Archive [October 1999]

Always fascinating, ever original, Paglia is one of the era’s most incisive analysts of popular culture — if you can keep up with her. Scholar, speaker, columnist (for Salon.com), author of Sexual Personae; Sex, Art, and American Culture; Vamps & Tramps; Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”, as well as numerous academic and popular essays, Paglia is a trip. If you think you can peg her, you’re wrong.

Rush: You’ve always been one of my favorite people — ever since I heard you say something I had never even thought of before, I guess about five or six years ago. You’re a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and as such, a commentator on art and culture — and somebody in an interview asked you if commentators have more validity than the artists themselves in determining the cultural effect of any artist’s work. You said, “Oh, by all means. The artist is not nearly as aware of what he or she is doing as those of us who study it.” I think the question actually had to do with Madonna at the time. But I think I know what you mean. They’re just doing their work. I don’t know how many of them are actually devoted to cultural or social change. Some of them maybe, but you do a lot of interpretation of artists —

Paglia: Oh. yes —

Rush: — and what their work means to culture. And I wanted you to expand on that, because the interviewer then did not give you more than a couple of seconds to answer the question.

Paglia: Well, I’m a cultural historian focusing on the history of the arts, and I’ve seen very clearly, from comparing the experience of artists in various disciplines, that you make art via a certain gift which is not necessarily verbal. Dancers and musicians and painters are working with a different material, so the critic and the commentator and the professor are all there to verbalize in a subordinate role to major artistic creation. The commentator stands in a kind of a median role, in between the artwork and the audience, which is either the general audience or the students in the classroom. We’re there to comment, to kibitz, to observe.

Rush: You sometimes find things that artists didn’t intend, that are accurate.

Paglia: Yes. A good example, one from a course I teach on the history of song lyrics, is Bob Dylan’s great song, “Desolation Row.” When you actually look at the lyrics on paper, it takes three class days for us to do that song. Yet there’s no doubt that it just poured out of him at a time when he was at a very high state of tension and mania. And it poured out in ways that I think he himself would be amazed at, the structure of it, the themes, the organization. It’s come out of the unconscious mind, it’s come out of an artist working at a very high level of creative ferment. And that’s really a magic moment in the arts. It just happens a few times in history. And often afterward, the artist is surprised by the kind of parallels and meanings that the commentator or analyst can find in the work.

Rush: Yes. Now I ask all of this to set up the rest, because you have become a commentator on many more things than simply art.

Paglia: Wait for one second. Rush. First of all, thank you — you were reading from my work like nine years ago. I was hearing this from my relatives in upstate New York, who are devoted to you, when I first came on the scene in 1990 and attacked the feminist establishment. Of course, that’s my coinage, “the feminist establishment.” The media had no sense whatever that Gloria Steinem and her circle in New York did not speak for all women or all feminists. And that’s how I understand your importance on the cultural scene, your incredible, vast influence, via my own Italian relatives, okay, who didn’t even know how to spell your name yet. They thought your name might be Ross Limbo! They weren’t sure. But they never missed what you were saying. You know, you have done an enormous service just in terms of the general political education of the mass audience out there.

Rush: Well, thank you. But I wanted to set up your background as a critic of art because it’s led you now into a credible position of analysis of other things that are not duly noted as art, such as politics and feminism.

Paglia: Right.

Rush: And you’ve dovetailed right into my first point. You are a true original thinker, which always drew me to you in the first place, and you had the guts to go against the feminists. Like you, I have never ceased to be amazed at how the media has fallen for the notion that these two or three feminist leaders ought to speak for every American woman. And the most membership they’ve ever had at any one time, in the National Organization of Women, is a quarter of a million. Now how can that small a membership in an organization be said to be predominant and representative of the main body of thought by American women?

Paglia: I was an early feminist and I was totally silenced and abused by the people you rightly call Feminazis. Since the late 1960s, I began having major fights with these women, with their dogmatic minds, their anti-male biases, their anti-art biases. I’ve often spoken about the major screaming fight I got into in 1969 and ’70 over the Rolling Stones. They declared the Rolling Stones “bad musicians” because they’re “sexist.” I mean, these people are philistines! My life was miserable. I couldn’t get published, I couldn’t get hired in a Women’s Studies department, and my specialty is analysis of sex and culture.

There was a letter from me at age 16 in Newsweek, in 1963, demanding equal rights for women. At that point, Gloria Steinem was running around at parties in New York in a plastic dress! And once I finally made it onto the scene in 1990, it was clear that there were many women and many feminists besides myself who couldn’t stand the manipulation of thought by these women in New York, by the Women’s Studies programs on campus, which are actually fascist, and by the major media, who have been hand-in-glove with those organizations at every point in the last 25 years.

Rush: Why is that, do you think?

