What can else can we say about Camille Paglia other than she is a delight? She’s smart, witty, generous, and fair. Her latest responses to readers’ letters includes a brilliant exposition on Hillary Clinton’s psyche:
A swarm of biographers in miners’ gear has tried to plumb the inky depths of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s warren-riddled psyche. My metaphor is drawn (as Oscar Wilde’s prim Miss Prism would say) from the Scranton coalfields, to which came the Welsh family that produced Hillary’s harsh, domineering father.
Hillary’s feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm’s length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham’s abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage — the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.
Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.
Hillary is the typical oldest child: bossy, ambitious, and totally lacking in subtlety. Combined with Baby Boomer arrogance, a certain amount of insecurity about how far she’d have made it on her own, and the feminist tenor of her times, and she positively sucks. Get in her way and she’ll go on the attack and play the martyr, all at the same time. Ugh.
On a lighter note, I found Paglia’s recent take on Art and Religion provocative and welcome. The arts are really in bad shape, like much of the culture. They confuse kitschy, ironic nihilism with brilliance. As a friend put it, their abstract, smeared-on junk shows no “sweat equity.” While all art does not necessarily have to be religious, nonreligious people make bad art. They are looking at man, but not man in general, rather man is usually the reflections of pedantic insecurities of their own minds, fashionable ideology, and the meager, half-educated greul cooked up in their imagination.
Could you imagine anything like the historical paintings of David, Titian, or Gerome today? It would be impossible; today’s younger artists can’t allude to myth and allegory because they’re raised on Pulp Fiction and World of Warcraft. Forget beauty, could one even imagine something moderately provocative, like a portrayal of communist atrocities or the fallout of divorce or the horror of abortion in a significant piece of modern art? Please, they prefer the courage of smashing the already-destroyed ones from a century ago and the revolutionary act of making a lot of money peddling bullshit, a la, Gerhard Richter.
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“Hillary is the typical oldest child: bossy–”
Instilled with leadership qualities
“ambitious–”
Driven to reach her goals
“and totally lacking in subtlety.”
Forthright.
The rest of us oldest children thank you for the compliments.
I’m a bit of a birth order afficianado and a middle child, so you know we’re all messed up of course.
So what’s wrong with middle children?
Perversely, World of Warcraft and it’s ilk tend to be classically informed by history and a sense of good and evil, whereas “high art” deliberately moves into what even Ayn Rand called the ethical fog of the relativists.