My Favorite Liberal Feminist Lesbian

I was first introduced to Camille Paglia by a girl I used to work with during the summers back in my college days. While waiting for our turn in the rotation for the privilege of serving the unwashed masses of the greater Narragansett Bay area all-you-can-eat clam cakes and chowder, we would do a lot of reading. Sometimes we would read each other's books; and that is how I happened to pick up Paglia's Sexual Personae. I'll never forget that it was the first book I ever read for pleasure that required me to keep a dictionary on hand.

One of my biggest beefs with the left these days is that there are woefully few outspoken members who are not stricken with Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS). For example, they would prefer to see us leave Iraq defeated and humiliated--regardless of the consequences-- because any other outcome might possibly make Bush look good. They do not see the difference between being an outspoken member of the loyal opposition (which they're not) and indirectly or directly supporting those who wish to destroy our civilization (more often the case). While I do not agree with everything she says, I do not think that Camille Paglia is one of these shrill BDS suffers; and it is why I respect her. It is also why those who lay claim to the leftist-progressive megaphone shun her like a drug-addled aunt at Thanksgiving.

In this Salon piece, she touches on a point I made in a previous post about how cultural secularism is destroying our society.

Religion is becoming an endless political distraction -- but cultural secularism is not the answer.

...I agree with him (Mitt Romney) that the founders of the U.S. social experiment were Christians (even if many were intellectual deists) and that our separation of church and state entails the rejection of an official, government-sanctioned creed rather than the obligatory erasure of references to God in civic life.

This is something that those who wish to wipe "In God We Trust" off of our currency, for example, and stamp out all references to God in civic life either fail to grasp or willfully ignore. Regardless of the number of times history is revised by those who do not like its outcome, the United States of America will always be a nation founded by men of faith; and their indelible stamp will remain.

But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.

Here she acknowledges humanity's need to believe in something beyond the, "if it feels good do it" frame of mind that defines secular humanism.

But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic exercises in self-esteem. Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs -- including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.

Europe, which has settled into a comfortable secularism, is no model for the future. The great era of European achievement in arts and letters seems to be over. There are local luminaries but no towering figures any longer of the stature of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Ingmar Bergman. Europe is becoming a museum and tourist trap, as people from all over the world flock to see the remnants of Europe's royal and religious past -- the conservative prelude, in other words, to today's slack liberalism.

Europe as a "tourist trap"--just like our own Fisherman's Wharf. Though with the Euro trading where it is lately, I'll stick to visiting Fisherman's Wharf.

Regarding education:

There was an excellent Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week about the urgent national need for technical education -- which has been a recurrent theme in my Salon columns for a decade. Walt Gardner, who taught public school for 28 years in Los Angeles, calls for a "shift in our attitude to grant career and technical education the same recognition, respect and value that we reflexively accord academic education."

Gardner predicts severe dislocations for the college-educated middle class over the next two decades: "Auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians will be earning a comfortable living and deriving deep satisfaction from their work, while many graduates from marquee-name colleges will find themselves unemployed when their jobs are off-shored."

Exactly! And as a career college teacher, I want to insist yet again that the general education offered by American public high schools and even elite colleges and universities has become blatantly mediocre and not worth the price. Soaring tuition costs are a national scandal that the presidential candidates have failed to systematically address. Families and students themselves have incurred monstrous debts in their deluded search for brand-name cachet, which only marginally relates to a quality education. The college admissions race in the United States is a gigantic marketing scam that most mainstream journalists, desperate to get their kids into the overrated Ivy League, have shamefully neglected.

Whenever somebody asks me if I've started a college fund for my 10 month old daughter (yes I have), I often reply, "well now I'm not so sure she's college material." I am joking, but only half-joking. Prof. Paglia makes another point I touch on from time to time: college in its current dumbed-down form isn't necessarily worth the price; and a good technical education is underrated.

Al Gore got the Nobel Prize this week for his role as chief propagandist in spreading global warming hysteria into every nook and cranny of credulous minds. I expect that this baseless panic, like all fads, will evaporate when apocalypse doesn't arrive on schedule. Meanwhile let's focus on legitimate practical issues -- such as the grotesque volume of pollution belched by big-rig trucks, which in the absence of an efficient interstate rail system in the U.S. are absurdly carrying freight for thousands of miles from coast to coast. Exhaust from family SUVs is nothing compared to the environmental damage wrought by trucks, whose massive weight and deadline-driven high speeds also constitute an unacceptable risk to passenger vehicles on the highway... Nature is not our victim but an awesome, uncontrollable force.

I'd like to see the study that helped formed her opinion regarding the relative costs and benefits of rail versus truck transportation, but she puts an arrow right through the hubristic heart of the Eco-vangelists with that last line.