Few write so piquantly about politics as Camille Paglia. She's the left's Peggy Noonan: insightful, lyrical, and bold enough to bare her eccentricities. Paglia and Noonan exercise both sides of their brains - the right and the left, the creative and the logical, the intuitive and the analytical. (Never trust a person who exercises only one side of their brain. Many bloggers shrink lyricisim in favor of analysis, or at least analysis in the form of opining. Blogging seems to follow the anti-lyricism trend of modernity - first poetry fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, now literary novels are losing favor...But I digress.)
Here is Paglia on Clinton:
Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala., two weeks ago. 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."Sweet. She also seems very fair-minded for an admitted Democratic partisan:
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...I like that Paglia takes risks, even ones that can leave her looking ridiculous. She opines:
The relationship between Cheney and George W. Bush is also perplexing. Despite the nearness in their ages, Cheney acts like Bush's father (no coincidence since Cheney served in George H.W. Bush's administration). There's something creepy about how Cheney, after heading the candidate search, insinuated himself into the vice presidency. He locked onto Bush like a limpet, using the more extroverted and physically dynamic president as his proxy. Bush's independent judgment was paralyzed, as if by snakebite. It's an unsavory, toxic relationship, a vampiric pseudo-marriage like that of the shadowy, Machiavellian Roger Chillingworth and the impressionable, waffling Arthur Dimmesdale in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter."....Which is the sort of unintended hilarity we often expect from academics. Instead of Bush wanting someone with experience and gravitas and finding it in Cheney, Paglia sees a Gothic, parasitic dysfunctional relationship. Common sense is not so common, but then it's not always as entertaining as the alternative.
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