Paglia on Perky Katie…Alas, more Couric….
Those of you who remember my blog from the pre-spam injection hack days might recall that I suffered the indignity of sitting through a graduation speech at Williams College delivered by the human smiley-face herself. A forty-minute version of her inane “I’m Katie Couric, and that’s a page from my notebook” dreck.
Well, my commentary is lost to the ages, but my fellow Philadelphian Camille Paglia makes up for it here. Priceless.
As I have repeatedly said in this column, I have never had the slightest problem in understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. On the contrary, I have positively enjoyed her fresh, natural, rapid delivery with its syncopated stops and slides — a fabulous example of which was the way (in her recent interview with John Ziegler) that she used a soft, swooping satiric undertone to zing Katie Couric’s dippy narcissism and to assert her own outrage as a “mama grizzly” at libels against her family.
Ideology-driven attacks on Palin became clotted liberal clichés within 24 hours of her introduction as John McCain’s running mate. What a bunch of tittering lemmings the urban elite have become in this country. From Couric’s vicious manipulations of video clips to Cavett’s bourgeois platitudes, the preemptive strike on Palin as a potential presidential candidate has grossly misfired. Whatever legitimate objections may be raised to Palin on political grounds (explored, for example, by David Talbot in Salon) have been lost in the amoral overkill that has defamed a self-made woman of concrete achievement in the public realm.
And let me take this opportunity to say that of all the innumerable print and broadcast journalists who have interviewed me in the U.S. and abroad since I arrived on the scene nearly 20 years ago, Katie Couric was definitively the stupidest. As a guest on NBC’s “Today” show during my 1992 book tour, I was astounded by Couric’s small, humorless, agenda-ridden mind, still registered in that pinched, tinny monotone that makes me rush across the room to change stations whenever her banal mini-editorials blare out at 5 p.m. on the CBS radio network. And of course I would never spoil my dinner by tuning into Couric’s TV evening news show. That sallow, wizened, drum-tight, cosmetic mummification look is not an appetite enhancer outside of Manhattan or L.A. There’s many a moose in Alaska with greater charm and pizazz.
[bold added]
Oh baby….that did my heart good just linking to that magnificent takedown.
StickerShock:
Truly awesome! She’s a professor at U Arts. Have your paths ever crossed?
14 January 2009, 7:06 pmdriver:
No, but I sure hope they do!
14 January 2009, 11:06 pmWoodwork:
I have always loved Paglia.
Her writing alone is worth the effort. I read her first book the year it came out in ’91-92: “Sexual Persona: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.†The title alone should be temptation enough to anybody with even a casual interest in Western Culture. It did for classical culture what I once felt Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces” did for pop music/art.
Since that time, she has taken more than a few hits from the sexless fuddy-duddies in her own industry, particularly those lacking anything like her fresh wit and novel incites, which is to say, professors. Although I confess to having been a bit put off by her fascination with Madonna —why not Bowie, T Rex, Siouxsie, Exene Cervenka, etc. if you really want sexual transgression doing hip-grinds on pop art– I got a real kick out of her undressing of the old white men. Even though her knowledge of pop culture has always seemed pedestrian, her strip-search of the classics is delicious.
This is, I believe, where her ribald take of Democrat politics comes from. It is jaded and cynical, rather than happey-dopey as is more common amongst the commentariat and tender-tingled posters.
I posted and excerpt of this article on another college web site and the zealots became apoplectic, as if some sailor on shore leave had dissed these ‘erudite’ ladies as puerile house-mavens low on the necessarily beguiling pheromones to complete the exchange.
It was, needless to say, delightful.
15 January 2009, 10:05 am.
driver:
Heh! Way to stir up the tittering lemmings, Woodwork. Haven’t looked in on that site in ages, they seem to be as happy-dopey as ever. Watch out, some of them have come here looking for you.
15 January 2009, 3:08 pmHindoo:
Moi? Nah. I know where to find him.
15 January 2009, 7:10 pmLaurie Kendrick:
I haven’t always liked Camille Paglia. I’ve read some of her rants and have disagreed with them mightily. However, I’ve also disagreed with Peggy Noonan on occasion. But there is no debate with regard questioning if either of these women can write.
They can and I have rarely watched CBS News since Dan Rather’s ridiculous hay-seed calling of the Presidential election in 2000. HTe boycott continues with Katie and her Couric now at the anchor desk.
But Paglia hit this one right between the eyes. Couric is so out of her league. Her interview with Palin which I saw much after the fact, was incredibly insulting. She was tough to watch on “Today”; impossible to watch on the supposedly bonafied news.
What Paglia said about Couric can be applied to just about every network talking head on the airwaves today…ESPECIALLY the idiots at MSNBC, otherwise known as Barack Obama’s Campaign Headquarters.
LK
15 January 2009, 7:17 pmdriver:
I think of Paglia as a sort of female Christopher Hitchens.
15 January 2009, 7:33 pm