Camille Paglia -- "Pumping and Pumping Her Narcissistic Bellows Like a Steam Engine" -- Holds Forth Some More About Hillary

Posted by Damozel | Back in the Eighties, I was an overwrought, culture-bitten little geek who not only read Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae cover to cover in one day, but carried it with me everywhere I went for months afterward.  I can't remember what eventually replaced it, but something else must have.  Something always does when you're that age.

Nowadays, Salon publishes Paglia's thoughts from time to time, including her thoughts on the Clintons, whom she despises.  At the end of one of her current diatribes, she says (with a blithe absence of self-awareness):

I'd love to have a woman president -- but slippery Hillary, stolidly pumping and pumping her narcissistic bellows like a steam engine, just isn't it. (Salon)

I've noticed that many powerful women seem horribly threatened by Hillary.  With Paglia, it's more than that.  You see, she knows Hillary better than Hillary knows herself, having "plumbed the inky depths of [Hillary's] warren-riddled psyche."  But Paglia, though of mature years herself,  finds other women of a certain age terrifying in a special way.  They remind her of nature and chaos, birth and death, pods and pulses, tubes and tubers, cysts and sacs: anything that swells with its own fluids, becomes obstructed and turgid, and bursts messily.  For example, here are some of Paglia's thoughts on Henry James' mother (a lady she certainly never met).

[Henry] James's world, we have seen, is ruled by women. . . . The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force. . . . We feel her hovering in his ornate style. . . . She is also the channel of the daemonic, through which man is crushed and humiliated by nature. . . .(NYT)

Any male who passes through those channels inevitably has his testicles crushed like grapes, you see.  So in a piece quite characteristically called "Hillary's slick willies," she writes off the men of the Clinton campaign in one fell swoop.

There is a strangely static and claustrophobic quality to the fiercely loyal cult she has gathered around her since her first lady years....Hillary's forces have acted like the heavy, pompous galleons of the imperial Spanish Armada, outmaneuvered by the quick, bold, entrepreneurial ships of the English fleet. (Salon)

In Paglia's prose, 'static' and 'claustrophobic' are qualities of an imprisoning womb-like space or capsule in which we can neither stand nor lie nor sit.  Wombs are bad, mmmmkay?  And if you're not careful, Hillary will engulf you in hers!  (But first, the vagina dentata!)   

"Tired, aging courtiers," such as Paglia seems to believe---not quite accurately, but colorfully---people the Crimson Court of She Who Would be King are also bad.  They signify impotence.  Impotence and an imprisoning room = Life in death.  Experience = age = impotence.

That's what Hillary offers, Paglia means.  And it's all because of her 'toxic childhood' that she's such a mess. 

I agree that the male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs. (One of the latter, the insufferable Mark Penn, just got the heave-ho after he played Hillary for a patsy with the Colombian government.) If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say Hillary is reconstituting the toxic hierarchy of her childhood household, with her on top instead of her drill-sergeant father. All those seething beta males (as you so aptly describe them) are versions of her sad-sack brothers, who got the short end of the Rodham DNA stick.

The compulsive war-room mentality of both Clintons is neurosis writ large. (Salon)

Talk about criticizing the mote in your brother's eye while failing to address the plank stuck in your own.

Yes, there is just no end to the many entertaining ways in which the misogyny of Hillary's detractors is playing itself out.  Unfortunately, few of the instances are as entertainingly loopy as this. 

In a response to a reader who leans Hillary-ward, Paglia first inaccurately reframes Obama's entire history, character and record to show that his credentials are just as good as Hillary's before arguing that it shouldn't matter anyway. 

There is no fixed system of credentialing for our highest office. On the contrary, the Founders envisioned the president as a person of unpretentious common sense and good character. Hillary may spout a populist line, but with her arrogant sense of dynastic entitlement, she's a royalist who, like Napoleon, wants to crown herself.....

I was lucky enough to see him up close as he spoke at a recent rally in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he answered policy questions in great detail. I was very impressed by his easy, relaxed authority and quick humor as well as his classy elegance. (Salon)

'Classy elegance'?  Napoleon?  Oh come on, Camille Paglia, I think we can do better than that.

Hillary Clinton's the brooding, cthonic solipsistic Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH!   She tends the fire in the Cavern of Female Darkness and uses her narcissistic bellows to pump out noxious fumes to befuddle you!  When she's not doing that, she thicks men's blood with cold!  She will crucify us all on the twisted tree of Nature and then point fingers at us and laugh!   If you're a man, she will slice off your testicles, have them bronzed, and string them together to make a tasteful necklace! Beware!  BEWARE!

Obama is a bronzed sword-wielding hero with a kouros smile who will lead us out of the darkness!  He will trick, conciliate, charm, or slay our enemies as needed!  He will dispatch the Impending Recession and restore peace to the Middle East through his hieratic assertions of charismatic personality!  He will create a More Perfect Union and reforge the golden bonds of friendship between all Nations!  Plus he has Christ-like humility and no sense of entitlement at all!  Vote for Obama!

