The Salon Interview: Camille Paglia

Salon.com ^ | 2/7/03 | David Talbot

[gcoolidge]

I've always found her to be an independent thinker and thought-provoking. very refreshing actually - an objective, intelligent liberal who, above all, does not subscribe to the liberal orthodoxy (or anyone else's, for that matter).

[tet68]

Very Good!

[Viking2002]

OK, I only made it to page two, and hit the silk.

'Libertarian Democrat' - there's a friggin' oxymoron, if I've ever heard one. Next.

[lainie]

The Camille Paglia Checklist

So, you've missed the beginning of this interview and don't know whether it's Camille Paglia or not? Nothing simpler than that. Just fill out this handy checklist, and the revolutionary Pagliameter will do the work for you!

• Is she talking about herself?
• Does she contrast something Judeo­Christian with something Pagan?
• Something Apollonian and something Dionysian?
• Hardcore porn is great?
• Mainstream feminism sucks?
• Foucault's an overvalued fake?
• Art is porn?

Follow the link to use the Pagliameter.

[lainie]

If I could, I would assign everyone to watch "Gone With the Wind" -- which is dismissed these days as an apologia for slavery. But that movie beautifully demonstrates the horrors of war. Everyone is so wildly enthused for war at the start, but Ashley Wilkes says, "At the end of a war, no one remembers what they're fighting for." It shows the destruction of a civilization, the slaughter of a whole generation of young men, and people reduced to squalid, animal-like subsistence conditions. And that's what's missing right now, as we prepare to march off to Baghdad -- a recognition of the horrors and tragic waste of war.

How can anyone take her seriously with this? (Everyone?) She is telling me I don't understand the gravity of war and need to use GWTW to get my education?

[faithincowboys]

perhaps I am as kooky as camille. I also saw a message in the space shuttle tragedy. how could you not? a fatal shuttle flight with the first israeli astronaut (one who bombed the Iraqi osirak nuclear plant no less), an indian american(hindu) and at least one devout christan (Rick Husband-flight commander)that occurs in the sky over Texas
(partly Palestine) in a shuttle called Columbia (Columbus
found america-- but you know that). the whole thing is rod serling weird. most interesting was the cause of the accident, a problem on the left wing-- likely to be the achilles heel of all three countries. the american left, israeli left and indian left will be very dangerous in the struggle ahead.

I think out of the horrfic tragedy the citizens of all 3 countries have realized that we will shed and draw blood together, dream and live and die together. we have common fates.

No one goes to war happily, we all should and must have trepidation. Could everything go terribly wrong--yes, it's possible. but perhaps it is a beautifully naieve and very
american belief, but evil will not win. it's the difference between us and the french. when the nazis came in, the french believed that their fate was to be a part of hitler's reich and as a result practiced the ways of their occupiers. we ,and the brits, are different, exceptional...we said no, "we can win, we must confront evil." during the cold war, the global left lost faith in our way of life and got seduced by communistic fascism. Lonely and brave people like reagan stood up to that evil and millons were liberated. now the global left tells us that we shouldn't challenge saddam and ,to lift from michael ledeen, the terror masters, but we must, we have no choice in the matter. there will never be a better time.the only deterrent we have in this new normal is regime change.
if the terror masters send terrorsts to kill us, it will not do to just kill the terrorists. the deterrent is to kill or overthrow the mullahs, the dictators, the leaders
of these homicidal states.

the evil will not win. and despite what hollyweird and the lefty intellectuals think we are not the evil ones. as we mourn our dead (the columbia crew) they celebrated.
we send people into space for the betterment of mankind, they send their young to die and kill. the difference couldn't be starker and barbarians like that will never win.
we are on the side of freedom and freedom must win.

[faithincowboys]

i did really appreciate her saying that if war is inevitable, we must support those in harms way and maintain our nat'l morale-- 2 very important things. that separates her from 99.9% of the anti-war movement who are hellbent
on demoralizing our troops and our country.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

I was intrigued by the three Paglia books I have read. She does have brilliant insight about art, literature and human nature. My dear Camille is way off base on this one.

According to Ms. Paglia's previously stated admiration for pagan beauty, she ignored the application of Aristotle's logic.

The space shuttle Columbia has no relation to Iraq. This huge red herring cannot be hauled up by the fishing trawler rig Madeline Albright uses to get into her girdle.

Equating the Columbia disaster with an omen or some supernatural event is best derscribed by the words of Thomas Hobbes:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness

Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.

[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.

[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.

[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.

[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.

Hobbes was aware of the tactical rhetoric of liberals way back in 1668...

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

See my comment, #48 above...

[giotto]

Great comments. Paglia is like so many other intelligent, once morally-grounded but now morally confused liberals who have occasional flashes of insight which they then attempt to expand on. But, using the faulty assumptions they learned in college and have never questioned, their arguments lack coherence and logic. This educated, analytical person builds her case on omens? I think she's been reading too much poetry.

[The Great Satan]

The portents! The portents!

[Kenny Bunk]

Camille is my main squeeze.

She is helping me wean the smarter of my children away from Deconstructionism. So big deal, she's got cold feet over Iraq. So does Pat Buchanan. No harm done.
Who's going to be polite enough to even listen, besides those of us who admire some of her points of view on feminists, faux-intellectuals, and Deconstructionists like the Clinton Family? The Left, particularly the Feminazis and Hillary, hates her guts, The Holy Roller Right hates her a**.

[saradippity]

Bookmarking for later. Thanks.

[ricpic]

Sense, nonsense. Sense, nonsense. Sense, nonsence. That's what listening to Paglia is like.

Can't stand the blood pressure swings.