Showing posts with label McCain/Palin Salon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain/Palin Salon. 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.

Friday, September 12, 2008

McCain/Palin: Salon -'Insists' - That Readers Agree - The Semiotic Seduction



Joan Walsh, the Gee Whiz Xanthippe of Salon.org 'insists' that readers 'understand' that

1. Gov. Palin is a Stepford Wife Dominatrix

2. Feminism really means something to mothers of America, as well as 'divorced, single-by-choice, or alternative inclination' females.

3. John McCain is a long-legged Mac Daddy

4. Change will only come if everyone does and thinks as Salon -'insists.'

My Aunt Helen used to ladle an extra pint of Dinty Moore Beef stew on my biscuits with an 'I insist!' No argument from this fat-boy Aunt Helen, ladle it on!

I love my Aunt Helen who insisted that I pray to the image of the Sacred Heart and not act like such a little jerk -'all of the time.'

Other people have insisted -'Have shot of Jack.' Pass, that stuff would gag a maggot. Strictly a Smithwicks Man, Noam.'

Other people have insisted that I 'read this op-piece by Noam Chomsky he really understands.' But I do not understand Noam. The guy has the personality of a dial tone.

Some others have insisted that I 'vote for Obama.' I did. Twice. Right here in Illinois. He got creamed by Bobby Rush and won over Allan Keyes!

Now Joan Walsh and her crew 'Insist' that Sarah Palin looks lke 'deer in the headlights ( Dan Quayle -BTW Quayle Won Huge!) and that Charlie Gibson tossed grapefruits at the Governor on ABC last night - saw it Joanie. Gov. did fine.

But Joanie 'insists' upon this doozy:

The fact that Sarah Palin sat for her humiliating interview with ABC's Charles Gibson on 9/11 is one of those strange serendipitous events that makes one believe there's order in the universe. Remember how 9/11 changed everything, especially our new seriousness about the larger world and foreign policy? Never again would we risk a president, maybe not even a senate candidate, without global experience and sophistication.

What a mockery Palin made of all that. I'll get criticized as sexist for saying this, but I would say the same thing about a man who sounded this ignorant: Talking to Charles Gibson tonight, Palin sometimes reminded me of poor Miss South Carolina, who, asked why many Americans can't find the U.S. on a map, famously said: "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have maps. And I believe that our education, like, such as in South Africa and the Iraq, everywhere, like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children."

This statement from Palin about Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is better, but not hugely: "I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes. We have got to make sure these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran."


N.B - Joanie had nucular misspelled -which I believe was meant to be a an affront to Governor Palin. Could be? Nah. Well, maybe.
Nah, no thanks. Non Sequitur, Joanie. This will keep you with a gig shouting with the White Noise Chris 'Milky' Matthews on The Tool Shed -MSNBC, but it is a roar of laughs to folks who can read - read about what they also witnessed. What? Were you hallucinating? Joan Walsh and Salon will continue to crank out laughs and McCain'Palin will continue to erode the once powerful lead enjoyed by the Junior Senator from Illinois.

When Aunt Helen insists, pour it on.