Cultural Critic: "Talk Radio, It's Real!"

Visited Salon & just had to stop at Camille Paglia's "sole Web presence" on the way out.

In response to persistent queries, I must repeat: No, I do not have a Facebook page, nor am I a "friend" on anyone else's Facebook. Nor do I Twitter. This Salon column is my sole Web presence. Whatever doppelgänger Camille Paglias are tripping the light fantastic out there (as in the haunted bus-station episode of "The Twilight Zone"), they aren't me!

They may not be Pags (Though we bet we should look for them.) but she's tripping over her own feet & a few other feet in a twilit zone somewhere between pseudo-populism & dementia, dancing to a mash-up of talking points

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis

(Occupants of the reality-based world will remember that Speaker Pelosi [Apparently not a favorite of Ms. Paglia's.] noted that people attending some of the Tantrums were comparing The Prez to Hitler & health care reform to Nazism, often w/ signs bearing swastikas; the Speaker did not call angry American citizens "Nazis," but the band in Camille's head [Bob Welch-era Fleetwood Mac] won't let her hear anything else.) & an

... exhilarating shamanistic vision (wonderfully enhanced by Christine McVie's hymnlike backing vocal) [which] captures the truth-seeking pilgrimages of my generation but also demonstrates the dangerous veering away from mundane social responsibilities. If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U. S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left.

You read it here first. She has seen the best minds of her generation, yada ... But none of that is any reason to think La Paglia un-balanced. After a page & a half from The Twilight Zone, balance:

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

Wow. She just pounded the faces of the 1996 & 2004 versions of the Republican Party into the political pavement. That'll show them. Take that, George Bush! And did you know? Republicans are sexy hypocrites.

No mention this month of hip-hoppin' Li'l Sarah P. though. Camille, please don't tell us ex-Alaska Gov. Palin's not a "credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness." Generous enough not to deprive others of the fun of scab-picking, rapidly losing interest in the whole mess, & realizing that to adequately deal w/ even one more of the themes will involve yet another hour of hunting & pecking that we'll never get back, here's one of the points that are central to her argument:

Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible.

MUST! STOP! VEIN! FROM! BURSTING!