Even though I don’t agree with Camille Paglia on very much (if anything) politically, I admire her greatly for her honesty, the clarity of her perception, and the true independence of her mind, and also for her great gifts as a writer. Her latest column in Salon shows her at the top of her form, particularly in this telling observation about Barack Obama:
As I’ve watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I’ve been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. . . Obama’s ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.
It also shows her refusal to close her eyes for the sake of ideology, as she expresses concern over
the mainstream media’s avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama—even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai.
She mentions specifically the evasiveness of the Obama campaign, and the unanswered questions about his association with Bill Ayers and (especially, to her) Bernardine Dohrn, writing,
We don’t need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don’t like feeling gamed or played.
Those two sentences, comparing the behavior of Sen. Obama and his campaign to that of the hated President Bush and his administration, have to have cost her. Paglia spends a fair chunk of her column on Ayers and Dohrn, whom she clearly finds disturbing; and from there she turns to Gov. Palin, writing,
Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology—contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is—and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. 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. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns—that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee—what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan—nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
It’s a powerful smackdown to groupthink and cant from someone who’s as free of both as any columnist around (on either side of the political aisle); the fact that it’s also a powerful defense of someone who both needs and deserves it just makes it better.