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.

Thought Police 1; Free Speech 0

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, resigned today. I shouldn't really care too much about this since I have nothing to do with Dr. Summers, Harvard or higher education for that matter, but the circumstances that led to his resignation are what compel me to post on the subject.
In January of 2005 he gave a speech at a conference on diversfication of the science and engineering workforce. He discussed possible reasons for the current underrepresentation of women at the top in many fields, especially in science and engineering. He said that although his remarks were provocative, it was vitally important to study the underlying reasons. These may include social issues, such as willingness to commit fully to a highly demanding career, and biological differences between the genders.

Here's the part of the speech that was so controversial:
"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong."

This was too much for poor, hyperventilating Nancy Hopkins to bear:
Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Soon after there were demonstrations on campus demanding that he resign because of his "insensitive" and "sexist" remarks. After a month of the situation smoldering the School of Arts and Sciences gave Dr. Summers a vote of no confidence, an unprecedented step in the history of Harvard. Since then it is apparent they have been unrelenting in their pressure for him to step down. Today he finally capitulated and he had this to say:
"I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership." (Read Summers's letter.)

Commentary

What I find so disturbing about this entire episode is that the president of what is arguably the most prestigious university in the United States should be forced to resign because he dared to suggest that there may be innate differences between men and women. In other words, he dared to stray from the liberal/PC dogma that the Arts and Sciences department preached and he paid for it with his job. He wanted to generate discussion and instead he got fully censured. I was under the impression that college--especially an Ivy League college--was a place where young malleable minds go to pick and choose from a garden of different, sometimes conflicting ideas and later assemble those carefully chosen ingredients together into what could be called their Philosophy of Life. In short--the university presents, the student decides. If a university president is forced to resign by the PC Thought Police, what does that say about the state of higher education in America in general?
I wish Harvard all the best in finding a new president. Hopefully they will find somebody who kow-tows to the Arts and Sciences department, realizes a university president should be seen and not heard, and above all doesn't court controversy by suggesting debate when trying to find answers to the problems that plague us today.

(I urge you to read the whole speech that got him in trouble in the first place and determine for yourself if his words are sexist.)

Unwinding the biological clock

If personal choice and self determination are the measures, women in America and the western world in general have a far better life than women living in other parts of the world today. The women's suffrage movement that began in the early 20th century and bloomed in the 60's has had many ramifications, most of them positive.
Today there is an article at MSNBC entitled: With no Mr. Right in sight, time for plan B
More women are silencing their biological clocks via sperm donation.

link

it begins:

When Anne-Marie,* the president and CEO of a start-up medical device company in Philadelphia, first begajavascript:void(0)
Publish Postn thinking of having a child on her own, she was 37 and her biological clock was ticking loudly.
As much as she wanted to be in a great, loving relationship with a partner, she wanted a baby even more. “If I turned 50 and didn't have children," she says, "I'd be pretty devastated."

Here we have an obviously intelligent, business savvy woman who chose to start her own company. The consequence of this is that she hasn't had time to think about a family until now. The obvious solution?

So after about a year of weighing her options and considering what it would be like to be a mother on her own, she did something a growing number of single women are doing: She chose an anonymous donor through a sperm bank and started her attempts to get pregnant, using drugs to encourage the growth of egg-producing follicles.

This is supremely selfish.

“I think a lot of the reason there are more single women becoming pregnant on their own is because of careers,” says Anne-Marie. “I went to a big-name undergrad school and a big-name grad school, I traveled a lot, I worked overseas. It’s hard to meet somebody, if you didn’t want to date someone from work. All of a sudden you’re 37, 38 and you think ‘I should have prioritized this more.’ But you’re just doing what you enjoy.”

Every choice has a consequence.
OK I'll come out with where I"m going with all of this...
Women have made tremendous strides towards equality with men in the past 100 years. This is good for men, women and society as a whole. However, when a woman decides that she's missed the marriage boat, or she thinks it's too much trouble to find a proper mate and nurture a relationship that will result in children, she now has the option of becoming a single mother by choice. Society, rightly or wrongly, has decided that being a single parent is not so bad afterall (it is most certainly preferable to a child growing up in a dysfunctional, abusive two parent home). I do not know how this translates into a single mother being both a good mother AND a good father. A child needs both to be a well adjusted kid, adolesent and adult. I think it is the pinnacle of selfishness to bring a child into the world simply because a woman feels she needs to be a mother before it's too late. It transfers her neurosis on to an innocent being. I'll speculate and say that a woman who cannot choose the proper mate or maintain and nuture a healthy relationship probably would not make the best parent in the first place. There's something Darwinian there. How is a child to understand that he/she is a product of a spermbank? What sort of psychological consequences does this have?
There is such a thing as too many choices, I believe this falls into that category. I'll say it again--a child needs a mother AND a father. If that were not the case, nature would have created us as asexual beings.