Camille Paglia relives her burst into our consciousness in 1990 with her NYT op-ed about Madonna.

The anti-sex feminists are all gone, she says: "And I'm still here." And so is Madonna.

That night I sat down with the witches.

In the comments on that last post, Irene says: "Wicca seat savers: I had almost forgotten." Oh, yes! How apt, in these witch-hunting days. The text, from my old post about going to see Camille Paglia at a bookstore in Madison:

I show up early for the Camille Paglia reading at Borders this evening. The place is packed. I find a seat and then, here’s Chris, sitting with Nina, and they’ve saved me a seat in the second row. There are a lot of saved seats. Next to me is a seat saved with a copy of a book called “Wicca – a Guide for the Solitary Practitioner… over 400,000 copies sold.” At first, I think, 400,000? So we’re screwed... And then, I think, well, apparently not. Two women show up and claim the Wicca seats. One says, looking at the book, “Oh, cool. I’m kind of interested,” and the other says, “Me, too.”

"BRUCE BAWER: Whatever Happened To Camille Paglia? She was never the same after crossing swords with Ann Althouse...."

Ha ha.

And here's the direct link to the Bawer piece:

In those first years after Sexual Personae, Paglia seemed to turn up everyplace. By 1992 she had churned out enough irreverent, entertaining essays for a sizable collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Two years later along came another grab-bag, Vamps and Tramps. For a while, the pieces just seemed to pour out of her.

But Paglia was too hot not to cool down. As the years went by, her output declined. And what she did turn out seemed increasingly familiar. She was repeating herself. What had once been provocative was now stale. And her determination to inject herself and her personal history into everything she wrote grew tiresome....

And then came 9/11.... On this all-important subject, Paglia was all but silent....

For some years now, Paglia’s chief forum has been a monthly column on the salon.com website in which she’s combined pop-culture commentary with political opinions. Though she continues to try to sound boldly irreverent, her schtick is old, her voice is tired, and her politics are more consistent with the official liberal line than any Paglia enthusiast of twenty years ago would ever have expected...

Then, on the Sunday before last, the London Times ran what seems to be the longest essay Paglia has published in years. It was touted by the newspaper as “explosive.” What was it about? Banning burkas? Suicide bombing? Female genital mutilation?  No, it was about Lady Gaga....  her Lady Gaga piece accomplished was to affirm her irrelevance.

Here's my reaction to the Gaga goo goo.

And here are: "My Dinner With Camille" ("I didn't know I was capable of stressing out such a big rockstar diva") and "Try to Survive a Tornado With a Post-Structuralist" (the blog post that stressed her out).

Isn't Camille Paglia afraid of sounding geezerly?

Even as she led the way in Madonna appreciation, Paglia was behind the curve in lavishing attention on Lady Gaga. What to do? Go negative:

Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…

Negative about Gaga and modern life in general. These kids today. Get off my lawn.

Camille Paglia — opining on the failing libido of the American female — has something to say about "new age" and "men in shorts."

Men in shorts is, as you probably know, an Althouse theme, and New Age is the obsession of our beloved commenter Crack Emcee. Here's the Paglia:

The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.

Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution....

Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. 

Paglia is dithering. Good Lord! Isn't she embarrassed to enthuse about the Rolling Stones one more time? And much as I enjoy her company in my crusade against adult men dressing like children, her inane bow to "the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices" makes it all feel hit and miss.

***

On adult men looking like enlarged boys, my favorite description is still Tom Wolfe's:

[H]e had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students....

"Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans?"

Asks Camille Paglia.

Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Yes, exactly. This is a big reason why I feel so drawn into writing what gets perceived as a right-wing blog.

"Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts..."

"... makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land.... I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made."

Camille Paglia rages.

AND: She approves of Sarah Palin's use of the term "death panels":

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

"Sotomayor's vainglorious lecture bromide about herself as 'a wise Latina' trumping white men is a vulgar embarrassment..."

"... a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism when even the doughty Ann Richards was saying to the 1988 Democratic National Convention: 'After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.' What flatulent canards mainstream feminism used to traffic in! Astaire, idolized even by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was one of the most brilliant and peerless dancers and choreographers of the 20th century. The agile but limited Ginger Rogers, a spunky, smart-mouthed comedian, is only a footnote. Get real, girls! This is the kind of mushy balderdash I doggedly had to plow through for five years in trying to find a good feminist poem for my collection, 'Break, Blow, Burn.' I never found one. Rule of art: Cant kills creativity!"

A Paglia paragraph on Sotomayor and everything else.

"Obama's lack of fervor may be one reason he rejects and perhaps cannot comprehend the religious passions..."