Paglia: Well, it’s very interesting. There’s a kind of soft, unthinking limousine liberalism that I cannot bear in all of the leading newspapers, in magazines centered in New York and in Washington. And in all those organizations there’s a sort of fatuous smugness that comes out of the superstructure of the Democratic Party — and I’m a Democrat! My family were originally FDR Democrats. Really populist, you know, ethnic Democrats. There’s this horrible, nauseating, elitist kind of an attitude coming from these liberals — and the Clintons and their circle are good examples of it.

I’m a product of the State University of New York at Binghamton, in upstate New York, and then I went to Yale University for graduate school, so I know what I’m talking about. I’m exactly the same age as the Clintons, I was across the street from them at the Yale graduate school when they went to law school. I know exactly the kind of head-turning that happened to Hillary in that environment, where you think the people around you are all the smart people. “We’re the superior people, we see much better than the common people, and we have the common people’s good at heart. We are just the absolute creme-de-la-creme, the high-IQ masters.” It’s like they’re a master race. I couldn’t stand that when I encountered it at Yale. It’s still the attitude of people in the Ivy League, and it’s still Hillary’s attitude, despite how much she can smile and smile, okay? That’s her attitude toward the rest of reality. So after being an early fan of the Clintons, I consider it my obligation to try to expose all this.

Rush: You’ve said recently Hillary is “the most arrogant, the most moralistic, the most sermonizing and annoying person on earth.” Did this all happen at Yale, or did other things since convinced you?

Paglia: I began to get worried about Hillary and the Clintons within weeks of him taking office, after his first inauguration. And actually the piece that probably has gotten me the most abuse of anything that I have ever written was the cover story of The New Republic in April 1996, “Ice Queen Drag Queen,” where I analyzed Hillary’s persona and pointed out all these things about her that I think are quite obvious, and other people are slowly waking up to at this point.

See, I didn’t know the Clintons when I was in graduate school, but I certainly knew their type. I think that Wellesley, which is a hotbed of feminist propaganda, is a fine school, but Hillary’s head was really turned there. I’ve tried to draw attention to her behavior on commencement day, and people just don’t follow up on it. She abandoned her text, and her responsibility as the chosen speaker, to turn on the guest on the podium at that moment, Senator Edward Brooke, and to berate him and to embarrass him. I have said that is one of the most significant details in all of Hillary’s history. What made her think that she had the right to turn that moment, which was a communal moment for people of many political persuasions, with the parents there in the audience — what made her think she had the right to embarrass the guest? Senator Brooke was not only an eminent African-American, he was a suave and urbane man, a man of the world. But there was something in his kind of manliness, I suspect, that made Hillary turn on him — it was an all-women’s school. She turned on him and created that scene.

Apparently there were protests made afterward about her behavior by parents and other people, but she’s had such a free pass on this. The media just lets it pass, “It’s an example of her courage, her Sixties-ness.” Sixties-ness, my ass! Pardon my language. To me, there’s nothing about her that’s authentically Sixties, or the real Sixties spirit. I think that her radicalism has been much overblown. I see her as kind of a company man almost, in the 1950s style. She’s a real square, but she’s a very dangerous square, because she thinks she’s right, and she’s completely insulated from anything from the outside. She doesn’t read newspapers. She’s sealed in this bubble, through the White House years, surrounded by all these flacks to do her hair and take her from place to place and so on. And the media’s inability to see through it is so amazing to me. I mean, the credulity, the naivete!

Rush: They had no desire to see through it. This is what’s been the mystery to me. The media seems to relate to these two people as though they are brother and sister, and cousin and family. They really have no desire to find out who the Clintons really are; they instead marvel at how the Clintons do what they do. I’ve never seen anything like it. The press is in the process of being spun, and they know it, and instead of reporting the truth, their reports focus on the sheer talent these people have at spinning them.

Now, you’ve written that one “can’t understand what’s going on with Hillary’s relationship with Bill until you understand her dysfunctional family, which the media have never fully covered.” They’ve looked into Clinton’s background, they’ve analyzed that every which way from Sunday, but not hers.

Paglia: They won’t go near it. As I said in 1996 in The New Republic, for heaven’s sake, that family just screams dysfunction! People will not go near it, because they want to protect her. There’s some weird, very strange manipulation that’s going on from behind the scenes. The kind of penetrating insights that are needed here just haven’t appeared. I mean, this marriage, okay? The most outrageous thing to me about it, especially given that so many feminists support Hillary, is that it’s so clear that Hillary has contempt for women who have conventional sexual allure — just the ordinary pretty woman. She has divided women into these two classes — there is the disposable class, the trailer park types, the sorts that Bill chases. And then there’s the really important women, the smart women, the educated women, who belong to Hillary’s little group. This is the way Hillary has rationalized to herself Clinton running around with these other women. It’s such a reactionary and exploitative scenario that Hillary has perpetrated. How any feminist could continue to support Hillary I just don’t understand.

