The Most Terrifying Editor’s Note In History

Next up: the thrilling return of David Horowitz!

Camille Paglia’s incisive [sic] and iconoclastic [sic] writing on politics and pop culture has been part of Salon’s fabric from the beginning. Her always-provocative column appeared here regularly between 1995 and 2001, then once more from 2007 through 2009. We’re thrilled to announce that she will join us here again, on a biweekly basis, to discuss the presidential race, the culture world, and everything in between.

Ah, yes, her return in 2007. The reviews were ecstatic:

A cursory glance reveals:

Vicious insults to the English language: 3 (”enthused” is not a word, with good reason; “surfeited” means that there’s “more than enough”, you don’t then have to tell me; “drearily prolix” is the worst two-word phrase I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’ve read Camile Paglia.)

Points at which she demonstrates her ignorance of the difference between being interesting and being on a job interview: 3 (plugging her unreadable piece-of-shit book; then naming both publishers; finally, celebrating her ghastly old Salon column – which was, oh by the way, THE WORST THING EVER – with the air of Napoleon returning to Paris.)

Episodes of egregious self-aggrandizement: 1 (1940-present)

Moments of unintentional comedy: 1 (complaining that the blogosphere is “numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix,” and then yammering on for another 50,000 words about how geocaching is the Promethean spectacle of Dionysian abandon on a field of mythic American post-feminist manhood and how Madonna has succeeded where Spinoza failed, or whatever.)

I can see God has more suffering in store for me, and so I say to Him, with steady chin and steely eyes, “Bring. It. On.” Seriously, I gather that someone somewhere actually reads this shit for reasons not related to masochism, and this person needs to sit down and figure out how their life got so disasterously off track. The ability to appreciate Camile Paglia is – like the ability to enjoy the show ‘24′ on any level at all – a sign of a diseased soul, which can only be cured by the generous application of John Tesh world music videos.

Now there’s someone Salon should be trying to lure out of retirement.

The punchline to her latest column, ostensibly about Sanders/Clinton but really about her as always:

The revolt of pro-sex feminists against the feminist establishment began with lipstick lesbians in San Francisco in the late 1980s and spread nationwide by the 1990s. I came into open conflict with feminist leaders after my first book, Sexual Personae, which had been rejected by seven publishers, was released by Yale University Press in 1990. Steinem, who obviously hadn’t bothered to read it, compared that 700-page tome about literature and art to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and said of me, “Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic.” That’s the way the feminist establishment worked—the automatic big smear.

For nearly 25 years, Hillary Clinton, with her simmering subtext of contemptuous bitterness about men, has been pushed along and protected by a host of powerful women journalists in print and TV, Steinem chums or sympathizers who have a lot to answer for. Charmed by Hillary in their exclusive dinners and private chitchats, they encouraged her presidential ambitions. But after two national campaigns, it should be obvious that Hillary has no natural instinct or facility for understanding and communicating with the public on the scale that the presidency demands. Sexism has nothing to do with it.

The first and last sentences of the final graf are an exhibition of self-refutation worthy of comparison to the true greats like Adler/Cannon.