"... that perennially erupt around the globe and that will never be waved away by mere words. By approaching religion with the cool, neutral voice of the American professional elite, Obama was sometimes simplistic and even inadvertently condescending, as in his gift bag of educational perks like 'scholarships,' 'internships,' and 'online learning' — as if any of these could checkmate the seething, hallucinatory obsessions of jihadism."

Camille Paglia on Obama's Cairo speech.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

She seems to want some kind of Mullah Obama, who can parse religions in expert ways so as to provide a path in which all religious devotees can, at the same time, be convinced by their own misunderstanding of others and the wrong nature of their own religious awareness that invokes chaos.

She wants a Messiah, a clear figure who dashes aside millennia of religious and cultural conflicts within a single speech. And, the fact is, people don't even want to listen to a messiah on these topics. The issue is religious but it's so much more than religious. It's about ego, and power, and control, using religion as a tool as much as a source.

Obama's lack of fervor is probably the best thing that can be delivered to a region wracked with fervor. Blessed are the peace-makers, after all.

Fervor is not overcome by more fervor, a waged war of passion. Rather, fervor is overcome by refusing to engage in the frenzy, absorbing and deflecting the rage into something constructive. The sins of the world are not addressed by talking them over in excited and rhetorically impressive ways.

She is conflating fervor with belief and frenzied excitement with persistent character. Most fundamentalists aren't acting out of real fervor for their chosen god, most are acting out of insecure egos who are attempting to manipulate the seen world so as to secure their own identity as dominating and secure their meager faith in some kind of obvious sign of their supposed devotion.

The religious passions of so many are not really religious at all, but are expressions of a deep-seated insecurity in the face of a rather dismissive world.

Obama's approach won't really change anything, but America is not the salvation of the middle east, and cannot leap into the frenzy with the same passion. We are the people who can show, in our actions, what it means to live for something greater -- our children, our future, our peace -- and how a steady approach is the way lives are built and rebuilt.

The Middle East does not need more fervor. It needs calm, but a calm that is trustworthy, and listening, and pushes for real changes in substantive ways within the societies themselves, pointing out that the answer is within not by changing someone else.

"Is it possible that there might be something really ugly at the core of contemporary liberalism?"

A question for Camille Paglia. An excerpt from her answer:

Liberalism... has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power...

...Liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees.... It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

***

Paglia's point aligns with something Justice Scalia often says. Here's a passage from a case we talked about in my Conlaw2 class yesterday:

The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court's criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter majoritarian preferences of the society's law trained elite) into our Basic Law.

"Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons -- his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes..."

"... who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship."

Camille Paglia wants heads to roll:

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

Heads should roll and arms should be used to butt heads. But butting heads is done with 2 heads colliding. If arms are involved, it's not butting. Even if the arms are fabulous and toned, it's not butting. Meanwhile, can you go mano-a-mano with a lamb? Lambs don't have manos. They have those little hooves. Perhaps fabulous hooves, but still. Butt still: Fight on, Camille! We love you... some of us do anyway. Others say Salon can "get Ann Althouse to do the same thing for much less money."

AND: Some day, when I get home after a long, strange conversation, I'll tell you everything about My Dinner with Camille.

Paglia's purple piffle.

Camille Paglia's new column begins with a purplishness:

Money by the barrelful, by the truckload. Mountains of money, heaped like gassy pyramids in the national dump. Scrounging packs of politicos, snapping, snarling and sending green bills flying sky-high as they root through the tangled mass with ragged claws. The stale hot air filled with cries of rage, the gnashing of teeth and dark prophecies of doom.

Doom! Yet read for a few paragraphs and you'll get hit in the face with the insipidity of: "But aside from the stimulus muddle, Obama has been off to a good start."

True, I was disappointed with the infestation of the new appointments list by Clinton retreads and slippery tax-dodgers.

Yeah, so then not just aside from the stimulus muddle, also aside from the multiple muddled appointments.

Nevertheless, I was very impressed by Obama's relaxed, natural authority with military officers on Inauguration Day, in contrast to the early Bill Clinton's palpable unease and exaggerated posturing.

The President was able to look decent standing next to military personnel. This is the "good start"? She should blush deep red with embarrassment to have defined the standard of presidential achievement down so low.

To be fair, Paglia also credits Obama with saying he'll close Guantanamo. Then, instead of acknowledging that he made only a promise — a promise devoid of details — to do something a year from now, Paglia lamely lambastes "conservative talk radio" for its supposedly claiming — rotely — that every Guantanamo detainee is a proven terrorist who should be "severely punished." But Guantanamo is not about punishment, Camille, it's about detention, and that's the conservative radio talking point.

Now, enough with that distraction, get back to Obama's purported "good start." That one-year-from-now promise and relaxed demeanor around military folk was good for you? But no, Paglia is tripping off to other topics. And WTF are "gassy pyramids" anyway?