Crazy Camille

Camille Paglia seems to be off her meds. Consider looney ravings like this one, from her latest Salon column (basically answering reader mail, which is like taking Q&A from a lecture audience — no planning, just scattershot “brilliance”):

Excellent analysis! You have cut the entire ground out from beneath Dick Cavett’s lofty claim of grammatical superiority to Sarah Palin by exposing his inability to sense a simple parenthesis in a spoken passage. I laughed heartily at your e-mail, for which I am most appreciative.

As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides — a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric’s dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a “mama grizzly” at libels against her family.

That’s typical of her new “look at me” charm offensive. Or, rather, offensive charm. Anyone who can listen to Sarah Palin and find a brilliant post-Feminist mind, unfairly pilloried by an effete media is either off her meds, or has just returned from the Rush Limbaugh re-education camp (think “Clockwork Orange”).

OK. That’s not the issue. What’s the issue is a long rant delivered on New York (Reich Wing) talk radio on the possible resurgence of the “Fairness Doctrine.”

Courtesy of Breitbart,  (AUDIO: Uncut: Complete Camille Paglia Interview on WABC-AM’s ‘The Mark Simone Show’) :

New Audio: Camille Paglia Blisters Democrats for Pushing Return to ‘Fairness Doctrine’

“They’ve totally betrayed the soul of the party to even mention this.” EDITOR’S NOTE: Don’t miss Paglia’s epic rant on the stimulus bill and Obama’s role — it’s in the related link section.

What’s hilarious about the “rant” is its sheer imbecility. Paglia — after being introduced by Mark Simone as one of the “top 20 intellectuals” in the world — proceeds to pull out the old, tired Reich Wing saw that liberal talk radio ought to work, in a “free market” using “free speech.”

How anyone could be such a fucking idiot is beyond me: the reason that liberal talk radio can’t get going is the monopolization of the airwaves by rightie companies like, say Clear Channel, who had the clout to essentially remove the Dixie Chicks and Neil Young from the airwaves for daring to criticize Bush and his illegal war. CC has removed AirAmerica from the air in several markets, and the idea of a “free market” is laughable. These bastards are holding the public airwaves by the throat and strangling public debate with pre-screened, controlled “call in” shows from hosts winning debates with themselves.

It is not “free speech” in any meaningful sense of the term, but it is “commercial speech” in EVERY meaningful sense of the term. Paglia’s “rant” comes across as clueless and naive. When you can’t grasp the simple basis of a vital debate, it kind of makes you look like a buffoon.

I wonder if the other 19 of the world’s top intellectuals are this stoopid?

When you’re not in a fair fight over using the public airwaves — politically opposed by media monopolies, where is this “free market” that forms the basis of Paglia’s argument that “liberals” lost in a fair fight? (And how come the majority political viewpoint is not only not given a shot at the public airwaves, but is actively removed? Washington, D.C. just lost their last station. See Bill Press, here for more detail. Or HERE. Or HERE.)

So, having been down this road before, we go down this road again.

15 November 2007…3:33 am
So, Is Camille Paglia Bugf**k Crazy or What?

[NOTE: except where otherwise linked, all quotes are from the Salon essay]

Good lord, were all these people in a coma through the gigantic storms like Hurricane Camille in 1969? The destruction wrought by that Category 5 storm is chronicled in Philip D. Hearn’s book, “Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast,” published three years ago. With winds of 200 miles per hour, Camille devastated 26 miles of Mississippi’s coastline and killed 170 people. The tidal surge reached 35 feet, while the barometric pressure approached an all-time low. One of my prized possessions is a poster torn from a London newsstand (I was traveling as a grad student in Europe): “HURRICANE CAMILLE WREAKS HAVOC!”

Let me begin with a Paglian disclaimer: I like Camille Paglia. I’ve always liked Camille Paglia. When I reviewed her essay collection Vamps & Tramps for the Kansas City Star in 1994, I wrote: “Camille Paglia is a charming, mercurial, observant and cheerfully Rabelaisian troublemaker.” As a free-thinking troublemaker myself, I sometimes felt I’d sparked to a kindred soul. Paglia postures as a rebel against mindless, conventional thinking.

And so she is. But I added this tag:

Paglia is passionate, her observations are acute, her conclusions logical. If nothing else, the reader will find a unique view of the social order, an entirely different perspective.

