Letters to the Editor
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You're a decent critic, Henry James bashing aside, but you know nothing about politics. You write that the only thing militating against Obama is time; the more he's known, the bigger his gains. Actually, the more he's known, the less voters seem to like him. After winning primary after primary, he lost two huge contests and is on the verge of losing a third. He did best early on (Iowa, Nevada), when no one knew anything about him.
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Amazing -- I actually agree.
* No doubt, answering the phone wearing a suit at 3AM is a strange thing to do. Clinton can't even unbend enough to throw on a bathrobe.
* Obama would be crazy to accept the VP slot, and unsurprisingly, he has said recently that he doesn't want it.
* While there has certainly been some misogyny in the media, it has largely been confined to Sunday morning TV, and it is a long way from "an all-time high."
* However, I don't understand her claim about Rush focusing on partisanship excessively for this election. Rush has always been about partisanship.
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Enough with the bragging please!
I love how fashionable it has become for whites to reveal that they are voting for Obama. Voting for Obama is now equivalent to Marching for Civil Rights in the 60's. I can just hear it now "Oh no, I am not racist. I campaigned for Barack Obama." I suppose the self-absorbed Camille thinks she has atoned for her racist sins.
I fear Barack Obama may be the worst thing to happen to Blacks and Civil Rights.
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ydharma
Rush Limbaugh always sticks to principles???? My God, a statement like that should nearly disqualify its writer from further consideration as a rational human.
I disagree..
That statement *completely* disqualifies the the writer as a sentient being.
Ms Paglia failed the Turing test with that one.
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I Hope There Is Hope
Hmmmm. I was watching a video of Serge Gainsbourg the other night and began to picture him with a mouthful of perfectly veneered teeth. For some reason, I let him keep his nose, but it didn't matter; that change alone turned him into someone with whom Bardot and Birkin would have performed a singing only duet.
American eroticism, arthouse cinema, and Obama aren't as disparate as they seem at a glance. I've been longing for a resurgence of intellectual curiosity, satire, vaudeville - not nostalgia, not museum pieces - but here and now. I want optimism and an adventure. I hope that if Obama is elected, can a Fellini or Antonioni be far behind? Would anyone watch?
I've watched my husband get very quiet when he's watching Ava Gardner, Sandra Milo, Claudia Cardinale and Anita Ekberg. He's never that quiet with contemporary actresses, with the possible exception of Charlotte Rampling and Salma Hyak. He even remarked recently about what a great movie "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" is and how that movie would never be made today. (The movie that was the inspiration for Alice Cooper, by the way.)
Hillary? Feminism? I don't see it. She's citing her years as first lady as "experience". By that definition, I think she may have had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
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Believe It or Not I Think Paglia's Right About Rush Limbaugh
When Limbaugh started his ascent in the popular culture, he made many statements I disagreed with. (I was forced to listen to him because I had fellow workers who tuned in his show regularly.) However, he had a certain consistent and conservative point of view, mixed with views that might have surprised some people. Remember Drew Carey trotting him out on his show to counter the opinion that the internet should be censored? In other words, he did have some sort of moral compass.
I think the fatal turning point for Limbaugh came with his painkiller pill bust and lying about the reason for his temporary deafness (it was the drugs, folks). After bloviating about locking up druggies and throwing away the key, the hypocrisy of his situation was probably more for even him to bear after he never spent a single day in jail.
It wasn't long after that he became a waterboy for the Bush administration, an admission he made on one particularly weird show a couple of years ago.
So now he is just a fat, pathetic, cynical, bitter ranter. Too bad. Karma is a bitch.
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Steinburg,
Keep holding on to the hem of Hillary's pantsuit. I don't know anything much about all the where with all's with ragard to whether people like Obama more or not as they get to know him, but I do know that most people know Hillary, and "Hillary hater" is a phrase which is now present everwhere in the popular vernacular. Speaking for myself I don't know if I hate Hillary, but if she becomes president it would be more appropriate to play "God save the queen," rather than "Hail to the Chief," because she is only bringing back a recycled dynasty that has seen its day.
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Mmm, Mmm, Good!
Reading Camille Paglia always makes me want to take a trip to the bathroom and regurgitate after I finish. This article, humorous as it is, was no exception. I guess we all need hobbies...
But really, Paglia's weak attempt to equate feminism with contemporary "sex" culture is splendid...not.
On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that she spit out the venom against Hillary Clinton and feminism early on -- seeing red doesn't make it especially easy to express exhiliarating thought.
On balance, I got what I expected: Paglia still seems to me to be a firmly entrenched non-feminist, 60s-style, despite her "lofty" discussion of great foreign films and those oh-so-great foreign actresses...feminists all.
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I really enjoyed C.P.'s...
descriptions of the modern starlets, and especially this, about the SI swimsuit issue:
"...all that's left is empty, mechanical attitudinizing".
I enjoy looking at beautiful interesting women, not mannequins. There was one shot in the whole mag that was great, a model who appeared in a half t-shirt in the Israel spread. (Can't recall her name.) It's not sexy, the media and the swimsuits and the 'Victoria's Secret' junk. It's all formulaic posing and it's incredibly predictable.
Zzzzzz.
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Rush for President
Paglia shows as much savvy about politics as she does about talk show hosts. Her fawning over Rush and her contempt over those 'arrogant, self absorbed, untrustworthy Clintons', who somehow had a remarkably successful presidency, despite getting his stick wet at someone else's expense, makes me wonder whether she has had a coherent thought in her life. Oh, I know that she can string together a bunch of anecdotes about now dead or dying womyn of yore, and somehow conflate their tales with popular culture. Honey, turn off Rush, stop making pretend about Obama and his rhetoric of hope (we don't need hope, we have that in barrels, we need action). Pull your conceded head out of the fantasy of femdom and look around you.