Maybe She’s Just Too Smart for Me

Camille Paglia (whose name has always sounded like a venereal disease to me. “OMG, Muffy, I went home with that TOTALLY hot SK8R boy on Saturday—and now, I have, like, this totally stinky case of camillepaglia. Sha!”) has revived her column on Salon.com. woo-hoo (lower case and lack of exclamation intentional—and you know how I loves me some exclamation points!!!)

Millie (you don’t think she’d mind if I called her Millie, do you?) is one of those people I think I’m supposed to like, but really, really don’t. My ambivalence evaporated upon reading her entry in Wikipedia:

Camille Anna Paglia (born April 2, 1947 in Endicott, New York) is an American social critic, intellectual, author and teacher. She is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has been variously called the "feminist that other feminists love to hate," a "post-feminist feminist," one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the UK's Prospect Magazine, and by her own description "a feminist bisexual egomaniac."

Puh-leeze, girl. I just threw up a little in my mouth.

You know that bitch wrote that herself. I mean when was the last time you saw “intellectual” as a noun in someone’s bio?

But I thought, what the hell? I’ll read her column. Maybe I’ll learn something.

And I did. I learned that my evaporated ambivalence had now turned to full-on, eye-rolling disdain.

One of the premises of her column today was her doubt of the existence of global warming. I won’t go into all of the detail—and forgive me, cuz you know I loves the big words--but, the woman’s use of florid vocabulary reminds me of Wal-Mart perfume—IT. JUST. STINKS. TOO. MUCH.

An example: “Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent?” Uh . . . I dunno. Is it J. Lo?

From C. Pag’s perspective, “virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.”

Say wha? My sense is that she doubts it because she carries a large share of the responsibility for said global warming. Greenhouse gas, fossil fuel, and blowhards like Camille. Need proof? Check out this line from a different part of her column, relating to political dynasties:

“There may be an atavistic longing for quasi-divine kingship that surfaces in unsettled times. Especially after 9/11, with its diffuse sense of peril, we should beware of the seductive dream of the strong man or clan who will shield us from harm. Democracy is predicated on sometimes chaotic cross-talk, not on governance by fiat, the whims of a hereditary elite.”

Somewhere in New Zealand there is a sheep growing a third eye.