But there is a disquieting element that suggests: If the author is this desperate for our attention, is she holding her opinions because she believes in them? Or, is she saying what she feels readers will react to?

Thirteen years later, I still cannot answer that question with any degree of satisfaction.

I could not help revisit those thoughts upon reading her latest Salon essay “Queen Hillary’s disruptive court,” which seemingly begins as a unique take on the underlying dynamics of the Clinton campaign, and rapidly deteriorates into a sort of bitchy gossip column aided and abetted by a down-on-its-luck thesaurus. (“Shay buddy. Coulja shpare a suffix for a referensh book down on itsh luck?”)

I’m not the only blogger reacting. See:

Camille Paglia / Salon:
Queen Hillary’s disruptive court — The press corps finally wakes up to her waffling and evasions. Plus: Norman Mailer’s largely forgotten legacy and our disappointing lesbian icons! — The mainstream media have been in a breathless tizzy about how Hillary Clinton waffled, tripped …

Discussion:
Bbbustard / bustardblog: PUTRID PAGLIA. — You may not realize this, but I loathe Camille Paglia.
Jill / Feministe: Wherein I disrupt Camille Paglia’s column with lesbo stunts
Wonker / HazZzMat: The Latest Hill and Huma Siting
JammieWearingFool: A Simple Question for Mrs. Clinton
DavidL / BitsBlog: Mrs. Clinton gets leftsided
John Hawkins / Right Wing News: The Kathleen Willey Interview

Discussion:
Bbbustard / bustardblog: PUTRID PAGLIA. — You may not realize this, but I loathe Camille Paglia.
Jill / Feministe: Wherein I disrupt Camille Paglia’s column with lesbo stunts
Wonker / HazZzMat: The Latest Hill and Huma Siting
JammieWearingFool: A Simple Question for Mrs. Clinton
DavidL / BitsBlog: Mrs. Clinton gets leftsided
John Hawkins / Right Wing News: The Kathleen Willey Interview

All Related Discussion
RELATED:
Thers / Whiskey Fire: Golden Needles in Our Eyes

Discussion:
TRex / Firedoglake: Late Nite FDL: Tell Me Why
Ann Althouse / Althouse: “Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary …

[Note: self-obsessed Ann Althouse commenting on self-obsessed Camille Paglia may well be the unintentional laff riot of the new Century -- HW]

It is a constant of American literary life that you must write blazingly, amazingly, with an angelic (or demonic) spark until you are “discovered” and your name is sufficient to sell goods, and then you can write all the drivel that you want and no one will say anything — until, of course, you self-destruct completely, in which case, you become fertile ground for the bio-pic/documentarian scavengers.

Paglia has not yet self-destructed, quite. But, if, as the old adage suggests, “great people talk about ideas, normal people talk about people, and small people talk about things,” Paglia can’t quite seem to decide whether she’s a normal person with a large vocabulary, or a formerly great person who’s desperate to drop into the ”normal” ranks. The sheer gossip quality is at times overwhelming:

The Chicago Tribune gave a rave review to “Hell in a Handbag,” a satirical play by David Cerda and Pauline Pang inspired by my British Film Institute book on Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” I’m a character in it — a know-it-all psychotherapist sent as a deus ex machina by Hitchcock to straighten out Bodega Bay.

Tippi Hedren and Veronica Cartwright, who starred in the original film, attended the Chicago premiere last month. The party photos are posted online: Tippi and Veronica can be glimpsed quaffing champagne in a limo and mingling with their vibrant stage doubles. The production photos of the charismatic Tracy Repep as Tippi/Melanie comically trapped in a minimalist telephone booth are not to be missed.

The essay is filled with pointless vitriol against perceived enemies and equally pointless “me journalism” asides in three almost entirely separate bitch-slappings about Hillary Clinton, Norman Mailer and Ellen Degeneres — all of whom Paglia seems to focus intensely on in three bizarre pas de deux of love/hate that ought to keep good little Freudians up long past their bedtimes.

On the pop front, Ellen DeGeneres’ cringe-making on-air meltdown over a dog, leading to her overwrought cancellation of several days of her show, should get a Raspberry Award for worst performance by a lesbian icon. Following Rosie O’Donnell’s professional collapse amid lunatic rants and operatic kvetching, this has been a terrible year for Hollywood lesbians’ public image. It’s as if when the butch mask drops, there’s nothing inside but a boiling candy kettle of infantile rage and self-pity. And now Ellen, the professed liberal, is narcissistically flouting the Writers Guild strike. Great going, gals!

