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When last we left Camille Paglia, she was in full swoon mode with the latest female celebrity who's giving her a moistie, Sarah Palin.
I must confess to wondering if La Paglia's girlcrush could possibly survive the brutal revelations of the last couple of weeks. Look at some of the things we've learned about Palin since then:
-- while mayor of Wasilla, she forced rape victims to pay for their own rape kits (at a cost of up to $1200 per kit);
-- as governor, she's made it clear that she doesn't give a shit about Alaska's epidemic of sex crimes and domestic violence;
-- she didn't know what the Bush doctrine is;
-- she couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine she reads;
-- she couldn't identify a single Supreme Court decision that she disagrees with other than Roe v. Wade;
-- asked to name what she thought was the worst thing Dick Cheney has done as Vice President, she answered, "the duck-hunting accident;"
-- she gave a disgraceful performance in the vice presidential debate, spewing out sheer gibberish and avoiding answering many of the moderator's questions;
-- she has made vicious and scurrilous attacks on Barack Obama, openly questioning his patriotism and his commitment to the troops, and all but calling him a terrorist.
Call me crazy, but I kinda thought any one of those things would give one serious pause. And that all those things in combination would most definitely be a dealbreaker. Particularly for anyone who identifies herself as a "feminist" and an Obama supporter.
Well, I thought wrong. Here's our Camille in her latest Salon column:
One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? . . . The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. . . People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.
Oooh, she's nailed us, but good. We don't share Camille's worshipful adoration of Palin because we're elitists -- how fresh! What a searing insight! I've never heard anyone express that particular opinion before.
But she's right, of course. What snobs we are to expect a candidate for vice president of the United States to know what the Bush doctrine is. Or to be able to name more than one Supreme Court case with which she disagrees. Or to pick up a newspaper once in a while. Us with our "standards" and our totally unfair prizing of "facts" and "knowledge"! Not to mention our complete sentences and properly conjugated verbs! Who do we think we are, anyway?
I particularly savored Camille's novel theory of why Palin came off so badly in the Couric interview:
As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor?
Yes, I'm positive in that in the parts that were edited out, Palin shows off a powerhouse intellect that would put the likes of Hannah Arendt to shame. Katie, you conniving bitch! How could you?
But Paglia is at her most brilliantly insightful when she explains Sarah's unique way with words:
As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. . Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.
Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies).
Isn't that special? How lovely for Paglia that her many years of struggling with difficult literary texts has enabled her to figure out what the fuck this woman is talking about. Because I confess, when Palin comes out with one of her Dadaist word salad utterances, such as this, said in response to a question about "how she would help keep any new domestic oil produced in the United States," I haven't the faintest clue:
"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first," Palin said. "So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."
Last but not least -- we all know that no Paglia column would be complete without . . . wait for it! Hey, how did you ever guess it? Madonna!:
As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism"-- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.
Oh, and there's much, much more -- for instance, you can find out why Camille thinks the comparison of Barack Obama with Neville Chamberlain is "a bit alarmist" (but only a bit).
All in all, I rank this particular column as one of her most awesome. La Paglia has truly outdone herself here. Brava once again to Joan Walsh, who a while back brought Paglia back to start writing for Salon again. Why, Ms. Walsh, you must swell with pride whenever you read her latest sublime offering.
One final note: with this post, I'm going to start a new feature every time I blog about something Paglia writes. It will be called the Camille-Meter™. With it, I will tally the number of times Paglia mentions the following, and then add it all together for a final score (though mentions of these made by the readers whose letters Paglia quotes don't count):
Madonna
Hillary Clinton
Gloria Steinem
second wave feminist(s)/feminism
"pro-sex" feminist(s)/feminism
Ivy league
elite(s)/elitism/elitist
Eastern or Northeastern
the 60s
(baby) boom(er/s) or "my generation"
post-modernism, or post-structuralism, or deconstruction, or (literary) theory
mentions or citations of her own previous writings
allusions to "my Italian and/or working class and/or upstate New York childhood/youth" (or variation thereof)
Here's the tally for this month's column:
Madonna - 4
Hillary Clinton - 2
Gloria Steinem - 1
second wave feminist(s)/feminism - 1
"pro-sex" feminist(s)/feminism - 2
Ivy league - 1
elite(s)/elitism/elitist - 3
Eastern or Northeastern - 1
the 60s - 1
(baby) boom(er/s) or "my generation" - 1
post-modernism, or post-structuralism, or deconstruction, or (literary) theory - 1
mentions or citations of her own previous writings - 5
allusions to "my Italian and/or working class and/or upstate New York childhood/youth" (or variation thereof) - 3
Total score on the Camille-meter™: 26
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