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Wait, Camille Paglia says, maybe this whole Obama thing was a mistake! And maybe Sarah Palin is the feminist icon of the 21st century!

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.

Title stolen from The Onion.

47 replies on “Camille Paglia Now Going Door to Door Trying to Shock People”

  2. Camille Paglia is the kind of person who, while Rome is burning, would be offering a feminist critique of Nero’s treatment of his concubines.

  4. I’ve got a literal pile of shit I want to sell this lady. It’s got ribbons and glitter, and overall, I’d say it’s pretty attractive package.

  5. Did she type this between drags of a formaldehyde-soaked rag? Because that is some seriously out-of-contact-with-reality stuff right there.

  8. @6: It’s okay. Lots of us went a little nutty for Paglia when she burst onto the scene well over ten years ago. There’s no shame in your autographed copy.

  9. Hm, that’s funny. I’m a classroom room teacher, too. I’m getting pretty good at detecting bullshit. And my fellow teachers and I have often talked about how Sarah Palin sounds *exactly* like our students who try to bullshit their way through questions they don’t know. Even the body language is the same. Maybe Ms Paglia a stupid fucking credulous hack of a classroom teacher.

  11. I don’t know what’s less confusing: this story, or Camille Paglia herself in a gorilla suit playing the saxophone for children’s birthday parties. With balloons.

  12. @9: Agreed. Listening to Palin during most of her early interviews was like listening to a kid at a spelling bee as they realized that the rug had just been pulled out from under them.

    “What’s your opinion of the Bush Doctrine?”
    “Can I have it used in a sentence?”

  13. Good lord that saxophonist line is embarrassing. Like many other foolish political pundits I would bet that Paglia’s frame of reference for be-bop jazz comes exclusively from Microsoft Encarta sound clips.

  14. Paglia has one true word in that paragraph as regards Palin: “ambitious”. The rest is pure dreck. Baroque dreck, but still — dreck.

  17. Paglia also had some weirdly resentful piece up the other week about how NY was full of phonies and not a real city like Philly. Clearly the woman still has a chip on her shoulder for having failed to eclipse [or even vaguely overshadow] Susan Sontag. Ironically, one of the things she used to gab about was not becoming a crank like Germaine Greer, but dear old Camille has become far pottier than that Aussie lass.

  18. “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.”
    I do disagree. I do not and most likely will not ever link Palin with a shift in feminism. I see her as a shift toward divisive junior high behavior. WTF is the more traditional Third World?
    Senility is, I think, generous. I would go with something like calculated carelessness.

  19. I think the idea that feminism will be advanced by adding conservative working women has merit. But Palin is a fucking moron and Paglia is being disingenuous by pretending otherwise.

  20. Its too bad. I never agreed with much of what she said but she used to be really bracing and thought provoking. But now I think she’s just become a self parody.

  24. I guess “the next big shift in feminism” is total hypocrisy, then.

    Paglia bears a distinct resemblence here to that spewing ass picture that Mr. Poe et al posted on Erica’s bicycle blog last night.

  25. Camille Paglia is the Ür-Troll. Look up “zaftig” anywhere and her picture comes up.

    Sorry, you’re not off the hook for buying “Sexual Personae”. She’s always been kway-zee. She’s the Ann Coulter of academia.

  26. It must be dreadful to be a public figure and not be very relevant anymore…and even worse, when you realize you’re just a public windbag addicted to the sound of your own voice on Access Hollywood or Fox News or MSNBC or, well, pick the public forum of your choice.

  28. Holy Cow! I had to go to the source to convince myself it wasn’t an Onion satire!

    My favorite part: “There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes.” She’s alive? Is that a standard? And babbles rhythmically?

  29. Did she just refer to herself as a “career classroom teacher”? I guess “art-college lecturer” doesn’t have as hard a ring to it.

    Nader’s outside in his Covair Camille, and he’s ready to take you for your big date.

  32. @30: She is willfully ignorant, which is an important distinction. Just plain ignorance is curable.

    And be-bop, contrary to Paglia’s belief, is hard. It is not simply a consequence of not being able to play a straight melody. Which she would know if she bothered to learn anything about it. But she didn’t, because then she would be forced to abandon her oh-so-clever analogy for Palin’s nongrammatical speech. Which brings us back to “willful ignorance.”

  36. What 30 and 32 said. Palin’s not stupid, just ignorant of world affairs on a ghastly scale. And possibly kooky in that weird, disjointed way religious fundies are.

    So much for Camille’s intellectual honesty. :/ In the end she’s just another eccentric blogger.

  38. Camille Paglia speaks for feminists the same way Colonel Sanders speaks for vegetarians. Her nutcase brand of “feminism” has always been geared primarily to garner lots of attention for Camille Paglia. Obviously, the men whose attention she so desperately seeks haven’t been giving her enough press lately, so she had to find a new bizarro theory to hitch her crazy-wagon to.

  40. Well here’s one thing about this post (at least the section quoted): No mention of date rape, Apollo/Dionysus dichotomy, or pornography.

    I think this column would be one very sober Camille Paglia drinking game.

  41. If Camille Paglia “says” something on Salon.com, isn’t it like writing it on a scrap of paper before burying that scrap in a remote bayou in the dead of night? If the only one(s?) to read it are Slog posters, isn’t that like having the scrap seen by a handful of crayfish in the murk?

  42. I’ll admit it, I liked Paglia earlier, back when she was a constant voice calling for more classroom rigor and for students to ‘live in the library,’ mercilessly grading people on their intellectual work done.
    This paled in the Bush years, when we were treated to a pillow-handed mental defective who couldn’t play Ski-ball unaided and had fucked up every single endeavor he’d attempted; a big slow pitch over home plate, and Paglia descended into bizarre riffs on his flight suit. Bush was the biggest, fattest target ever for those wanting to take intellectual laziness to task, and Paglia didn’t even swing and whiff, she declined to swing, and not out of declining a target unworthy of her bat.
    And now Palin? Fucking Palin? Fuck having to be a teacher, anyone who’s been thru high school’s seen stoner/too-cool classmates give rambling non-sequitur answers like that, and we knew why then, and we know why now. If I’d compared them, in one of my many creative writing projects, to a be-bop saxophonist, I’d have better couched that in sarcastiquotes, or included a laugh track.
    Yeah, the Third World, their big problem? Not enough pro-life women. I can trace a clear line between those places with strong stances against birth control and abortion, and places with booming economies, and where, mirable dictu, womens’ lots are just fucking ducky.

  45. I thought of Palin as a throw back. A last stand of a discredited ideology. A desperate attempt to rally the knuckle dragging right wing that had clearly worn out it’s welcome. But Paglia is just a self promoting loud mouth.

  47. Look. I work hard avoiding reading any of her work over at Salon. I don’t need you inflicting her nonsense on my poor vulnerable eyes.

    Paglia is a self important tool. She always has been. She always will be. There is no need to pay any attention to her. That is all she wants. She is an internet troll that people keep feeding for no appreciable reason.

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