Er, what? Camille Paglia gets to play ‘Miss Manners‘ for all lesbian entertainers? This is frankly absurd. Paglia is no more qualified to pass judgement on women who happen to be lesbians AS lesbians in the course of their NON-lesbian jobs than I am to pass judgement of male heterosexuals on their male heterosexuality in the performance of their non-male heterosexual jobs.

The truly enlightened can recognize that screwing up, or being an asshole, is a universal Human Virtue, completely divorced (separated, in the case of homosexuals, who are not allowed to marry) from one’s sexual identity, race, creed or religion. To paraphrase myself paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln — for whom I have the greatest respect, and used to, as a child, study the engravings of, on both pennies and five dollar bills with keen interest, because I was a special , gifted, artistic child, quite unlike my doltish peers — God must love assholes, because he made so many of them.

Which brings me (whom I deeply respect and admire, and need to make constant points in favor of — and against both my real and my perceived enemies — without bothering to note whether my monomania intereferes with either my narrative or my readers’ ability to make any sense of whatever recherche point of mine that I am about to make) to Ms. Paglia’s continual obsession with Ms. Paglia.

It’s one thing to HAVE a mind that’s the equivalent of a Ferrari among mere automobiles. It is quite another to drive it responsibly (naturally, I speak from personal experience, but quote Paglia, two wit [sic]):

Feminism would have been far stronger had it been able to absorb Mailer’s arguments about sex. If my own system seemed heterodox for so long, it’s because I appear to have been one of the few feminists who could appreciate and integrate all three thinkers — Mailer, Greer and Johnston. I’m sorry that Mailer, presumably cowed or pussy-whipped, abandoned the gender field. It would take Madonna, thanks to her influence on a generation of dissident young women, to bring authentically Dionysian ’60s feminism back from the dead. That pro-sex wing of feminism (to which I belong) has of course resoundingly triumphed, to the hissy consternation of the Puritans and the iconoclasts –those maleducated wordsmiths who don’t know how to respond to or “read” erotic imagery.

Speaking of Madonna,* one of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke. I wonder if it’s this debacle that Woody Hochswender, who had worked at Esquire, is describing in a startling letter following Roger Kimball’s scathing Mailer critique, which is posted on that indispensable site, Arts & Letters Daily. Guess what — Esquire’s original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

[* I have changed the link to a more appropriate webpage, and also beg you to stop laughing at CP's incredibly bizarre segue. Listen up:]

An odd tag to put in an essay that takes global warming advocates to task for “hubris.” And, I had read Roger Kimball’s vicious little grave-pissing and thought it juvenile when it came out. There is a time and a place for that sort of thing, and I do penance for my snarking on the death of William S. Burroughs. But Paglia’s cross-referencing of the Kimball piece merely makes her an aider and abetter. It does not raise my estimation of her critical skills; the opposite, in fact. It is intellectually pointless and socially corrupt to speak ill of the newly dead: no one will believe whatever you say, and you’ll look like an ass.

A bigger ass if you CITE such an ass to speak ill of the dead, alas.

A lass named, in this case, Camille.

The essay starts OUT encouragingly, although one has to remember that Paglia has set herself against the “Barbie” school of modern feminism for some time, and Hillary Clinton is, in many ways, the archetypal Barbie Feminist:

… there’s definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign — sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card. I suspect the latter dumb move, which has backfired badly, came from Ann Lewis (Barney Frank’s sister), a fanatical Hillary true believer who has been spouting beatific feminist bromides about her for the past 15 years. (The transcript of my tangle with Lewis about Hillary on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 1994 is reprinted in my second essay collection.) Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends — hardly a reassuring trait for a potential president whose paranoia has already been called Nixonian. Isolated monarchs never hear the bad news until the people riot and the lynch mob is at the door.

Next page: Why don’t we have a stronger Democratic female candidate?

First of all, who gives a flying f**k who Camille Paglia had a bitchfight with on CNN, er, thirteen years ago, or who she’s “leaning toward” OTHER than Camille Paglia? Remember my review from that year? Here’s a pithy quote from my brilliant writing (which was, alas, not appreciated by the Liberal Establishment, and I was not awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism that year):

Paglia the critic is often at odds with Paglia the performer. She constantly refers to “my book” – Sexual Personae . In the talk show forums, Paglia often comes across as needing center stage, demanding that other participants listen to what she thinks, but refusing the converse.

