Mac MacArthur continues his deconstruction of Camille Paglia How Cammy Paglia Lost Her Mind in Salon
Readers respond From: Ed As a gay man, I can assure you that Camille is not some secret weapon we have invented to "recruit young boys into our lifestyle." Camille may have been invented perhaps by a biomedical concern or perhaps by early failed cloning experiments. From: Brian Nice to see you catch up with camille paglia (note: no caps here, either). She's been what I will kindly call "damaged goods" for as long as I've been aware of here, which is, by the way, far too long. Thanks. From: goode242 Hear, hear! It's about someone took this overrated "intellectual" and media darling to the woodshed. But credit her with one thing -- nobody, but NOBODY, can say as many stupid things faster than the hyperkinetic Ms. Paglia. She's not only an intellectual nothing but the poster child for cutting down on caffeine. |
And the readers responded -- in overwhelming agreement.
The fact is, Cammy decided to expound upon the presidential race in the following pages. And here is just a little more of my answer to the pseudointellectual snake of Philly. Enjoy!
How the Demos lost the White House in Seattle
Cammy Baby! Don't you mean:
How the Democrats had little or nothing to do with Seattle!
Only someone who is a political tyro -- an ogler looking through the fence -- would use a term like "DEMOS." Try DEMS, or Donkeys - but NEVER DEMOS! It shows what a fraud you really are.
The WTO battles blew the election for Gore; McCain needs more than bad luck to qualify for the presidency; Hillary's one of the most destructive personalities in American politics; and why Madonna talks like the queen mother.
Ah, I see your strategy. You are attempting to make EVERYONE hate your guts so their collective Karma will result in your early death without the need to kill yourself! Why pick on Madonna? Because she gets a lot? Because she's more popular than you? Or is it because she could beat you up?
And, by the way, your linking the WTO failure with a Gore loss is not only wanting, it is just plain stupid!
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By Camille Paglia (cough, cough)
clarified by Mac MacArthur (super-intellect) Dec. 8, 1999
Check your lie meter, Piglia. First; there were nowhere near 30,000 demonstrators in Seattle. Second, it seemed to me that the police were very well prepared, almost as well prepared as those cretin National Guardsmen who shot down my friend Jeff Miller in cold blood -- for daring to protest that meat grinder for the poor and the black that LBJ and Nixon called the "Vietnam War."
My first thought, as I watched the news footage of scrambling crowds, shattering windows and clouds of tear gas, was "There goes the Democrats' hope to hold onto the White House next year."
Which is evidence of just how stupid you are.
Aging liberals may remember the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago for the fascist tactics of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his police, but the riots in the street partly provoked by anti-war demonstrators cost the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, the election, and they sparked a national movement to the right whose effects can still be felt among the electorate. When law and order break down, it's liberalism that loses.
I was laughing my butt off as I read this! Paglia reveals what a posuer she (he?) really is. First: the riots in Chicago didn't cost Hubert Humphrey the presidential election. As a matter of fact, most people think is was his Howdy Doody freak voice and his lousy piano playing that convinced America he was a wuss. In fact, it was HHH's refusal to wind down the war, and Nixon's lying promise to do so which cost Hubie the election.
The battle in Seattle forced a welcome if brief international consciousness on the mass TV audience, which has been preoccupied with domestic issues and celebrity scandals throughout this decade, an obliviousness barely dented by President Clinton's outrageous boutique bombings abroad. The protesters' success in hamstringing the WTO, which adjourned without reaching key agreements, will surely inspire more young people to social activism for a wealth of causes. I hope it's curtains for another style spawned in Seattle -- the apathy and whining asexuality of passive-aggressive grunge.
Wow... NOT! "The apathy of asexuality?" What the hell are you talking about? No one gave a damn about -- or even understood -- that the WTO is a fascist organization run by and for international business, with the U.S. dictating the outcome -- whenever it wishes, that is.
But Americans WERE concerned to see cops at it again with great vigor, shooting rubber bullets into kids at close range and making them gargle with pepper spray.
You are a galling pool of four day old raw eggs.
The danger is that this nascent coalition of Democrat-led trade unions with environmental and labor equity groups will get stereotyped as left-loony. When post-adolescent anarchist goons pledge total destruction of the system or when dinosaur Marxists denounce capitalism as "evil" and call all property "crime" (caught on camera in Seattle), this promising movement doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of gaining popular support.
