Camille Paglia is to writing what the guy from Bronski Beat is to singing. There was a brief moment back in the 80’s when Jimmy Somerville’s eerie countertenor was a good thing. As a distraught gay teen living in a backward southern town, I was sort of duty-bound to buy the 12″ extended single of “Smalltown Boy” and play it until the grooves wore out.

The problem of course was that over the course of Bronski Beat’s brief career (and Somerville’s subsequent venture, The Communards), the singer never made any effort to expand and explore his voice, to add any kind of depth or nuance. He seemed content to just blast away at the same four or five notes and retread the same hoary lyrical themes (You and me/one day we’ll be free, etc., etc…) interminably.

Such is the case with Camille Paglia. She had a moment somewhere back there in the first Bush presidency where she discovered that by striking a contrarian stance on women’s issues and engaging in certain specific button-pushing, attention-seeking behaviors, she could attain a kind of celebrity. That moment of relevance was mercifully brief, but no one, apparently, bothered to pass that information on to Camille.

The editors at Salon haven’t figured it out yet, either. Why do they insist on running her overwrought, under-thought ramblings?

Thers thinks he knows:

Paglia has a column in Salon because the editors of Salon hate you.

Oh. Of course.

I decided this afternoon that I was going to write about Paglia’s latest trail of verbal cat-sick, but very nearly gave up that notion entirely when I realized that meant I was going to have to actually read it. (No! Noooooo! Anything but that!)

Nonetheless, I bravely suited up, donned a respirator and other level-4 hazmat accoutrements and waded in. It’s this or trolling MalKKKin-land for a topic and I just can’t face the bizarre and byzantine curlicues of La MalKKKin’s paranoid delusions tonight. A Theropod can only take so much.

Paglia opens her essay in flame-thrower mode, insinuating that everyone who favors a Hillary candidacy is some kind of hideously deformed emotional cripple:

Aside from the stylish Huma, there’s definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign — sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card.

Heh. Camille Paglia just called someone else “ham-handed”. (I’m sorry, Mr. Pot. Mr. Kettle isn’t here right now. You’ll have to call him black later.)

Now, I’m not much of a Hillary man, myself, but I don’t think it’s a moral or mental failing to support her. That’s just silly, and Camille’s description of the people working on the Clinton campaign (”nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos”) would do Rush Limbaugh proud.

Then, in typically tin-eared fashion, Paglia says the Democrats should be playing up Dianne Feinstein as their greatest distaff asset. With all due respect, Dr. Paglia, this is simply not the week to be singing DiFi’s praises, given her recent high-profile capitulations to the BushCo junta, the egregiousness of which has made even her long-term supporters yearn to send her off to the glue factory.

The rest of the piece is just as fatuous and wrong-headed. Paglia adopts the same tack as the Bush Administration’s paid junk scientists and denies that global climate change is anything other than a liberal fantasy, then marks the passing of Norman Mailer in typically self-congratulatory fashion:

Feminism would have been far stronger had it been able to absorb Mailer’s arguments about sex. If my own system seemed heterodox for so long, it’s because I appear to have been one of the few feminists who could appreciate and integrate all three thinkers — Mailer, Greer and Johnston.

Ah, yes, Camille. If all the proto-feminists had just been more like you, we’d be living in the post-patriarchy, now, is that it?

She drops names with the grace and elegance of a prize bullock in a game of Cow-Patty Bingo, and goes so far as to insinuate that Madonna declined to meet her back in the day because of “her uncertainties about her education (she had dropped out of college after one semester to seek fame in New York)”.

Yes, Camille, Madonna was intimidated by the mighty bonfire of your burning intellect. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the pop goddess might have been a little put off by your drooling mash-notes, much as I was put off by your essay in praise of gay men where you said you love us because we’re totally promiscuous, sex-crazed sluts. It’s like, “Uh…thanks, lady. I like you, too, because your books come in handy when I’m low on toilet paper.”

This was about the point in the article where my left eye started to go blind in self-defense.

There is apparently no topic that Paglia is too ill-informed to comment on, as the rest of her essay attests by plowing ever onward, spouting undercooked criticisms of Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, and Natalie Wood. Funny, it seemed so much longer than a mere three pages.

Why was this necessary again?

Remember: Camille Paglia writes for Salon because the editors of Salon hate you.

Oh, right, right. Remind me to thank them profusely for that.

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