Those who know me personally know that I've been a fan of Camille Paglia ever since she shared pages in Playboy with the Chairman of the Board's daughter, Nancy Sinatra. I was doing some searching on the internet to see if she'd done anything new and ran across an old transcript of a speech she'd given at MIT in September of 1991
http://gos.sbc.edu/...
There's a lot there, but most notably there is the prediction of the rise of the neocons and the cause of it.
About six paragraphs into the speech she starts talking about leftist phonies, people with no training in history and no credentials for political thinking. These criticisms aren't applying to your local community college, not at all; these accusations are pointed at places like Yale.
While we could sit here and argue that things like literary theory follow a cycle and are, therefore, subject to being wrong at any given time, we must admit that, sometimes, the failure of academia has real-world consequences, and one of those consequences came in the form of George W. Bush. In her speech she stated:
"The situation right now is that we have on one side people who consider themselves leftists but to me, as far as academe is concerned, are phonies, people who have absolutely no credentials for political thinking, have no training in history, whose basic claim to politics is simply that nothing has happened to them in their lives. A lot of these people have money. I'm sick and tired of these New Historicists with trust funds. I'm so sick and tired of it. And because they're pampered, their whole lives have been comfortable, because they've kissed asses all the way to the top, they have to show they're authentic by pretending sympathy for the poor lower classes, the poor victims."
Then, speaking about Terry Eagleton of Oxford, she states:
"This is why he has to wear blue jeans, to show, "Oh, no, I don't have the money." These people are hypocrites! They really are. It's all a literary game. There's no authentic self-sacrifice, no direct actual experience of workers or working-class people. It's appalling, the situation. It's everywhere, it's everywhere in the Ivy League."
Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like a certain chimpy president we have, who went to an Ivy-league school and wears blue-jeans in order to 'connect' with the common man?
She suggests that there was a lack of self-critique on the left, something that caused a lot of people to be labelled neoconservative when they didn't really deserve the title. Yet here we are, 15 years later, with a neoconservative regime in power. One has to wonder if the left still has a lot of soul-searching to do before we can defeat the likes of BushCo?
What led us here? Could it be that PC went too far and started stifling speech that should have been free? Was there hypocrisy in race relations by rejecting the idea of 'equal, but different'? What new lessons have we learned, if any, since the post-sexual-revolution era? And what role are we playing, if any? More importantly, what role SHOULD we be playing?
And should we hold Yale partially responsible for the current state of affairs in our country?
It may be that we'll have to live outside Utopia in the end. There will be no place where eternal innocence reigns free and we'll all be children free to play in the Garden of Eden. Rather, we'll have to be high-minded and well-educated instead, being comfortable to live with our differences, even if we find some of those differences distasteful. Right now there's a fascism on both sides that needs to be eradicated, and we can't look toward academia or the government for a resolution. That's something we'll have to look inside ourselves for.