The Unfortunate Case of Camille Paglia

I wrote yesterday in admiration of the insights and judicious analysis of James Fallows with respect to the Sarah Palin VP candidacy. But, as in any random sample, for every positive statistical outlier there are corresponding negative ones as well. Thus, we arrive at the unfortunate case of Camille Paglia.

Here is her initial reaction to Palin’s selection and convention speech:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

Generally speaking, so far so good. In spite of the overwrought invective (“prissy, victim-mondering, philistine feminist establishment”), she makes a solid point about the difficulty that female politicians have had historically in straddling the line between conflicting perceptions of femininity, especially motherhood, and perceptions of strong leadership, especially in the military realm.

Palin’s capacity to serve, but more significantly the American public’s willingness to accept her (at least at a first-glance), as both a potential leader and a mother is a significant step forward in terms of synthesizing traditional female gender roles with the feminist movement’s goals of full social and political equality.

But, having strapped herself to the Palin mythology bandwagon things start to take a funny turn:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. 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?

[snip]

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 value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) 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.

Really? The only problem with Palin’s otherwise glittering performances on the public stage was some sort of elitist East Coast rejection of her accent?

Yes, and but of course the “best bits ended up on the cutting room floor!” Paglia’s powers of insight are on full display here. It is now clear that only the dastardly liberal bias of Couric and her mustache-twirling henchmen at CBS could have motivated them to air those interview segments that cast Palin in a poor light.

Now that I have been able to tear myself away from my dog-eared copy of the Feminine Mystique, maybe I can appreciate Palin more fully through Paglia’s eyes:

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. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. 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.

So first we go from tsk-tsking the snobbery of those who groundlessly criticize her syntax, to defending it through comparisons to immigrants for whom English is not their native tongue, to rounding it all out by drawing parallelisms between her locution and that of the Bard himself. I mean, Shakespeare?!? WTF?!?!

Let’s just reflect for a moment on the following Couric interview excerpt:

Palin:

That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade – we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

So, what is really going on here? I mean besides the creation of the next great sonnet series.

It seems that Paglia, as a self-described “dissident feminist,” styles herself as intellectual antagonist to establishment feminism. From this well-entrenched ideological perch, she then adopts a knee-jerk enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend viewpoint.

Since Palin raised the hackles of much of the feminist political establishment, especially on the heels of Hillary’s primary defeat, then definitionally Palin must be defended, even at the cost of any semblance of rational thought.

Back to Paglia for the coup de grace:

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil).

Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

Yes, thankfully we have Camille Paglia sacrificing herself in the hinterlands of Philadelphia. Almost in the image of a modern-day Jane Goodall, painstakingly documenting all of the aboriginal folkways and now translating the unique patios of the Pennsylvania outback.

Because, without her selfless efforts, we would be left to suffer ignorantly the condescending ramblings of the liberal media elite. I mean, what could be worse than that?