Lest you wonder why I love her so:
I do not own guns and have no interest in them. (Swords, those Homeric and chivalric emblems, have always attracted me more.) But as a libertarian, I read the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as granting to private citizens the right to bear arms against the potential abuses of a government turned tyrannous. Furthermore, should police authority evaporate after a cataclysm of storm, flood, earthquake or terrorism, citizens have a right to defend their families and property against criminals and looters. If food and water are in short supply over a protracted period, expect predators and violence.
The horrendous problem of illegal guns now rampant among the urban underclass cannot be solved by depriving all American citizens of their Second Amendment rights. Major cities must address their internal problems, which include improving public education and vocational training, creating job-rich public works projects, and instituting on-the-street neighborhood policing. The major media, concentrated in their metropolises, should stop extrapolating their local issues to the nation as a whole.
Camille Paglia is more than a little schizophrenic with regards to political realities, in my opinion, and her grasp of economics is not so much sketchy as nonexistent, but her intelligence, insight into human nature and historical awareness is so great that those weaknesses in no way lessen my very high regard for her.
I am in complete agreement with her assessment of global warming, or if you prefer, anthropogenic global climate change:
Who is impious enough to believe that Earth’s contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began “Sexual Personae” (parodying the New Testament): “In the beginning was nature.” And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.
I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on cable TV recently, I wasn’t able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore’s lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming — which is blatantly untrue — he forfeited his own credibility.
Read the whole thing… I haven’t even posted the best parts. La Paglia doesn’t let minor things like death interfere with her beautifully venomous contempt.