Re. Camile Paglia: Woman of the Year
When you experience some sort of medical symptom such as a rash, you might choose to go to a doctor. Typically, you ask that doctor to render an opinion as to what might be the matter. The doctor will use a combination of medical signs, i.e., measurable things like blood pressure or bacteria in the urine, observing the rash, taking a biopsy the rash, et al and medical symptoms, i.e., asking the patient what it feels like or what they have been experiencing. In turn, opinion is rendered, treatment prescribed, behavior proscribed, etc., to ameliorate the problem.
If what you want is hard, irrefutable evidence that Western Civilization is experiencing collapse, which collapse might be defined as radical, rapid change (it can be relatively slow) that clearly harms the prospects of its inhabitants and that many might view as bad, then we will probably have to wait for its collapse. Immediately prior to the old Roman Empire’s collapse, the majority of Romans could not foresee that the Visigoths at the gate would ever bring down the Empire. The barbarians were no big deal and nothing had changed as the water in the pot reached boiling. But wasn’t that the point of the 1960s freak movement? A call that civilization was indeed in a bad way and things needed to change.
Point is that one may easily parrot the de jour talking points of the left that either all is just fine or all is going to hell if we don’t get a lot more government control a la MSNBC, CNN, and on ad infinitum. Demanding so-called absolute, unalloyed facts/truth before we dare to adjust our fair republic’s current trajectory seems to be madness, especially since so many of our brightest diagnosticians seem to believe that said trajectory apparently will quickly intersect with an immovable reality.
Me? I don’t want to wait until we hit the fan. I want to hear from those diagnosticians and make a judgement call as to whether we jink the car left or right. Seems left is causing a lot of damage. We need to jink right a bit. Who’s crazy or not? Rather than listening to the screeching vapors on the left that we need more government control of every aspect of our commerce and medical care to the likes of scolds like Kathleen Sebelius and Ezekiel Emanuel, to give unfettered war making powers to a nit-wit in the White House and his crazed enablers at the State Department, its much easier right now for me to listen to the likes of Camile Paglia, David Mamet, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Heather MacDonald, Thomas Sowell, Peggy Noonan, Victor Davis Hanson, Jonah Goldberg, Ross Douthat, Roger Kimball, and a host of other public intellectuals that posit that perhaps all is not quite right in Paradise.
Black Orpheus 