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Paglia's book 'Sexual Personae' had an incredible influence on me. I recognized myself in her 'Pagan Beauty' chapter... she infected me with realizing I was a 'beautiful boy'. Her thoughts later aided my metamorphosis like something out of Ovid.

The next few years, in my spare time, I've been studying sexuality and I've found some of the same conclusions as Paglia but many more unturned stones.

Paglia's thoughts on Iraq are completely predictable. Here's why:

Ever since the beginning, people have always thought themselves controlled in some way. People turned rivers, volcanos, clouds, and the sun into gods. Others imagined a grand prince who would tend his nation like a gardener does his garden. And as a gardener has his hooks and shears, so does the prince have his laws, regulations, and armies.

People view tyranny as a 'slavery'. But when someone like Moses freed people from slavery, they still reverted to a paganism and demanded that Moses act like a prince. They even created a golden calf to control them. Throughout Chinese history, the pattern is cyclical. The people thought the emperor to be a 'prince' and to 'control' them. Alas, an earthquake or flood occurs and the prince is thrown out with another taken in his place.

The point of what I'm getting at is that most of Human history, man has thought himself controlled rather than free. He places his destiny in a prince or god. This is why for thousands of years, humanity often starved or perished from the elements (or slaughtered each other in stupid wars).

This is the fruit of classical education: the notion of a prince to control people from Plato's 'philosopher kings' on up to Rousseau.

Man knowing himself free has happened in spurts and spasms throughout history. But a nation did so here a couple of centuries ago, and the world forever changed.

There is an intellectual fashion to say or try to prove that Humankind is CONTROLLED by something. Some people say speech and media controls us and alters us. Others say everything is a matter of psychology. Yet, a few say that it is entirely our environment. A more popular idea coming forth now is that GENETICS controls us. Whatever it is, it is that Humanity is under control of some 'authority' and free will is an illusion.

Paglia believes that Humankind is under some authority. She gives it the name of 'nature' with 'sexuality' pulling the rug from our lofty ideals.

I live in north Texas. I heard the explosion and looked up at the brilliant sky. I know that Columbia blew apart due to some malfunction, perfectly reasonable and caused by error. Paglia insists that it is an 'action' from the 'Authority'. She then digs into classical romanism to say that the romans would think that. Of course they would! They believed everyone was under an authority as does Paglia.

This is the grounding reason, no matter what evidence is present nor how damning it is, why people insist on going through the UN or some coalition. They still demand some 'authority'. But diplomacy is a made up world of theories and more theories. Oh, how I wish I could move to this World of Theory all the intellectuals come from! For in Theory, everything is correct.

This rooting for some 'authority' is the same everywhere for these people (to them, Democracy means creating a god whose name is Will of the People and we see his scriptures in charts, polls, and such).

The American Revolution has turned global. People are learning that they do not live under some authority, that they possess free will. THESE are what cults like extreme like Islam hate (remember, they believe Allah is the 'authority' and sets the destiny for them all!). The technology unleashed from this revolution is wonderous. But the old school of thought will use them to their own ends. The tank was meant for farming. They made it into a weapon. On 9/11, we saw airplanes (used solely for transportation) be turned into missiles. Box cutters became used to slit people's throats.

The same trend is following with biological technologies. Paglia can believe in some great overall 'authority' that controls. But I will believe that we are free people, independent, who are composed with life, liberty, and the quest for joyfulness. We will tell these authority worshipers that freedom is not the cutting of chains or food stamps. Freedom is a matter of mind where people take up their own responsibilities and tell the leaders what to do, rather than dumping responsibility on a leader and have him tell us what to do. One day, it will become absurd to blame a politician for the faults of the economy just as it is now to blame a politician for hail and frost.

Ms. Paglia, you will not place a crown on Nature. We don't see your 'authorities' which is why the commentary seems silly as a child demanding he go ask Santa Clause before he acts.

What you call arrogance, I call independence. What you call destiny, I call a matter of will. And what you call extremism, I call a day's work.

I was intrigued by the three Paglia books I have read. She does have brilliant insight about art, literature and human nature. My dear Camille is way off base on this one.

According to Ms. Paglia's previously stated admiration for pagan beauty, she ignored the application of Aristotle's logic.

The space shuttle Columbia has no relation to Iraq. This huge red herring cannot be hauled up by the fishing trawler rig Madeline Albright uses to get into her girdle.

Equating the Columbia disaster with an omen or some supernatural event is best derscribed by the words of Thomas Hobbes:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.

Hobbes was aware of the tactical rhetoric of liberals way back in 1668...