Camille Paglia enjoys a special status among cultural observers. Although she is unapologetically liberal, she skewers her comrades on the left for being irrational and infantile. She claims to enjoy right-wing talk radio, and many conservatives look forward to her columns.
In today’s column, she takes down the Clintons:
If she gets as little traction in world affairs as Condoleezza Rice has, Hillary will be flushed down the rabbit hole with her feckless husband and effectively neutralized as a future presidential contender. If that’s Obama’s clever plan, is it worth the gamble? The secretary of state should be a more reserved, unflappable character — not a drama queen who, even in her acceptance speech, morphed into three different personalities in the space of five minutes.
. . . gives Obama high marks for his attention to the infrastructure, with this caveat:
But then I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge.
. . . laments the supercilious elitism of Dick Cavett and his disdain for Sarah Palin:
How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?
* * *
English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don’t live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom!
. . . and distances herself from the thuggery of the gay movement:
Another hot-button issue: After California voters adopted Proposition 8, which amended the state Constitution to prohibit gay marriage, gay activists have launched a program of open confrontation with and intimidation of religious believers, mainly Mormons. I thought we’d gotten over the adolescent tantrum phase of gay activism, typified by ACT UP’s 1989 invasion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the communion host was thrown on the floor. Want to cause a nice long backlash to gay rights? That’s the way to do it.
So if Paglia listens to talk radio, and conservatives find value in reading Paglia, maybe there is more potential for dialogue than we think, but that potential will not be realized while the snarky left brands everything it disagrees with (talk radio being a prime example) as hate speech.
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