Yes, and you will help them become stereotyped by repeating the words of one silly rioter -- who may have realized that what he was saying might actually be true. But these people won't be characterized as "Left Looney" because the American people largely agree with those kids and working people who made up the bulk of the sane demonstrators. They don't like the fact that a secret cabal of farting old men violate the U.S. Constitution and leave us with no recourse but to riot. In this country, Miss Paggy, we cannot make policy except through our ELECTED officials. Or weren't you aware of that?
And by the way, ignoramette, the Democrats do lead the "labor-equity" groups -- whatever they are. It is labor who leads, and often controls, the Democrats -- you fool. Capitalism, in my view, is the best vehicle of social change. Free enterprise and free thought are inextricably and creatively intertwined. Over the past 200 years, capitalism has enormously advanced global prosperity, even if an unacceptable economic gap remains between the first and third worlds.
How easily you write off more than two thirds of the world's population who struggle in order to make sure members of the American middle class are able to buy a new car every two years. Capitalism may have advanced YOUR global prosperity, but it has left too wide a wake of stunning poverty to be the "best vehicle for any change let alone social change."
Are you serious? Even the dumbest student at some Junior college in the armpit of America -- the San Fernando Valley -- knows that the best vehicle for social change is a benevolent dictatorship. But, of course, we cannot trust Queens to be benevolent -- as they often have violent tempers (see European history 101).
Capitalism may be a very effective machine for change -- but certainly not for most of the world.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist to the extreme -- but that's only because I know there is no room for more compassionate systems in a world steeped in "kill or be killed" tradition.
What would you know about global prosperity? A woman who views the world through her genitalia is not someone I would count on to give me advice about economics -- micro or macro.
Though you'd never know it from the snide rhetoric of cloistered liberal academics, modern feminism owes everything to capitalism, which gave women financial independence for the first time in history.
"Modern feminism," unfortunately, does not exist -- and you are one of the prime reasons it doesn't. You fill your books with lies and half-truths about men, women, and even yourself, I suspect. You, as a supposed intellectual leader of the feminine elite, have done more to destroy effective feminist movements than most people alive. On the other hand, capitalism is inherently Darwinian, and a just society must provide a safety net for the poor.
Oh, how expansive of you -- and how condescending.
While intrusion by government into the market should be as minimal as possible, it is ethically imperative to monitor working conditions, product safety and environmental integrity.
Well, moronette, that's about what the government does do. But how about people like Jimmy Carter, whose cronies pimped for BCCI -- and cost the working men and women of the nation $100 billion which was doled out to Washington and New York Wall Street rajahs who faced ruination? Or what about other bank failures -- eagerly participated in by the Keating five -- two of whom are running for President this cycle?
My lifelong scriptural texts are William Blake's radical poems "The Chimney Sweep" and "London" (discussed in my first book), which heartbreakingly dramatize the disparity between the powerful and the powerless in newly industrial, polluted England.
You might have done better reading C.P. Snow or even "Bruno" Bronowski than Blake's condescending pap on the poor -- a hypocritical text at best. Adjusting tariffs or formulating trade guidelines is a very difficult matter when emerging nations interpret U.S. demands as a usurpation of their sovereignty. We need a stronger "green" lobby that will fruitfully ally with its foreign counterparts. And we urgently need a broad-based, rigorously rational progressive party that will, without succumbing to outdated Marxist formulas, challenge the corruption of the major political parties by big money; critique the escalating power of multinational conglomerates; and condemn flagrant corporate greed (as in the looting of company profits through the inflated salaries of top executives).
It's too late for that Paggie, and you should know better.
Today, these corporations are owned by nearly every American bozo on earth. They have a stake -- a monetary stake -- in the corporate corruption, pollution and political hijacking they witness and condone. As a matter of fact, your buddies have made certain to guarantee this sea change and have assured that most Americans now cheer Jack Welch and GE for continuing to pollute the Hudson River and flip the bird to the EPA.
Your attack on high salaries is teen-aged. These guys are simply rewarded for turning obscene profits for their stockholders. Like Stalin, they earn every penny of it. There is no stopping the high-tech transformation of the world economy -- except by Mother Nature, of course, with one of her standard cataclysms (a perennial Paglia prophecy).
Hopefully some microbe that invades big-mouthed writers who would be better off working in a car wash will finish us off.
What is needed is massive educational reform -- such as the development of trade schools and vocational programs serving students of every age.
Ouch. There you go again, you condescending cur. Why don't you go to a trade school or a vocational writer's course, because you sure don't represent the academic elite unless you consider them frauds like you seem to be.
And really, calling for educational reform -- how original can you get?