Gee. Sound familiar?

Cutting through the snark (and you’ll need a sharp macheté for that unenviable task), it would seem that Hillary Clinton isn’t enough of a “female” to be the first viable distaff candidate. Great minds would say that it isn’t a question of what’s between Hillary’s legs, but what’s between her ears that matters. Small minds will suggest that she should either be elected BECAUSE of what’s between her legs or NOT elected because of what’s between her legs, and Camille Paglia, somewhere in the lost middle seems to think that — as with the suggestion that Barack Obama isn’t Black enough to be a Black candidate — Hillary isn’t Woman enough to be the Woman candidate.

Hint: her perfect choice for the first Female Commander in Chief? Senator Dianne “Quisling” Feinstein of California:

Why don’t we have a stronger Democratic female candidate? I have repeatedly said that Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California should have been the first woman president. With all due respect to Salon’s perspicacious Glenn Greenwald, whose hard-hitting columns on Feinstein as a Beltway politician have been must-reads, Feinstein’s statewide and national popularity are mainly due to her unflappable performances on television as a shrewd, steady, articulate public servant, deeply informed about military matters. She handles and deflects media queries with silky ease. Exuding both authority and compassion, she has true gravitas — a rare quality in women. Dianne Feinstein, not Hillary Clinton, has already created the paradigm for a female commander in chief.

Then, having not fed out quite enough rope to hang herself, Ms. Paglia gratuitously goes after global warming. Ah, contrarian to the end. And the problem with the contrarian is that, ofttimes, they adopt their positions as a means of attracting attention, pure and simple. As slimeball Roger Kimball used Norman Mailer’s death to pimp his own “name,” so, too, Alexander Cockburn (pronounced “Clap”) used Hunter S. Thompson’s death to the same end*. The contrarian is often NOT an original thinker, as much as a narcissistic reactionary. (* I’ve written about this phenomenon, snarkolepsy, HERE.)

And, frankly, having read the following passage, and knowing that Paglia will undoubtedly quote herself — presuming that she should deign to answer this humble objection — I will quote MYself in return. I looked up her (logorrhea infected) Wikipedia entry:

Paglia describes herself as a feminist, and as a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and Ralph Nader, and even campaigned for John F. Kennedy as an adolescent. Her views on the legalization of recreational drugs and prostitution, and on the relaxation of sexual consent laws, are more libertarian. She is a strong critic of much of the feminism that began with Betty Friedan’s 1962 The Feminine Mystique, and compared feminists — whom she considered to be victim-centered — to the Unification Church. At the same time Paglia’s embrace of fetishism, pornography, prostitution, and most prominently, male homosexuality, puts her at odds with the “family values” of American social conservatives.

The first line reminded me of something that I wrote in “Swiftboated Again, part iii” that bears repeating:

Worse than even this is the phony “moderate” who claims that both Democrats and Republicans do “it” — whatever “it” may be — or who lump ALL politicians together, in the way that KKK members lumped all “darkies” together. Who bobbled their empty heads when Ralph Nader claimed in 2000 that there was NO DIFFERENCE between Al Gore and George Bush.

Alas, to paraphrase Bob Dylan (and, thus, appear hep and “with it” to a certain Generation that Paglia can’t seem to see beyond): the head it is a bobblin’.

Camille: you’ve a fine mind, and when you use a little discipline, you can be a fine writer. But get over yourself. Seriously. If your points are cogent, We, the Readers (and history) will listen. Otherwise, you’ve too many competitors in the whining-and-puling arena of celebrity gossip to garner much notice.

The sort of people who read writers who write like you, and the sort of people who like to read about celebrity gossip tend to be mutually-exclusive demographics. It doesn’t pay to stake out the territory between two Venn diagrams with negligible overlap. If one Venn diagram rolled over, or went to get some chips, you could get squeezed out of this dimension of n-dimensional space/time altogether. (Don’t get me going on Lorentz Transformations!)

Writing this kind of random crap only destroys credibility.

And for ghod’s sake, don’t just fill space when you write. Have a point and stick to your topic. Jeez.

Courage.

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