Letters to the Editor
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Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy
One more of these vacuous screeds from this ridiculous "pundit" and I will cancel my subscription.
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I'm a fan of Paglia
...and even I think she's losing it. Her sense of intellectual responsibility seems to be eroding, as if she's resting on her reputation. Understandable, but unfortunate.
The feisty debates in the letters section is the best thing to come out of Paglia's return.
And Xrandadu DEMOLISHED Sham Sam.
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Mixed feelings
I am of mixed feelings when it comes to Camille Paglia. I have read some of her essays, and although she occasionally makes legitimate points, much of her writing is inflammatory. She is controversial for controversy's sake and this reduces her creditability as an academic. Generally, I take everything she says with a grain of salt and fully expect the French philosophers she is fond of bashing will outlast her. In addition, the concept of critics has always bothered me. Criticism is necessary, but I suspect many critics are failed artists who lack the creative chops to produce anything original. Of course, this is not true of all critics (many artists perform critical functions concerning other artist's work), but other than polemics about Madonna and frat house parties, where is Paglia's original work?
The best part of the Paglia column is the letter section. Overall, most of the writers intensely dislike her, but what was most enjoyable was Xrandadu and Joseph’s systematic dismantling of Sham Sam’s (un)arguments. Xrandadu and Joseph never descended into ad hominem and Xrandadu obviously possesses the patience of a saint. Thank you for being articulate and enlightening.
Sham Sam, you are clearly passionate about your opinions, but hard cases make for poor debates. It would be in your best interest to enroll in a critical thinking course. After you have completed said course, you will argue your points with logic and will not to resort to insults.
How do you know a debate has been lost?
The loser attacks the character of their opponent.
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To Sam, Xrandadu, and everyone else (part 1)
Sam – thanks for your open, thoughtful response yesterday morning (on page 47). I appreciate the change in tone that occurred here on the letters forum when we cut back on yelling at each other. At least now that I know something about you, I have real reason to give more of a shit about what you say, even though I find myself disagreeing with or being utterly lost in most of it.
I’ll also say that I’ve found virtually every post by Xrandadu Hrutman to be brilliant. You’ll even see that way back on page 32 I gave him my award for Best Overall Takedown of Camille. Shooting her full of holes wasn’t hard because her global warming argument was vapid and shallow and lacked any substance. No more really needs to be said about Camille; she damaged Salon’s reputation (in my book) by being so shallow, but we can make oysters out of sewage here (or lemonade out of lemons, whichever you prefer) by using this forum to meaningfully learn about and from one another.
With respect to Xrandadu’s posts: if he’s the preacher here, then I’m definitely the choir. I hope that Xrandadu’s letters changed a few minds out there. I would love to believe that clear, concise reasoning, an even tone, patience, and persistence will beat the shit out of hollow, inflamed, shrill, and shallow rhetoric every time. But if that were true in America today, Bushie Bush would have been tarred and feathered during the 2000 elections, and we’d have a government that went over the top to make wise investments on behalf of and in its people: schools would get real money, preventative medicine would be especially subsidized, solar power would have been subsidized decades ago, and everything that’s detrimental to human health and lasting happiness would be taxed. Basically, in my own personal ideal world, our government would pay more than lip service to the recommendations of what people in the academic field of public health have shown with their research. But I digress.
Alas, here we are in this forum, Xrandadu has spent hours and hours writing and meticulously dissecting and testing the logic of each statement Sam and others have made, and yet I don’t get the impression that any of them have budged one bit. I’ve even seen some fortification and backlash against Xrandadu’s position.
The lesson from these past 7 years that I need to learn (and rehearse and reinforce), that Xrandadu needs to learn, that any truly thoughtful and rational and passionate person needs to know, is that, while reason and logic have their time and place, relationships – actual human to human connection and trust and sharing and understanding and loyalty and encouragement and sacrifice and withholding of judgment – may matter a lot more when it finally comes down to working together to make changes for the greater good.
I’ve never been attracted to John Edwards as a politician, but as I write this, I’m reminded about his whole “two Americas” spiel, and I think I’m finally realizing what, exactly, he’s referring to: the gulf between you and I, Sam. The gulf between you and Xrandadu. The two sides of this “debate”, and where each side is actually coming from, and, more importantly, why. Let’s bridge that shit. Let’s put our faith and trust in each other and in the hope that the vast majority of people are, if not saints, at least pretty darn good at heart and deserve the benefit of the doubt. Trust is an accomplishment, a point of arrival, but it’s also a powerful starting point. Jesus, I sound like Carey Tennis with the constant epiphanies. Fuck that. Anyway - crossing that gulf between the two Americas that John Edwards has talked about does NOT mean having to be a poser in order to appease (see: John Kerry going duck hunting in Ohio on election day 2004; I loved the guy, but this made me cringe). I think it just means that, when we argue about stuff, we can get a hell of a lot further when we put more of ourselves on the line, when we make it more personal, when we dig deeper into why people think they way they do, why they hate the shit they hate, what they’ve been through to make them that way; let’s dig into and root out what the unspoken assumptions are; basically, who they are as individuals. That’s way more interesting to write about and read than a debate that consists of a bunch of facts and references and rebuttals and attacks. We’ve seen what that technique can do, and I’m not too impressed with the results.
From his response to a previous post of mine on page 47, I’ve gotten the overwhelming sense that Sam just doesn’t trust science. And why should he? It doesn’t sound as though today’s world, which science and rationality have played such a big part in building and fortifying, has been particularly good to him. He was a black foster kid in South Central LA, no stranger to its violence, and who knows what horrible shit he saw as a veteran.
Why the hell did I get to lead such a privileged, happy, easy academic life, and Sam was a foster kid in South Central? It’s not fucking fair. And I was the one in a hundred, one in a thousand, who had parents who raised me with the constant message “you’re damn right it’s not fair, and it’s not right either, so you’re going to work your ass off and use every last ounce of this privilege you’ve been given to change things and make the world more humane.”