What an incredibly smart,

thought provoking article I read this evening. From an atheist! Feminist! Gasp, the horror!

Okay, so this article will not appeal to anyone that mindlessly follows rhetoric from either side. And there are plenty of blogs out there that diss it, using the usual attack the messenger argument. So, if that is you, read no further and go find one of the countless pages that will not require you to think, will not require you to consider that someone else might, just might, have a point.

For the rest of you, be sure and open a tab in your browser pointed to answers.com, you’re going to need it unless you have a PhD in English, she uses words we didn’t use in the trailer park growing up.

Enough introduction! The article in question is in Salon Magazine (lost a few of you there) and is written by Camille Paglia (okay, now that most of the rest of you are gone, let’s talk). In an interview with her (Salon Interview), she manages to toast both Dems and Repubs, lift up religion, put sanity into the argument about several issues and even tell us that she once voted for Ralph Nader.

Just a few quotes, no commentary, read it, judge it:

• PBS documentary about Andy Warhol. What a tedious, pretentious program — with its funereal music and preening, jargon-spouting talking heads.
• Mark Foley – The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election
• What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was far worse than any evidence I’ve seen thus far about what Foley did with these pages.
• Condi Rice looks lost lately. She’s overstretched and on a learning curve.
• Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success. Rice is a brilliant woman, but diplomacy is an art.
• But uncritical American boosterism — automatic endorsement of every government action — is myopic and self-defeating.
• The notion that terrorism could be confronted through conventional military means — by sending in troops as if it were D-Day — was such a colossal stupidity.
• But I’ve become concerned about Bush’s mental state in the past few months.
• So, thanks very much, George Bush, you’ve managed to rocket Noam Chomsky to the top of the bestseller list!
• I’m worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking.
• Are we really left with the same old tired nags and with robo-Hillary leading the pack?
• If we want a woman president, we need to start training ambitious young women not in women’s studies, with its myths of universal male oppression and female victimage, but rather in military history and national security issues.
• All that vulgar posturing — Barbra Streisand trotting out a Bush impersonator at her concert, then being surprised when she gets heckled and cursing the heckler?
• I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.
• It’s like Hillary’s philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, does it? Or does it take a strong family and not the village?
• If Hillary is a serious presidential candidate, to have her husband constantly careening around the landscape like an unguided missile and stealing the limelight is disastrous.
• Radio hosts are blanketing the country with round-the-clock conservative ideology — not because they’re dastardly conspirators manipulating the media but because they’ve achieved their success, market by market, in creating programs that millions of people want to listen to.
• Don’t even mention Al Franken — I can’t listen to him for 30 seconds without falling asleep. A voice like molasses and never a fresh idea.
• In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list — like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we’d have anarchy.

Like I said, no commentary. You read, you judge. If there is a better article out there on the state of our country, let me know.