I am always surprised by the level of animosity US workers have for unions. Without unions, there would not be a 40 hour work week, safey regulations, child labor laws, vacations or sick leave. The presence of unions positively affects the workplaces of those even not in unions by offering a standard by which people can judge their market value.

Certainly some unions have made stupid mistakes, some have become as elitist as corporations, and some, notably the auto workers' union, have failed to stand up for workers they represent. However, in the balance between corporate responsibility and workers' welfare union members come out far ahead. That top managment is getting 400 times workers' salaries indicates the need for workplace and economic reform.

There's no political will to demand social and financial accountability as long as workers, as citizens are too tired from working too hard for too little to get ahead. Fewer and fewer people can afford their own home; huge numbers of people are mired in debt; 50% of bankrupcies are due to medical bills. Corporations and their bankrolls are protected as individual persons under the law while individual people lack the resources to demand fair treatment.

This is where unions come in. When was the last time a CEO wasn't rewarded for failure? Auto workers aren't responsible for GM's losses, the guys who decided to make SUVs when gas prices were rising were. Yet while laying off thousands and losing money by the bucketload, CEO Waggoner made $5 million in salary and another $5 million in stock options then said it was a reasonable pay cut and a sign of his sympathy with the workers who had made $45,000!

As representatives of a particular group, a union can swing a powerful hammer to shape law and to bang on the doors of politicians who would otherwise be beholden to only the corporate interests - which are not the same as workers' interests. Perhaps the mythology of winning the lottery, like winning American Idol or surviving Survivor, has infiltrated our thought processes. Maybe people think they will get lucky, that they can do it alone, that they won't be the vitims of undue hardship, that anything is better than nothing. Maybe people think that they're going to get rich.

I would suggest reading Paul Krugmans November 30, 2006 essay in Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12699486/paul_krugman_on_the_great_wealth_transfer/print

Or going back to Eugene O'Neill's play, The Hairy Ape. "I ain't on oith and I ain't in Heaven, get me? I'm in de middel tryin' to seperate em, takin all de woist punches from bot' of 'em. Maybe dat's whay dey call Hell, huh?"

One loathes to use Sendak's trick of staring into all her yellow eyes before telling her to be still. However, those who hired and admire Ms. Paglia and she, herself, might benefit from a good look into her own contradictory and shallow work.

She sees Christianity as a mythology without conflict, western civilization as a series of neurosis, says feminism (it is unclear whether she mean feminists or feminism as an intellectual perspective) is "incapable of appreciating art," and has posited that beauty and art are simple opposite end perversions of maleness. "Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

Salon prizes itself on well written investigative journalism and essays made up of astute observations and critical thought. The loud, trite and thoughtless Ms. Paglia fits into this design the same way Barry Bonds fits into an ethics class, as an example of what not to do. I also suspect they share a characteristic enlarged head.

Those who think riling people up is creative mistake vitriol for virtue. I use the great and much missed Molly Ivins to counter any claim Ms. Paglia has to being either an intellectual or a feminist.

"Tracing Paglia's intellectual ancestry is a telling exercise; she's the lineal descendant of Ayn Rand, who in turn was a student of William Graham Sumner, one of the early American sociologists and an enormously successful popularzier of social Darwinism. Sumner was in turn a disciple of Herbert Spencer, that splendid nineteenth-century kook. Because Paglia reasserts ideas so ingrained in our thinking, she has become popular by reaffirming common prejudices....

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in...intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation's intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has ``flashes of brilliance.'' If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill."

The link to the Ivans essay follows. The last line sums up the intellectual worth of Ms. Paglia's work. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia