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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I've never even seen the movie "Titanic" but I do understand your comment about the power of the story having to do with the hubris of Western culture. Tie this together with the Global Warming/Climate Change shipwreck. What is more ridiculously audacious, to build an "unsinkable" ship without sufficient life rafts, or to presume to be able to direct the climate of the ship that is mother earth? If we actually set sail under Al Gore's pilotage on a mad voyage of carbon correction there will be a Titanic like movie in our future when that ship wrecks on its own iceberg.
coalsoffire
If you have to "rework" her sentences to make her understandable, then Palin is not communicating well. Why do so many people have trouble grasping this point? It is not acceptable that she cannot fulfill one of the basic requirements of public office, i.e. communicating clearly and effectively to everyone who understands standard English (not just the few with the gift of divining what Palin is trying to say).
How many sentences will she need to have corrected in order for the public to understand her? How many interviews will need to be "reworked" and interpreted? Sounds like she needs a full-time translator. Maybe Blaine Walgren can take the job.
I continue to find the willful blindness of this woman's apologists amazing.
"Camille, the reason Air America is a dud is pretty obvious to me. Liberals don't fall for the simple screeds and scapegoats that are more effectively used on conservative reactionary listeners..."
So how do you explain Keith Olbermann?
It's because your column often reads less like a column and more like an amalgamation of political stump speeches and talk radio. You're trying to be everything to everyone. When it gives you credibility you assume the mantle of academia, but are quick to take jabs at the "elite university intelligentsia" when trying to score points with the anti-intellecutal right. You almost always (including in this column) bring up the fact that you're from a middle class, Italian-American upbringing as a way to bash "coastal liberal elites" but even the briefest self-reflection would squarely put you in that camp that you so disdain; a professor at an arts university in a major Northeastern city.
You assume that your history as a feminist and an out lesbian automatically allows you to speak for the left, but then ritually deride "the left" and gay rights organizations giving credence to criticisms only coming from the weakest of right wing sources.
You knowingly take on the role of "gadfly" but refuse to do the job properly - your flawed logic and factual cherry picking, combined with your folksy "don't we all just know this is true?" delivery are far more reminiscent of radio talk show hosts than intelligent columnists.
Being an academic I'm forced to wonder whether you hold your professional work to the same frighteningly low standard that you do for you commercial work. Perhaps tenure has made you intellectually lazy, but I would fail a first year graduate student if they submitted work to me of a similar quality to what you routinely publish. It's biased, inaccurate, often unsourced, poorly researched and displays only the most cursory examinations into the topics at hand. I only hope that this is just a fun pastime for you and not indicative of your university as a whole. It's frankly embarrassing.
You have the audience and the standing to be an extraordinarily effective gadfly and challenge all sorts of different forms of conventional wisdom, but you can't accomplish that by cutting corners and not doing your homework. That's how politicians get elected, not how real intellectual work is done.
There's so much to hate in this column. But let me just point out one thing:
"Until I see stronger evidence, I will continue to believe that climate change is primarily driven by solar phenomena and that it is normal for the earth to pass through major cooling and warming phases."
In other words, you ignore the evidence for human-caused global warming and instead take a position that is just as empirical, but lacking in evidence, because you like it better.
In a pod, camille and sarah....camille actually manages to convey the non-stop grating prattle of palin's voice in her writing, which is quite the accomplishment....the most awful, yet funny, duet in history...palin and paglia (nice ring) at the grammy's...they enter from opposite sides of the curtain, like barbra and neil, and serenade us and them with a mind-blowing version of Endless Love...oh, joan introduces them..."two hearts (plus joan), two hearts that beat as one"
I see stars following certain letters... I want one too so having read those letters I think I have a handle on what it takes so here we go: CP you are dumb and a no account sell out. You have turned your back on lesbianism and liberalism and more isms than I can count. You probably get out on the right side of the bed in the morning and are a proponent of turning right on red. The fact that you had something decent to say about Sarah Palin is proof that it is you, not Princess Lea that is the daughter of Darth Vader. You, madam, are a poopy head! (insert editors choice star here)
Don’t quote The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage to me. I’m sufficiently well-educated, confident, and curmudgeonly to use my own style.
If you insist on using a style book put out for newspapers, use The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. Otherwise, your best bet is the ne plus ultra of style books, The Chicago Manual of Style. Whoever writes the Q&A section of the online version has a great sense of humor. Grammar and style need not be dry.
For a book on current usage, Burchfield’s preposterously “descriptive” update of Fowler’s Modern English Usage leaves little choice other than Brian Garner’s masterly Garner’s Modern American Usage. I can’t locate my copy of Garner’s right now, but I’ll bet we part ways on Democrat vs. Democratic if it’s mentioned.
Unless I slip up and forget to do so, I make a point of saying and writing Democrat instead of Democratic. Why? Because I can. And because people like vaporland get so upset when I do it. What vaporland thinks of my use of Democrat is no more consequential to me than a little dog turd. (Would “little dog’s turd” be better?) I’m willing to use democratic regularly, but only rarely in its capitalized form.
Back to the article itself.
As I read Ms. Paglia’s current offering, I found myself disagreeing with her more than usual. Is it curious that I should agree with her more often than not? She’s either a bisexual or lesbian liberal woman (I think), while I’m a heterosexual conservative man (I know). . . .
Now that I’ve finished the article, I find that we disagree on little. That leads me to this conclusion: She and I are both right most of the time. She may not be a Myers-Briggs INTJ type as I am, but I’ll bet we’re different on only one letter.
I was a projectionist in a movie theater when Written on the Wind was screened. I saw it several times. You have my guarantee: Dorothy Malone’s Academy-Award-winning performace was “hot stuff” to a 15-year-old boy. Her “wild dance” in a gauzy gown assured the win.
Ms. Paglia gets it. Other liberals don’t. Paglia never disappoints.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
