Paglia is a fun read, but she is wildly inconsistent. Like many of us, she bought into a whole lot of drivel in her youth, but even in late middle-age she can't bring herself to admit it. So she endlessly goes on about the hallowed 60s (it's a rare column when those days are not mentioned), but at the same time uses her rapier sharp mind to fillet the dunces who still take the politics of that time seriously.
Somehow Paglia's voice seems a little less forceful to me in these post-911 times. I'm not sure if it's because my perceptions of the world have altered radically, or if something in her voice has gone hollow. Maybe I just don't give a damn about fashionable straddlers like Paglia anymore.
Should be: ...the dunces who try to take the politics of that time into the present.