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Camille Paglia, again

I'm a big fan of Camille Paglia. I think that she has a very clear, and rich, mind, that she seems a woman who feels comfortable with ordinary folk, and has a passion for culture and plain-speaking. Her columns at salon.com, detailing her distaste for the left as much as her revelling in the shock value of Rush Limbaugh, are very great fun, which is high praise. I imagine that she has very little obviously in common with me, but what would life be if we were all the same?

So I was interested to see in Dr Paglia's latest columns something that I have been picking up on too. For some on the American right, and I don't mean all republicans here, paranoia, militancy, and an increasing wish to just walk away from normal debate are congealing into something else. All one needs is to totally deligitimise government and to cast centrists as liberal enemies of the country and of all decency, and something will give; these people are heavily, and righteously,--and, before you say it, rightfully-- armed.

Over the course of the past few years on this blog, I have clearly been following a much more alienated and conservative path than I started out with. One of my first ever blogs was about how, with a re-election figure amounting to just under 22% of the electorate, things would go wrong for the British government very badly when things went wrong globally; I have also noted how this was a kind of rough justice for such a debased state.

I think that polarisation for forty years has shredded the anyhow tenuous civic peace of the American republic in a similar way. When things start going wrong in the United States of America, however, they won't be as nasty or bilious as politics is getting here; they will be infinitely worse. So, to see Dr Paglia picking up on this has really made me think, and I would urge you to go and have a read of her lines too.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Why don't you stop your friend Neil Clark from humiliating himself like this?
http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/05/spuriosity-shop-chapter-94.html
4:58 pm
Martin Meenagh said…
Hi Anonymous. Look, Free men can have whatever opinions they want, and we're not each other's keepers, any of us. We can disagree. What I think is important that you do so without having personal goes at people and without investing debates with all this sort of thing.

It's what I keep going on about--courtesy. Martin Kelly, whom I would direct you to, has a typically decent response to this too.

This is the reason, most of all, I think, why I'm not really part of the self-defined 'left', though I was a Labour member I guess culturally. People get so angry and heavy so quickly, and they hit on the chinks and inconsistencies in life rather than approaching people as friends until they behave otherwise.

Neil has always been kind and courteous to me, and for a while a few years ago we were colleagues--I enjoy achat with him from time to time, and I guess we disagree on a good few things, but I can't change anything so what does it matter? We have another Judge, ultimately.

Opinions can differ, and on things I don't know about, like all the stuff flying around blogland, I won't have a go at people, including you.
6:02 pm
Martin Meenagh said…
Sorry, am tired. I meant 'keeper' in the zoo sense, not the Cain one. Perhaps I need feeding....
6:06 pm
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