These days in politics, it is an increasingly rare pleasure to be able to enjoy the writing of someone we disagree with much of the time. Camille Paglia has a nice piece today on Sarah Palin:

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English — beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant. Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism.

Paglia adds some bonus facts: “When Wyoming joined the Union in 1890, it was allowed to keep women’s suffrage. As late as 1915, the state legislatures of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey (in the supposedly more cultured Northeast) rejected women’s right to vote. But the Western states had been far more open-minded. Washington state granted women’s suffrage in 1910, California in 1911, Montana and Nevada in 1914.” Very interesting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, New Media, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.