Missing Camille

I've missed Camille Paglia's work the past couple years since she stopped writing for Salon. Turns out, she's been writing a book call Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Ancient Egypt to Star Wars. 

There's something refreshing about a person who is thoughtful and bold, who does not worry about what is politically correct, and that's what she does. While often not agreeing with her, I enjoy reading her work for this very reason. Listening to someone with whom you don't agree, but who expresses themselves in reasoned, honest ways, keeps one from becoming insular, but also allows one to find common ground. If we always treat those with whom we disagree as "other", then I think we let ourselves become bent out of shape and we lose the ability to relate to our fellow humans. If we claim that we are created in the image of God, then we must not allow this to happen.

Here is link of Camille being interviewed by Glenn Reynolds. They cover art in the U.S., particularly our unique relationship with art, and a bit of politics. At around 15 minutes, it's a fun listen. She also recently wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, How Capitalism Can Save Art.

On the Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade

Here are a couple of quotes from Camille Paglia from her Salon article in September.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Interesting that she sees nature as being fascistic. Is it not humans being created in the image of God that thwart, what Christians see as nature broken or gone awry? When we see disease, do we not try to heal? When we see catastrophe approaching, do we not try to stave it off or find protection for those in harms way? When humans do not do these things, don't we sense that something has gone very wrong with their humanity?

and

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

While I most strongly disagree with Ms. Paglia in her support of abortion, I appreciate her honesty. There is nothing much more frustrating to me than listening to someone speak as though abortion is the morally superior choice. There is nothing moral about that choice. It is a tragedy for all involved.

There are many pro-life groups out there if you'd like to learn more.

Feminists for Life
Libertarians for Life
Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League
Priests for Life
Consistent Life
Rachel's Vineyard

Another Refreshing Column

by Camille Paglia. Really, it's her answering a number of letters from her readers. You can tell when a writer is honest, and she is honest, which is part of the delight in reading her work. Of course, I found her answer to Sam sad, but I'll just keep praying. Click here to read this month's column in Salon.

Camille Paglia

Has the best post election analysis I have seen.

On Barak Obama:

No one knows whether Obama will move to the center or veer hard left. Perhaps even he doesn't know. But I have great optimism about his political instincts and deftness. He wants to be president of all the people -- if that is possible in so divided a nation. His natural impulse seems to be toward reconciliation and concord. The big question will be how patient the Democratic left wing is in demanding drastic changes in social policy, particularly dicey with a teetering economy.

While I don't share her optimism, I think she's correct in that we don't know how he'll govern. He has a very liberal and pro-abortion voting record as both a state and national senator, but being in the executive branch is a very different role. My guess is that he will, at least privately, hold President Bush in higher regard by the end of next year. At the very least, I think he'll be more sympathetic toward him because of the difficult decisions presidents have to make.

On the press:

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.

And:

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

On Sarah Palin:

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.

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.

Read the whole article. I've enjoyed reading and listening to Paglia for many years now, beginning with her smack down with Naomi Wolf on the Donahue show. How can someone talk so fast??!!