Posted on 10/07/2008 9:12:14 PM PDT by publius1
Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.
Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.
The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.
And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.
One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.
As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.
Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.
Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism" -- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.
But it is now 18 years later -- the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality -- above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of "Butterfield 8." In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan's borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.
The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother -- without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.
The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.
I love this story! It captures the indomitable, muscular energy of women of the agrarian phase of culture, which I too witnessed in my childhood. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in the Italian countryside.) There can be no doubt that this is the primary reason for my dissident protest against the bourgeois proprieties and whiny male-bashing of Anglo-American feminism. Take-charge feminism doesn't try to game the system or run to authority figures for protection. It's hands-on in the moment, forcing respect for female power by earning it.
My favorite parts -- other than calling Katie Couric a viper -- were these:
"Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality."
"People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism..."
"She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature."
SEND SARAH AND TODD BACK TO MICHIGAN. NOW!!!
Yep!
Damn fine piece of work from one of the smartest women in the country, even if she is a liberal.
That was a very good read! I didn’t catch the authors name until I finished, and I’m shocked.
Although we differ on issues, I enjoy Paglia’s columns.
Her columns on Palin have been spot on and I respect that she can take on the hypocrisy of the elite.
In a column she wrote not long ago she offered that the reason that she did not live among the elite was because they were snobbish and out of touch.
Camille gets it.
It is so surprising to me that someone as intelligent as Camile Paglia can actually be voting for an empty suit like Obama.
I think I know who Camille is going to vote for. Her last line is right on the money.
Sarah is going to be a major political and cultural figure in this country for a long long time.. She has a larger than life personality and such great charisma. She connects with us.
In an era where people view politicians about as favorable as they do herpes. She is loved. We LOVE her.
I trully look forward to the second Wednesday of each month to read Camille Paglia's column. I don't agree with her on some issues, but I trully respect the incredible intelligence, insight and theory she puts forward. She calls it as she sees it. What first caught my attention was her fierce defense and celebration of the her family and the people/community she came from. I so applaud that.
So, I was not surprised when she defended Gov. Palin (Paglia doesn't agree with her, but thats not the point...she respects her...something not seen in the MSM). I would have been surprised if Camille didn't call upon her respect for a strong woman (even if she won't vote for her). Well done as always...
Also, pretty impressed she used two letters from LDS writers (how many Salonists will have to Google that?)
If you’re known by the company you keep, well, Paglia is apparently a dear friend of Rush’s.
Kind of cool on both their parts.
Down Butch, she’s taken. You’ll have to be content with a tingle up your leg.
A while back, Paglia wrote about the feminization of higher education; and how young men (in particular) who in other generations would have been encouraged to go into a trade, become an electrician, plumber, carpenter...and go into business for themselves...are now 'forced' to confirm to the societal need for white collar cubicle life. She felt that educators looked down upon the trades (as they stood in a building w/plumbing and electric...and get the picture). But Camille, this east coast intellectual saw not only the need for the trades but celebrated people who could build and fix and make the world work as opposed to those who are 'taught' to shuffle papers and some how stripped of the ability to 'do for themselves.' After I read it, I thought...'you sure you're not a conservative?'.
I’ll go you one better.
You and I and hundreds of thousands of others like us are bonded to Sarah for life, win or lose.
You want to talk about leadership, Sarah inspires me to want to do more for my country, my community, and my family.
And it’s not about her policies (which are generally on the nose when she isn’t listening to McCain) or her good looks - it’s all because of who she is, what she stands for, and how she lives her life.
Sarah gives voice to what we instinctively believe about this great land. What she says rings true somewhere deep in the soul. The lousy left can never hope to understand something like that.
Obama may win in November, but time will prove that Sarah is the political leader of Generation X.
She’s Italian, so of course she’s conservative.
Her liberal education and subsequent profession depended on her going lib, but you can sense the cracks in her contrived worldview.
Really rather a fair article from her.
I agree. I’ve always enjoyed her essays, especially on the intellectual corruption in academia. I’m lost as to how she always refers to herself politically as a “libertarian” yet votes extreme left. Last election, she called herself a libertarian and voted for Nader. This election, she calls herself a libertarian yet will vote for Obama.
If I remember correctly, she also wrote in an essay that she learned a lot about politics from Edward Said. That figures. She also doesn’t seem to know all that much about economics.
Still, her praise of Sarah is sincere (though I felt momentarily faint when she slipped in that bit about eight years of Obama presidencies), and her analysis of the rhetoric of the left (though, unfortunately, not its policies), is spot on.
Drink more of that Obama KOOL-AID Paglia, and continue down your aristocratic journalists path to fascist oblivion.
Palin is the future of America. Obama is the last desperate gasp of a passee generation of 60s has beens, who gave us the BJ loving president, who ejaculated on a blue dress instead of goin' whole hog.Both are men of extreme talk and little action.
Obama is their blow by, a desperate gamble at a Utopia that has no basis in reality,realizable only through a totalitarian state, and has effectively destroyed our banking system.
Get with the future Paglia. You are writing about it.
Well, Camille - I almost want Obama to win this November to enjoy the amusing sight of the Obama children being arc-welded to their brand-new seats on the slave-galley OBAMAUSA, and seeing the more-amusing sight of the old hippies being stripped of their pensions & 401Ks by Obama's Wealth Police.
Almost.
Dang! That she's on the other side!
Doesn't it just blow? Paglia is the freaking best, 98% of the time - and this time is no different.
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