Jeff’s got his hands full today, so I’ll try and contribute a bit in the moments I have.
Camille Paglia pops up at Salon to beg AlGore not to run, and provides her usual blend of keen insight and unfounded goofiness, as for instance in this sentence:
After two major televised debates by both parties, only a Pollyanna on helium would believe that any of the top-tier Democrats will definitely be able to defeat a leading Republican like Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani.
What, exactly, is a Polyanna on helium? She goes on later to make an accurate assessment of Gore:
As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore’s preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents—telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he’s trying to manipulate.
Whereafter it blithely transitions into psychedelia:
Toronto’s National Post has been running a fascinating series by Lawrence Solomon on global warming dissidents, who don’t get much press in the U.S. My own philosophy about earth’s titanic, humanity-dwarfing operations is contained in a curious video I recently found on YouTube.com. Clips of volcanic eruptions and magma flows are set to the abstract “psychedelic” music of a California rock group, the Danbury Shakes. This eerie fusion of lurid natural images with a distorted, clashing soundscape is richly evocative of a 1960s vision that has been lost. The ‘60s revolution, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was about much more than politics. Fanaticism about global warming reduces the eternal terrors of nature to a banal political melodrama.
Before careening via some inscrutable association into Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan & company, where a few sententious things are said.
She’s an entertaining writer, but I wish she’d send me some of whatever she’s on.
I can see where Jeff could have his hands full today.
I hope he has copious quantities of anti-biocrapical soap to wash his hands.
Sorry to be so off-topic.
Tony Blair is another Man of a Thousand Accents- egregious little creep.
Autobiocrapical?
furriskey – All of Blair’s accents sound quite British to me.
Can Blair pull of a decent Cockney accent? That’d be cool.
Someone with a very, VERY high voice?
I liked Camille back when she was first becoming known. Lately she’s just been…. twittery.
Camille Paglia is the tits. I love her to death, and not just because she’s an honest liberal. She can be hysterically funny, and has a goofy streak, but she also has a steel-trap mind. Which, come to think of it, is no big deal. I have a steel-trap mind. It’s full of dead mice.
Dan,
Come to Philadelphia.
Drink the water.
Yours,
N. O’Brain
Autobiocrapical?
It’s Celtic, Dan. You wouldn’t understand.
Which makes him the perfect candidate for many Democrats, who have become themselves mere cartoon characters.
A wishful thinker with her head in the clouds?
Definitely odd word choice.
Agreed.
SW: progress52
Yeah, it was about drugs and libertinism that in combination bred epidemics of venereal diseases, divorce, AIDS, and overdosed and very dead rock stars. It also indirectly produced the current crop of Kos Kidz, St. Amanda, Al Gore, CBS News, and Whoopi Goldberg.
A good time was had by all.
A lighter-than-air naïf.
A balloon head with rose-colored glasses?
The Nazis wanted to build a helium Polyanna, but they had to use hydrogen, and we all knew how that ended up.
It’s hard to envision a Nazi Polyanna, anyway.
She rides dinosaurs and is sure they wouldn’t eat her given half a chance, because they like her.
She can’t do that! I have a patent on the blend of keen insight and unfounded goofiness!! [It’s a 10%/90% mix, respectively, but I give away my secrets.]
I think it’s just a poor metaphor: I have a hard time picturing a Polyanna on helium, but no trouble picturing Alfred E. Neumann on helium, although there’s no significant difference.
I’ve got to agree though that the global warming hysterics make it far too easy to dismiss legitimate environmental concerns.
Come to think of it, I have a really hard time picturing Al Gore on helium. That stick is so far up his butt I don’t think he could inhale the stuff.
It’s flashing terrible! Oh, the humanity! Still, I’m sure they’ll all be OK.
Pollyanna* on helium is apt. Scratch that “happy” thin skin and – **BLAMMO**!
*That would be Pollyanna pretenders, not the “real” storybook character who suffered and overcame the death of a father who loved her and raised her with real rules for life.
(It’s a girl thing, maybe, Swen. That “sugar and spice” crap promoted over the past two generations by marketers / politicians pandering to the largest base in America (or just trying to get laid) – endless victimization memes encouraging us to betray our brothers and to mock the sacrifices of our mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers – helped us get away with murder (millions and counting…) and more. GIRL POWER!)
/ not to be is a buzzkiller. To be unaware of having made such a choice, then to see – is – **BLAMMO**! Well, more like an everpresent whine that grates on everyone’s nerves until a braver uncle locks aunt wacky in the attic (unless his wife grabs her weak sister (and their children) and heads to the Grand Canyon, first.)
/ “Some tears are,” Gandalf.