Letters to the Editor

• Molly Ivins (RIP) on Paglia (pt. 1)....

  [Read the article: Queen Hillary's disruptive court]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Austin, Texas --- ``So write about Camille Paglia,'' suggested the editor. Like any normal person, I replied, ``And who the hell might she be?''

  Big cheese in New York intellectual circles. The latest rage. Hot stuff. Controversial.

  But I'm not good on New York intellectual controversies, I explained. Could never bring myself to give a rat's ass about Jerzy Kosinski. Never read Andy Warhol's diaries. Can never remember the name of the editor of this _New Whatsit_, the neo-con critical rag. I'm a no-hoper on this stuff, practically a professional provincial.

  Read Paglia, says he, you'll have an opinion. So I did; and I do.

  Christ! Get this woman a Valium!

  Hand her a gin. Try meditation. Camille, honey, calm down!

  The noise is about her _oeuvre_, as we always say in Lubbock: _Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson_. In very brief, for those of you who have been playing hooky from the _New York Review of Books_, Ms. Paglia's contention is that ``the history of western civilization has been a constant struggle between ... two

  impulses, an unending tennis match between cold, Apollonian

  categorization and Dionysian lust and chaos.'' Jeez, me too. I always thought the world was divided into only two kinds of people --- those who think the world is divided into only two kinds of people, and those who don't.

  You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? _Au contraire_, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

  Never one to dodge a simple dichotomy when she can set one up, Ms. Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this. She pegs poor old Rousseau, that fathead, as the initiator of the silly notion that nature is benign and glorious and that only civilization corrupts.

  Right away, I got a problem. Happens I have spent a lot of my life in the wilderness, and also a lot of my life in bars. When I want sex and violence, I go to a Texas honky-tonk. When I want peace and quiet, I head for the woods. Just as a minor historical correction to Ms. Paglia, Rousseau did not invent the concept of benign Nature. Among the first writers to hold that nature was a more salubrious environment for man than the corruptions of civilization were the Roman Stoics --- rather a clear-eyed lot, I always thought.

  Now why, you naturally ask, would anyone care about whether a reviewer has ever done any serious camping? Ah, but you do not yet know the Camille Paglia school of I-am-the-cosmos argument. Ms. Paglia believes that all her personal experiences are Seminal. Indeed, Definitive. She credits a large part of her supposed wisdom to having been born

  post-World War II and thus having been raised on television. Damn me, so was I.

  In addition to the intrinsic cultural superiority Ms. Paglia

  attributes to herself from having grown up watching television (``It's Howdy-Doody Time'' obviously made us all smarter), she also considers her own taste in music to be of enormous significance. ``From the moment the feminist movement was born, it descended into dogma,'' she told an interviewer for _New York_ magazine. ``They stifled any kind of debate, any kind of dissent. Okay, it's Yale, it's New Haven in '69, I am a rock fanatic, okay .... So I was talking about taste to

  these female rock musicians, and I said the Rolling Stones were the greatest rock band, and that just set them off. They said, `The Rolling Stones are sexist, and it's bad music because it's sexist.' I said: `Wait a minute. You can't make a judgements about art on the basis of whether it fits into some dogma.' And now they're yelling, screaming, saying that nothing that demeans women can be art.

  ``You see, right from the start it was impossible for me to be taken into the feminist movement, okay? The only art they will permit is art that gives a positive image of women. I said, `That's like the Soviet Union; that is the demagogic, propagandistic view of art.' ''

  Well, by George, as a First Amendment absolutist, you'll find me willing to spring to the defense of Camille Paglia's right to be a feminist Rolling Stones fan any hour, day or night. Come to think of it, who the hell was the Stalin who wouldn't let her do that? I went back and researched the '69 politburo, and all I could find was Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem, none of whom ever seems to have come out against rock music.

  Permalink Wednesday, November 14, 2007 08:30 AM