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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Paglia: Western Civilization at risk. |
| 2013-12-29 |
| [WSJ] 'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation. 'Surprising' to some perhaps. When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts." Under the Champ, we'll soon all be living in huts and smoking the grass. The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus. "Talk about Miley Cyrus"....now there's an intelligent concept. Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian). An "abrasive, strident and obnoxious" lesbian, quite rare. Quite rare indeed. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 That was after WWII. Bauhaus (and the whole Nietzschean philosophy, for that matter) came over after the First World War. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-12-29 19:58 |
| #5 And a space program, Pappy. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-12-29 16:54 |
| #4 Well, we did get the Bauhaus movement and a few German architects in return... Do we still have the receipts filed away somewhere? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2013-12-29 15:08 |
| #3 America forked over a lot of resources to help. Well, we did get the Bauhaus movement and a few German architects in return... |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-12-29 14:40 |
| #2 The first big attempt at suicide was in August 1914. America forked over a lot of resources to help. With the death of the ancient regimes (Hohenzollern, Hapsburg, Romanov, et al) the new European malaise of socialism moved to the forefront as means of suicide with another big attempt in 1939 (National Socialist joining with Communists socialists to divide Poland). Again after another great expenditure of resources the death was delayed, but the whole cancer of 'redistribution' and 'social justice' from its European origin took hold in the New World, particularly among the Europhiles who had a particular revulsion to populist Americana. It's been a slow degenerative disease that has metastasized through the culture. Unfortunately, if history is any indication, either the decline will continue or a lot of blood has to be spilled to remove it. The latter is not just a point of internal strife but also the inability or unwillingness by the body to defend itself from external agents. |
| Posted by: P2kontheroad 2013-12-29 08:05 |
| #1 Philosopher = lover of wisdom. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-12-29 07:51 |