Letters to the Editor
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Enlist, VichyDems.
If you're too old, then be a mercencary. If you're too feeble, then drive a truck for Halliburton across the desert. If you're too feeble to do anything other than tap a keyboard and pretend that it's WWIII, then give all you have to vets' organizations, including your keyboard.
But you won't, will you?
You're not just a coward. You're a coward's coward, a man who sends other folks off to fight...and I don't care if you once fought. If that's so, that's all the more reason to fight again, since you have the skills.
One thing that I've never understood about the Right is the media's unwillingness to ask why the Right, with all their crucifix-flaunting, didn't advocate turning the other cheek post-9-11? How can you be a Christian and attack or even counterattack? You can't. If you follow the Christ, you do more than forgive. You love your enemies. I think there are about 56 true Christians in the world. Everyone else is buying lottery tickets and dreaming of wealth or living in McMansions and rah-rah-ing war, evermore war, for ever and ever.
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So tiresome
The two guaranteed survivors of a nuclear holocaust are cockroaches and Camille Paglia's narcissism. As Norman Mailer has wisely observed, "You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves." Paglia has got to be the least self-aware human being on the face of the earth. And can't she once, JUST ONCE, find something even remotely new to say? Every single thing she writes: Bash Hillary and the Democrats, praise Limbaugh, drop name of rock group to appear cool, drop name of current celebrity to appear hip and relevant. When is Salon going to retire this one-trick pony? Her act is desperately old and tired and stale. Enough already.
Eric Meyer
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Regarding standards.
The Vichykook wrote: "The Sen From Minn must have thought he was in Barney Franks office or perhals the DNC Headquarters."
Okay. He's marginally literate. And his topical literacy is crazy akimbo. And his bigotry has launched a Bigot Pride Parade and he's flaunting his mottled, undersized cerebral cortex on the Internet, where children might see it.
I will fight no more forever with this marginally literate, topically illiterate, bigotry-flaunting boy.
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@ Yossarian, who wrote:
"Paglia has got to be the least self-aware human being on the face of the earth. And can't she once, JUST ONCE, find something even remotely new to say?"
Years ago, Paglia felt fresh to me. I wonder if she fawns over Madonna because Madonna, unlike Paglia, pepetually reinvents herself, whereas, as you note, Paglia repeats, repeats, repeats. I skim her columns now, but enjoy the letters to the editor.
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Help me out here...
I'm trying to remember the title of this book Camille Paglia wrote. "Sexual...Identity..." or "Sexual Personality," something like that. Oh, if only she were to mention it in each of her columns!
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Gender Studies
I am very dismayed by the three books Paglia reviewed about male gender studies.
WHY are women writing about men anyway? They get it so completely wrong, that it is laughable. Worse yet, this shit has a way of sticking and directing how men think about themselves, in the wrong way.
Do men exclusively tell women about their sexuality? Are women who write about their own female sexuality routinely shunted, ignored, not published, and made fun of? Well, get this, men ARE. Regularly.
We are discouraged from writing how we feel, what affects us, what goes through our minds, the symbolism of the matter, the implications of intimacy. If it is not of the cliched variety, where the man is the mythical Satyr, it may as well NOT be a valid observation.
Yet women are encouraged to explore EVERY avenue of sexuality, male or female tinted, without censure.
I will offer up a more detailed critique of the three books later.
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Sorry you get to vote
but it is absolutly beyond question that global warming is occuring, that people are causing it and that it would be much better if they would cause less rather than more in the future
They invented the term 'mental midget' for people like you.
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So, according to you, Paglia is presenting wrong
praise Limbaugh, drop name of rock group to appear cool, drop name of current celebrity to appear hip and relevant.
So it is not about substance with you, but about presentation.
If she placed a paragraph title called "Cool Rock Group Observation of the Month" in front of her Who paragraph, would that make you happy?
Or how about, "Rush Limbaugh is Not So Bad After All, Because Even A Broken Clock is Right Twice A Day and Besides, You Dems Are Full of Yourselves Too"
I thought the left was supposed to be more intelligent than the right. So why are YOU, who only sees presentation, any smarter than a knee-jerk ditto head?
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Actually WE caused the Pol Pot monstrosity, but not by withdrawing..
Until the USA happened along, the Vietnamese Army and the Viet Minh (later Viet Cong) kept their abominable neighbor, Pol Pot, in check. Our bombing of Cambodia to get the Vietnamese out of there was what gave that particular monster free rein. (And our lust for sub rosa control of the Golden Triangle of opium didn't help matters, either.)
Rewriting history out of ignorance or using political slogans as a substitute for facts only displays the unplumbed shallows of the mind of the person who does so.
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Iraq and Cambodia
Although the backside of failed US foreign policy in Vietnam and Iraq appear to have some similarities. As you so well describe, this parallel is very limited. Camille, millions of Americans cannot stand the idea of defeat. They desperately look for a reason to persist with the hope of eventual victory. This is not rational. The Bush Administration tosses out a lifeline to these people in the form of a moral justification based on probable genocide. Their emotional need completely overwhelms rational analysis. The war goes on.
Where is the liberal, democratic moral argument against this madness?
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Aw, Forget It!
When I was a child growing up in what some might describe as the backward Sahara of the Bozart South, I was always amused by two cartoons that adorned many a den and family room. One depicted a Union Civil War soldier above the caption, "Aw, Forget It!" The other depicted a Confederate Civil War soldier above the caption, "Forget, Hell!" Later in history class in school, such as it probably was, I learned about the exhortations of people of their day to "Remember the Maine!" and "Remember Pearl Harbor!"
Now, when someone utters the words, "Remember 9-11!" or "Remember Saddam!" one common rejoinder is, "Aw, Forget it!" Or, in more popular phrasing, "Aw, Move On!"
We are urged to "Forget It" in large measure because the cost of doing much about it in lives, treasure, and reputation is too high. We can spend the money on better things than human liberty. It's too complex--too many variables with all the conflicting ethnic currents. Besides it's not our business anyway--let the Iraqi's take care of themselves and solve their own problems, just like the Cambodians and the Vietnamese before them, and the Chinese and the Russians, the Hungarians, the East Germans and untold millions of other people who ended up under the tyrant's boot or worse.
"Just forget it!" And an echo still rings from the days of the American Civil War when a popular position of many Democrats in the North was to negotiate an end to the War because the cost in lives and treasure was too dear. Forget the breakup of the Union and the enslaved people of the South who labor under the tyrant's boot. It's not our business anyway. Let the South go its own way and solve it's own problems.
You might be able to reject those who choose to "Remember" and who warn of the dangers of future terror and tyranny as paranoid. You might be able to forget terror and tyranny, Camille. I can't.