers to explain talking points to his supporters.

We are the working stiffs who read the news and make judgments about some candidate on merits of his/her words and deeds.

I know firemen who read Salon, Back Hoe Local 150 Operators who have season tickets to the Chicago Lyric Opera and CSO, school teachers who summer in the Illinois National Guard, Chicago Cops who teach boxing to black kids in Englewood, when they are not ignoring daily slanders in the Chicago Sun Times, and Pulitzer Prize winners who are voting for John McCain.

Camille, I Loved - Break Blow Burn, but remember Sweetie, what Wallace Stevens said,

People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.


Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock: Wallace Stevens