While I am away, read this wonderful interview with Camille Paglia. She never fails to challenge = and dance gleefully on her crushed enemies.

So many wonderful lines:

My clashes with other feminists began immediately. For example, it was 1970 or 1971, there was a feminist conference at the Yale Law School, and major feminists were there including [the author] Rita Mae Brown, who said to me, “The difference between you and me, Camille, is that you want to save the universities, and I want to burn them down.” How can you have dialogue with these people? Later she became a rich lesbian novelist and has a horse farm in Virginia. And then I had a screaming fight with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band over The Rolling Stones, because at that time, hard rock was seen as sexist. Now, this argument seems so retrograde…

I am an equal-opportunity feminist. I believe that all barriers to women’s advancement in the social and political realm must be removed. However, I don’t feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life. This gender myopia has become a disease, a substitute for a religion, this whole cosmic view. It’s impossible that the feminist agenda can ever be the total explanation for human life. Our problem now is that this monomania—the identity politics of the 1970s so people see everything through the lens of race, gender, or class—this is an absolute madness, and in fact, it’s a distortion of the ’60s…

Race, class, and gender? Absolutely! But the point is that Marxism is, as I argue in the introduction to my last booklet, is not sufficient as a metaphysical system for explaining the cosmos. It is very limited. Marxism sees only society, but we are much greater than that. There’s nature, there’s eternity, there’s questions of mortality, which Catholic theology of the Middle Ages addresses far more profoundly then Marxism ever has…

Now, I’ve encountered these graduates of Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, I’ve encountered them in the media, and people in their 30s now, some of them, their minds are like Jell-O. They know nothing! They’ve not been trained in history. They have absolutely no structure to their minds. Their emotions are unfixed. The banality of contemporary cultural criticism, of academe, the absolute collapse of any kind of intellectual discourse in the U.S. is the result of these colleges, which should have been the best, have produced the finest minds, instead having retreated into caretaking. The whole thing is about approved social positions in a kind of misty, love of humanity without any direct knowledge of history or economics or anthropology…

Even better. Read the whole thing. And marvel at her energy, insight and integrity.