"Just Tell Them...

I have worked 40 years to make the Women's Suffrage platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon."

Susan B. Anthony

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Just for Today, Camille Paglia Speaks for Me


Ms. Paglia has not always been my "homegirl." I completely disagreed with her, during the Democratic primaries. The matter of electing a bumbling neophyte to the highest office of the land was never negotiable to me.

But right here.... Ms. Paglia calls it like it is.

Quoting:

"Yes, something very ugly has surfaced in contemporary American liberalism, as evidenced by the irrational and sometimes infantile abuse directed toward anyone who strays from a strict party line. Liberalism, like second-wave feminism, seems to have become a new religion for those who profess contempt for religion. It has been reduced to an elitist set of rhetorical formulas, which posit the working class as passive, mindless victims in desperate need of salvation by the state. Individual rights and free expression, which used to be liberal values, are being gradually subsumed to worship of government power.

The problems on the American left were already manifest by the late 1960s, as college-educated liberals began to lose contact with the working class for whom they claimed to speak. (A superb 1990 documentary, "Berkeley in the Sixties," chronicles the arguments and misjudgments about tactics that alienated the national electorate and led to the election of Richard Nixon.) For the past 25 years, liberalism has gradually sunk into a soft, soggy, white upper-middle-class style that I often find preposterous and repellent. The nut cases on the right are on the uneducated fringe, but on the left they sport Ivy League degrees. I'm not kidding -- there are some real fruitcakes out there, and some of them are writing for major magazines. It's a comfortable, urban, messianic liberalism befogged by psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Conservatives these days are more geared to facts than emotions, and as individuals they seem to have a more ethical, perhaps sports-based sense of fair play.

Probably the main reason for my unorthodox view of politics (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin) is that I had much more childhood contact with working-class life than appears to be the norm among current American columnists. One of my grandfathers was a barber, and the other was a leather worker at the Endicott-Johnson shoe factory in upstate New York. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, my father was able to attend college, the only one in his large family to do so. I was born while he was still in college and mopping floors in the cafeteria. Years later, he became a high-school teacher and then a professor at a Jesuit college, but we never left our immigrant family roots in industrial Endicott. To this day, I have more rapport with campus infrastructure staffers (maintenance, security) than I do with other professors or, for that matter, writers. Don't get me started on the hermetic bourgeois arrogance of American literati!"


As a social "Liberal" rooted in working class ethics ... I, too, find the arrogance of the American "literati" insufferable. And, to be quite honest, I blame them for Liberalism's Jumping of the Shark.

Paglia, herself, can share some of that that blame.

2 comments:

  1. (as in my instant approval of Sarah Palin)

    I hardly ever read Paglia, but she had some very interesting things to say about Palin and Hillary. Something about them sending 'mixed gender signals'? It sounded like just the sort of thing I like about both of them!

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  2. Anonymous10:11 AM

    Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I would never let THAT thing speak for me.
    Also, I don't think liberalism jumped the shark - even if most people claiming they were liberals are behaving just like the other guys used to.

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