"I don't see the United States as having any problems"

Well, yeah, if you squint just right, close one eye, then the other one, imagine living inside a bubble where you deny everything you see and just believe in your own childish religion-soaked world domination fantasies-- sure that makes perfect sense.

On the smirk subject, where have you been? I can't help wondering.

During the 2004 debates he smirked and paused and stuttered and was basically just the weirdest presence I had ever seen. There are entire Web sites about his smirk, and have been for years.

Everyone saw it and voted for him anyway. But I promise you it's nothing new.

I've managed to get ahold of a sneak preview of the next Camille Paglia article. So rather than wait, you can read this advance look at selected excerpts. Enjoy!

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All of this brings us inevitably to a discussion of the true symbol of feminism in pop music, and the only one we have really, yes, I'm talking about Britney Spears. Her finger is on the pulse of the modern world like no other. She reflects the zietgiest of the symbiosis of the many shared identity crises seething in our collective angst in the shaving of her head alone. How many men are bald, after all? Who hasn't, furthermore, gotten drunk and forgotten their children somewhere? Even though she's dismissed as almost everyone who might possibly read this as an irrelevant lightweight, I'm going to spend many, many, more columns discussing her as a non-sequiter nonpareil,, starting with her latest CD "Don't Rain On My Pareil" in which musically she takes us to places few in this country would ever want to go even with the windows rolled up, nor have the vaguest understanding of, god knows I don't.

Politically, I'm going to be sensible for once in my life and back Barack Obama, but for all the wrong reasons. However, those attack ads he's been running are not doing him any good. The one about how John McCain is just a vapid Hollywood style celebrity was particularly dumb. As one of our leading intellectuals I write about almost nothing but vapid Hollywood celebrities, or wait, is that the other way around..... anyway, believe me, McCain is not even close to Hollywood. He's in Arizona. I mean he's not even Britney Spears, did I mention her? I think Obama's ad using Britney and Conrad Hilton to attack John McCain used the wrong hotel chain. Symbols matter! Oh, and he sounds black. What's up with that?

Kisses,

Camille

Frankly, I don't know what Rush Limbaugh sees in you.

Oh the far right as always loved Camille Paglia. It's simple really, they get to point to her spouting often exactly the same extremist right wing viewpoints that they do, and claim that she's "a liberal" doing so. Works no end of magic.

I mean this has been from the start, I remember in the early nineties someone pointed this out, when I had read only one column somewhere, I think maybe the East Bay Express, and asked what in the world was up with this hideous right wing writer being published in that "alternative" publication. Alternative meaning, at least it used to, an alternative to the consant right wing skew of almost all of the other publications strangling this country.

I had sort of hoped that Salon.com might be one of those alternatives also, but the moment Camille was signed on I knew it was not to be.

Case in point: Not only did Camille buy the entire McCain smear about "inflating tires is Obama's energy plan", she took it further and claimed that Obama himself went on a "crusade" about it and sent out tire gauges. Concluding with the sneering "Symbols matter!" was a particularly nice touch, though she could have added "The fact that I've gotten them all backwards, doesn't!"

It's worse than Limbaugh, actually, in some ways, they can reinforce some inane invented smear and say "See? Even the Libruls agree!"

is all it is. As the Socrates quote someone posted above demonstrates, there were those who had the same fear of writing and books at all.

Does anyone think we're worse off since books were invented? They're external storage devices, invented partly because the capacity of the brain to hold the increasing amount of information was being overwhelmed.

I can still muse about the meaning of life and all of the other wonderful things I want to while letting my cell phone remember the phone numbers. In fact, the latter helps me keep space and resources free for the former.

Socrates didn't have cell phone numbers to remember. As we became more and more technological, there was simply no way memorization would handle it anymore. If the people building a 747 had to do it entirely from memory with nothing written down to refer to, I for one wouldn't set foot on anything they built.