The social convulsion of job losses because of migration of industry abroad cannot be wholly prevented by artificial government manipulation. At present, American primary education is failing to provide either knowledge or skills for anyone but those already set on a professional track by their affluent, upper-middle-class families.
True, but tell me -- has this ever been untrue? Face it -- that is the impact of your darling Capitalism -- social change aimed at dumping down the poor, not "dumbing them down." Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford have more qualified candidates applying than ever -- so I guess you are wrong, yet again, about how "stupid" American children are.
They are not dumb -- many of them are just frozen by stupefying poverty. Others realize that adults like you won't be there to do much more than demonstrate outlandish hypocrisy to them throughout their lives.
Don't look to Washington for help, since Congress is stalemated and the immediate political field seems bleak. Gov. Bush has yet to show presidential qualities, and his elementary communication skills are weak. Hillary Clinton's senatorial fantasy is sapping the Gore campaign by stealing P.R. wattage and keeping 20 years of Clinton scandals on the front burner. Al Gore continues to lose credibility through his own foolish choices and grating hamster-wheel freneticism. After the devastating revelations in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the leading advisory role played by his shallow 26-year-old daughter Karenna (Naomi Wolf's Ivy League pal), who can take Gore seriously?
You know Cammie, when I dream about you -- and I do, you Satanically sexy old broad -- you are always there as a serpent, and your paragraph above so well demonstrates the evil of the Paglia pitch-forked tongue.
In a few sentences you have written off Bush, Hillary, Gore, Clinton, Gore's daughter (who happens to be a nice girl), and of course the woman you hate most because she is better, in every sense, than you are -- Naomi Wolf, who at least is trying to contribute to meaningful change rather than focusing, as you do, on the general clitoral orgasm of America.
Who can take you seriously, snuggled in your comfortable but meaningless academic life in a second rate art school in a dead city, is the better question. You haven't a clue.
Do you, Cammie, have your own "salon" monthly? Do you invite your most-probably despicable friends to laze on your feather-stuffed sofas and drink martinis, impressing themselves with their own intellect?
I bet you do, and ask why are you so minutely popular! I'll tell you why -- because you are a perpetual robotic chainsaw of personal destruction. The average American loves your kind of gruff, "macha" tabloid toilet talk couched in the pose of academic license -- and the average hanger-on twits of both sexes naturally revel in the titillating excitement of it all.
But when you wake up in your small arrogant world and stare in the mirror, do you really like what you are?
I doubt it. You're too gutter-smart for that. Shame on the superstructure of the Democratic Party for its cowardly decision, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in early 1998, not to force President Clinton to resign: Gore would have been elevated to the presidency at his peak of strength and prestige and would have grown into the job, guaranteeing Democratic control of the White House well into the next decade.
Oh sure, you silly girl. Again you show your ignorance. First, there is no superstructure in the Democratic or Republican Parties. The leaders of national political parties -- who have little or no power at all -- simply work at the bidding of their President.
When their president leaves, they and all their staff take a hike. That's really the way it works -- not how you imagine it.
Instead, we Democrats must watch the gruesome spectacle of Gore whittling himself down day by day as dope-on-a-rope Clinton bounces from screw-up to screw-up.
You should be such a dope, Cammy. Gore is not whittling himself down -- and for you to call yourself a Democrat is hilarious. What you are is a Pagliacrat -- interested in only yourself, and certainly not in reconstruction of the Democratic Party.
The problem for Gore is that he has never had to run hard for anything before and he was kept too far in the Clinton background -- as Arianna Huffington writes, "the tin suit of armor in the White House basement." Meanwhile, Bill Bradley, for whom I need a palpable reason to cast my Pennsylvania primary ballot, is still plodding along in a coma. Bradley's obliqueness is starting to look like petulance. A president needs more dynamism. If Bradley doesn't ratchet up soon, Bush will sweep to victory simply by reason of his raw, youthful, bulldog vitality. As for John McCain whom the liberal media are busily over-promoting to sabotage Bush, I can't believe anyone takes him seriously as a candidate for high office. He belongs in military operations, not the Oval Office.
This, I'd say, is about as adolescent a description of the race as I've seen.
Bradley is doing anything but "plodding along" -- but I do agree that he is in a perpetual coma (hopefully drug induced). McCain is basically trouncing the BushBaby -- and Bush doesn't have a chance in hell of winning.
Write that down on your mirror - in red lipstick. We just completed a 10,000 respondent national poll, and Senator McCain is already beating Bush nationally by a hair. This is a very bad omen for Georgie Boy.
So, again, I ask: what in God's name are you talking about?
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