Hillary and Obama as reflected in the Paglia carnival glass!  Think I'm exaggerating?  Here's an excerpt from the 1990 review of her book in The New York Times.

[T]here is nothing intentionally funny about ''Sexual Personae,'' which is all too clearly the work of a humorless, lapel-grabbing fanatic with a universal theory to hawk. Ms. Paglia's elaborate schema of sexual symbolism, impressive though it may sound in the telling, has led her to construct a bizarre anticanon of decadence in which earnest dullards like Charles Dickens and Henry James are shoved aside in favor of that old fraud, the Marquis de Sade.

Sade, to be sure, is not without his significance. Mario Praz and Edmund Wilson, to name only two critics of distinction, recognized and acknowledged his noxious influence on various key figures in the Romantic movement. But Ms. Paglia is not merely interested in Sade - she admires him. She is, in fact, the latest of the Sade cultists who have been haunting the fringes of serious literary criticism for decades. Like the rest of her fellow Sadeans, she complains that her idol is underrated and ignored, ''the most unread major writer in western literature. . . . No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade.'' Comparison with Sade, not surprisingly, is the ultimate superlative in her critical vocabulary: ''William Blake is the British Sade, as Emily Dickinson is the American Sade.'' (NYT)

Given that Paglia reframed Emily Dickinson, as a 'sadist'----and made a persuasive case for it on the strength of some rather special readings of  Dickison's poetry----I can only conclude that the anxiety which Hillary seems to stir in Paglia is a credit to Hillary. 

I'm so glad Salon still publishes her column.  I can't think why they do, but I'm glad.  So vaunting, so full of sound and fury.....I'll let you complete that thought, I think. 

Taylor Marsh, who has a better knowledge of the men who surround Clinton than Paglia, was too outraged at all this hackery to see the fun to be had in it---but I'm confident she'll come around.  You can read her remarks here.

Memeorandum.


OTHER POSTINGS

"She Thicks Men's Blood with Cold" Part 3:  The Hillary Derangement Syndrome in Action 

 "She Thicks [Wo]Men's Blood with Cold" (Hillary Clinton, Part 2).

Hillary Nails it on Iraqi Oil Allocation 

Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?:  Media's Clinton 'Storyline' Revealed 

Hillary Picks up Another Super-Delegate 

Protest re: Media Bias in NYC this Friday   

TPM:  Will Hillary Put Mark Penn Out to Pasture or Just Geld Him?

Comments

[Adam]

You nailed it in the title. Paglia's "Pumping and Pumping Her Narcissistic Bellows Like a Steam Engine" line applies perfectly to Paglia herself. I don't have nearly the history with her that you do, but I really struggle to understand why I should think she matters.

I do agree with her, however, that fundamentally, Hillary is likely to lose the nomination because Obama ran a better campaign than she did. It doesn't take Paglia's ranting to figure that out, though.

Napoleon WAS a populist. How else can one describe the Napoleonic code, given what preceeded it?

[danny]

Obama has not run a better campaign - he has put forth with the use of the internet a more negative and bitterly divisive campaign than the democratic party has seen in a long time - one that changes peoples politics alright and not in a way some people may hope for. What Obama has succeeded in doing is throwing Hillary - well both the Clintons under the bus and backing over them again and again while his supporters are inside cheering for the death of two very important leaders of the democratic party.

Obama may or may not win - I don't think we know who wins this one yet. I still think that Hillary takes it from the media corporate candidate because people will wake up to the cost of an nomination like his will be on this nation. Hillary is the candidate for all people. Obama is the one who has called the Clintons everything under the sun including racist. He loses for that tactic hands down.

I won't vote for him. I won't go that route again ever.

[Adam]

Danny, I generally ignore your comments, but this is absurd. Point me to one time that Obama called the Clintons racist.

And the Obama camp absolutely did run a better campaign. Obama built an enormous grassroots organization on the ground in every state, While Hillary basically looked past the primaries to the general and had very little organization in many states. Hillary changed her message and slogan many times, while Obama had one from the start and stuck with it. Obama had a plan that went through all fifty states, while Hillary's camp assumed they would more or less clinch on Super Tuesday.

Obama's positives (as oppose to Hillary's negatives) rose in almost every state as the primary or caucus approached. If Obama's success was merely due to negative campaigning, then this would not be the case. It was due to his astounding fundraising and his enormous grassroots organization allowing him to raise his visibility.

[John Brown]

Paglia isn't right, but you do yourselves no favor by pretending as if Taylor Marsh has a great deal of expertise about anything significant.

Yours,
John Brown
Unofficial Taylor Marsh Biographer

[John Brown]

Paglia isn't right, but you do yourselves no favor by pretending as if Taylor Marsh has a great deal of expertise about anything significant.

Yours,
John Brown
Unofficial Taylor Marsh Biographer

[damozel]

Marsh has as much expertise as any other close observer of human life, the American political system, and the Democratic party. She has as much claim to speak on these topics as, for example, you have to speak about her. As for me, I say what I think and leave it to other people to decide whether to let it in or leave it out.