Camille's back!

After a six-year absence, our cultural high priestess and pioneering Web proto-blogger has returned! And nobody -- not Hillary, Obama, McCain nor Anna Nicole -- can escape her level gaze.

Editor's note: Salon welcomes back Camille Paglia today to begin a new monthly column. Paglia was part of the team of writers who helped found Salon in 1995, writing for the Web like a natural. We think of her as a proto-blogger, since her earliest columns melded political analysis, high and low culture commentary, her personal passions and lots of interaction with readers. She'll devote every third column to answering reader letters; send her your questions at ask_camille@salon.com. We are thrilled to have her back.

By Camille Paglia

Read more: Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Camille Paglia, John McCain, Opinion, John Edwards, Iraq War, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

Feb. 14, 2007 | Greetings, Salon readers!

My column returns today for the first time since 2001, when I resigned from Salon to focus on writing "Break, Blow, Burn." On my book tours of the past two years (for the Pantheon hardcover and the Vintage paperback), I was very touched by how many people in the signing lines enthused about my Salon columns and appealed for their return.

I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix.

The Web, in my view, has its own crisp idiom -- a fusion of the verbal with the visual. The computer screen, as a development of the TV monitor, doesn't favor the elaborate, self-interrupting, endlessly qualifying syntax devised for books and still aped by pretentiously big-think glossy magazines. (I chronicled the stylistic evolution of my Salon column, in response to new technology, in "Dispatches From the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet," an essay in "Communication and Cyberspace," co-edited by Lance Strate.)

The Web so favors the roving, intrusive eye that the blogosphere itself is currently threatened by a gorgeous riot of viral videos-on-demand. As a Warholian pop fan, I'm thrilled with this impudent development -- even though as a career college teacher, I'm also concerned about the fate of analytic reasoning and literary expression.

My place in the Salon family, which dates from my contribution to Salon's inaugural issue in 1995, has its roots in the San Francisco Examiner, where David Talbot was the progressive arts and culture editor and an early supporter of my work after I burst on the national scene in 1990 with the publication of "Sexual Personae." He invited me to write for the Examiner, and the result was articles such as "The Female Lenny Bruce," my celebration of Sandra Bernhard (more about her later). David left the Examiner to found Salon with other veterans of San Francisco media.

Initially, my Salon column, "Ask Camille," perpetuated the format of my satiric Agony Aunt feature in Spy magazine. (My Spy debut had been piquantly flagged on the infamous February 1993 cover of a cheerful Hillary Clinton clad in dominatrix gear and wielding a riding crop in the Oval Office.) Though I gradually phased out the Q&A structure, I always tried to incorporate reader response by posting letters on hot-button topics, such as gun control. Today, thanks to technological advances, Salon offers instant responses to all of its articles. To foreground reader interests and concerns, I will be devoting every third column to my replies to questions, which will be solicited by Salon through this special mailbox.

Because the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign is already revving up, my monthly columns will start with politics and, as usual, move on to cultural issues from the fine arts to pop. And by the Italian principle of abbondanza, my columns will always be served in a mighty big dish.

I am a pro-choice libertarian Democrat whose platform remains the same, above all regarding educational reform. I denounce the outrageous expense, ideological indoctrination and spiritual hollowness of American higher education, with its crazed admissions rat race and juvenile brand-name snobbery. And I call for a valorization of the trades and for national investment in vocational schools to help salvage the disaster zone of urban public education.

Though I am a professed atheist, I have been arguing for 20 years that the study of world religions should be basic to the university core curriculum. I addressed this matter last week in "Religion and the Arts in America," the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College (it was filmed by C-SPAN). I approached the subject from a different angle in "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" (Arion, winter 2003).

Let's cut to the chase. I am as adamantly opposed to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as I was before it happened, when the mainstream press abandoned its watchdog role and servilely capitulated to administration propaganda. The thinness of the American case for war was on blatant display in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council, which I saw on live TV and scorned as a series of slick rhetorical gimmicks and preposterously unpersuasive photos.

I want American troops out now -- not next year but tomorrow. Support of the troops means not subjecting them to an unsustainable and ultimately unwinnable mission, cooked up by armchair cowboys who see the world in simplistic cartoon terms ("good guys" vs. "bad guys"). The provincial philistines of the Bush administration blundered into the Mideast with little more than superficial knowledge of its tangled history and ancient culture. And they have colossally wasted American blood and treasure on a project that had only a tangential relation to the atrocity of 9/11.

My peak Web moment of recent weeks was watching the riveting video of Code Pink's March 2003 confrontation with Hillary Clinton in a Senate conference room. I whooped and applauded as Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar group, spoke eloquently of the trauma and horror inflicted by the invasion on the women and children of Iraq (a subject consistently ignored by the American press).

There's a priceless moment when a protester strips off her pink slip and hands it to Hillary (who had just voted for the war resolution the prior October) as a symbol of her flunking this ethical test. Hillary, who has problems when life departs from script, at first takes the gift, then yanks her hand back and loses her temper. The hapless slip is seized by a female flunky and abducted. It's a classic!

Next page: Barack Obama has nimbly upstaged the ponderous Hillary machine