Queen bee

Monday, 14th January 2008

For years now, I've been puzzled by the phenomenon that is Camille Paglia. Why does anyone take her seriously as a pundit? Is it simply because American academia needs its own version of Germaine Greer (who is, in fact, capable of talking sense when she's in the right mood)? Or is it that Paglia came up with a highfalutin justification for wasting time listening to Madonna?

Her latest column, on Hillary Clinton, is full of the usual campus strutting. I hold no brief for Hillary, but the venom in the piece is equalled only by Paglia's appetite for playing the amateur psychiatrist:

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them....It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumoured hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern.

I like the use of "rumoured" and "probably" in the same sentence. Alex Massie took issue with another of the Salon columns just before Christmas - I meant to link to him at the time, but got distracted by all the Yuletide chores. Alex notes how Paglia clings to the assumption - much-cherished by a certain kind of apocaplyptic transatlantic commentator - that Europe's lack of religion is a sign of decadence: "Secularism evidently cannot stimulate creativity as profoundly as religion does..." she observes in her usual magisterial way. Alex's response is worth reading in full. But here's the key para: Paglia bemoans godless Europe, but for her thesis to remain valid one should expect the United States to be a hotbed of artistic achievement. After all, America is the great exception to the general rule that prosperity kills religion. And yet I doubt that Paglia thinks this a great era in American arts and letters either. Most art, of course, is not very good and unlikely to last. 'Twas ever thus. But really Paglia's argument rests upon her distaste for "flashy, transient niche entertainment".
And if she doesn't like flashiness and transience, how did she ever fall for Madge in the first place?