She’s still the Cosmos

As the late, great Molly Ivins noted in her seminal take-down, Camille Paglia is the queen of the categorical statement. Unlike the rest of us, who have opinions on people or cultural phenomena that we might call “personal preferences,” Paglia’s likes and dislikes are definitive.

You think that’s easy? Her role as the sole arbiter of significance makes it impossible for poor Paglia to merely hold an opinion on any subject. She must instead confer mantles of cultural significance to an odd assortment of singers, actors, writers and politicians and defend her stamp of approval forever, no matter how events might overtake her original assessment.

For example, Paglia can’t merely admire a 3rd rate karaoke singer with a keen aptitude for marketing; she must declare Madonna the future of feminism and stick by that assessment, no matter how vapid or kooky the object of her devotion becomes over the years. That must be a heavy burden indeed.

But no burden can be heavier than the woman to whom Paglia passed the future of feminism torch after she personally snatched it from Madonna’s failing claws: Sarah Palin. Before the election, Paglia decreed Palin had “made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna.” At least Madonna obliged Paglia by continuing to crank out crappy pop tunes for several hundred years after being identified as feminism’s future. But Palin’s quick post-election fizzle left Paglia scrambling for justifications of her faith. And she settled on, of all things, language.

According to Paglia, those of us who were mystified by Palin’s mangled syntax and incomprehensible sentence structure are the stupid ones, and snobs to boot:

“So she doesn’t speak the King’s English—big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.”

See, we Palin critics are like those stuffy opera aficionados who failed to recognize the genius of Charlie Parker. And if that cultural reference is too musty for you, Paglia helpfully supplies a more recent one in her current Salon column—Palin speaks like bloggers write:

There has been a revolution in English—registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak…

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time.

Really? Then perhaps she’d be kind enough to translate this passage for me:

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.”

I think Palin was trying to say that as executives, governors are accountable in a way that members of congress are not. She also seems to work in a sly dig at Obama with the “present” vote thing. But the lack of clear subjects, objects and verbs (not to mention extraneous references to furniture) makes supposition necessary. Ferreting out Palin’s meaning reminds me of the daunting task the family in the old Lassie drama faced each week: ascertaining the fate of little Timmy from a collie dog’s series of yips, woofs and lunges.

Is Paglia really saying that clear, concise communication isn’t important as long as there’s a “powerful clarity of consciousness” in one’s eyes? What an odd thing for a college professor to say. I guess Lassie would get an “A” in Paglia’s media studies class.

Life would be much simpler for Paglia if she could just admit that Madonna and Palin give her a lady-boner and leave it at that. But she can’t, not for Madonna and Palin, and not for any subject on which her beady little eyes alight.

And I pity her for it. How hard it must be to get through lunch if you can’t just enjoy a slice of pizza but must instead declaim on the cultural significance of Italian-American cuisine’s vibrant, gaudy, triumphant dance on the grave of drab, puritanical meat and potatoes! Such is the price of Cosmos-hood. As we say in the provincial South, bless her heart.

[Cross-posted at Betty Cracker]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 12/10/08 at 10:21 AM • Permalink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia

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