Guilty Pleasure

I have to admit it... I have a little bit of a crush on Camille Paglia. I know she's a left wing academic which should illicit thoughts of Hitleresque German schiza style pornography; but she just knows how to say the things that make me a little mushy.

Like her recent comments about Hillary...

"Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte." Does Hillary Clinton have a stable or coherent sense of self? Or is everything factitious, mimed and scripted (like her flipping butch and femme masks) for expediency?"

"All that Sunday, network radio news, for example, betrayed its liberal bias by running clips of only her noblest phrases. Heaven help any Republican who had made so lurid a gaffe! Fortunately, alternative media now exist: On his radio show that night, Matt Drudge ran huge, hilarious swatches of prophesyin' Hillary camping it up."

We must all remind ourselves that Camille is an outspoken Dem.

Also she had this to say about W.

"I've always felt that liberals' hatred of Bush is misplaced. I feel pity for him -- he is a genuinely tragic figure who made the wrong choices and destroyed the promise of his presidency. His sense of divine election and destiny, a defense mechanism that allows him to survive that crushing job, is of course positively dangerous for the country. At this point, it seems Bush's persona will never mature in office. As he blustered with dangling arms and stiff cowboy legs to the podium during last week's South American junket, I felt embarrassed at his lack of diplomatic courtesy and simple savoir faire."

But perhaps the most romantic thing she's said to me this month...

"This kind of outreach to expose and remedy injustice represents the finest spirit of leftism, a practical, compassionate activism -- not the pretentious postmodernist jargon and sanctimonious attitudinizing that still pass for leftism among too many college faculty. Capitalism, which spawned modern individualism as well as the emancipated woman who can support herself, is essentially Darwinian. It expands any society's sum total of wealth and radically raises the standard of living, but it leaves the poor and weak without a safety net. Capitalism needs the ethical counter-voice of leftism to keep it honest. But leftists must be honest in turn about what we owe to capitalism -- without which Western women would have no professional jobs to go to but would be stuck doing laundry by hand and stooping over pots on the hearth fire all day long."

Read the full content of her monthly Salon.com post here.

Paglia