Rush: Why do they consider her the smartest woman in the world? Where did that get started?

Paglia: Well, it’s absolute nonsense. I think it dates from the period just before the debacle of the health care program, when she went up on the Hill, I remember, I was on “Crossfire,” when Kinsley was the host, and I said I found very offensive the tone that Hillary took up there, when everyone was so impressed with her high intelligence. The Senators were all over themselves trying to show deference to a woman, because they were smarting from the criticism of their treatment of Anita Hill, which I thought was totally justified. I thought they should have slapped Anita Hill around a lot more than they did! But because of that, they went through conniptions with Hillary to show how they respect female intelligence. So that’s how this delusion got into the world, okay, because of the exaggerated and unctuous deference the Senators showed as Hillary was testifying.

Well, I despise the tone that she took up there, and I didn’t think she was so brilliant, and Kinsley said to me, “Oh, then you’re in a minority — everyone was impressed with her intelligence.” But I heard this condescending tone of a sixth-grade girl used to being teacher’s pet. I said, she sees everything as if she’s so smart and as if she’s the master. Well, it proved to be false, didn’t it? She didn’t know what the hell she was doing! She gathered around her this little brain trust of those geeky guys, who didn’t know what they were doing either, and we lost one of the best opportunities ever in American history to reform health care and to get health care to people who don’t have it. But there was this idea that she had the answers, that she was going to remake the whole health care system, reduce it to this little structure that she could manage from her office. It was mad. It was crazy. It wasn’t smart. It was stupid, in point of fact. She had carte blanche. It could have been a major triumph, if she were smart. Neither is she an original woman. I have met brilliant women in my life. But Hillary is not brilliant. Not one brilliant sentence has ever come out of her mouth.

Rush: Everything she’s been involved with has been a total disaster. You start with health care, then the strategy on Paula Jones. It’s all been an absolute disaster. And yet this persistence in calling her the smartest woman in the world — it’s laughable.

Paglia: It’s ludicrous, okay? She has a kind of glibness that she got at law school. I mean she would have been a good, competent lawyer. But the idea that she was one of the top one hundred lawyers in the country was one of the biggest scams I have ever heard. Where was her great legal work?

Rush: It’s like her “education reform” in Arkansas. The state is 49th when she takes over; it’s 50th when she leaves. Yet she’s considered a great expert on education. Now, Camille, is there something about her personally you dislike, that causes you to analyze her this way?

Paglia: No, absolutely not. I’ve been commenting on the Clintons from before the inauguration, when I rejoiced in Bill Clinton’s election — I voted for him twice. My comment on them is keyed to reality. I was observing Hillary in action, okay? And I was appalled.

When Hillary made that remark — which is her real voice, and her real sentiments — “Well, I could have stayed home and baked cookies” — I thought she was great! I liked her. I liked her attitude. I even liked it on Inauguration Day, when she didn’t know she was miked, and she went up to Bill and said something like, “There are people waiting on line. Listen, those people out there are getting screwed.” I liked that kind of Sixties voice. I thought, “Gosh, I like her. That’s like my kind of abrasive voice. She’s going to be really cutting through the crap.” She’s someone I understand completely because we’re the same age, we were at Yale the same time, and I recognize her as someone who never cared about fashion, or makeup, or any of that stuff, and looked kind of dowdy —

Rush: — true —

Paglia: — someone who wanted to be taken seriously for her mind. So I really identify with that. I feel I’ve had this bead on her all along. But I let observation and evidence influence my judgment. These stupid people in the major media began with an a priori idea: “We are Democrats; the Clintons are good.” Then they were deaf, dumb, and blind to everything else that happened. I became concerned, even on that first Inauguration Day evening. I tried to talk about this on “Larry King” once. As Clinton was sitting there in the audience at the Inauguration gala, with Hillary by his side, and Barbra Streisand was singing, I saw this sour look on Hillary Clinton’s face. And my heart sank. I said, “Something’s wrong.” I intuited the entire thing, okay? And when I tried to make this point on TV, the reaction from Ann Lewis was, “Oh, that’s ridiculous — talking about someone’s expression.”

But in point of fact, Hillary’s psychological problems, her interaction with Bill, the bimbo eruptions, Barbra Streisand herself, the Lincoln Bedroom, all these things were coming. The way the Clintons have debased the White House, sold the Lincoln Bedroom, treated the Oval Office, this sacred historical space, as if it’s like the back room of an Arkansas brothel, it’s just appalling! These people should have been driven out of Washington by a storm of media protest.

Rush: Why did the American people not see it this way?

Paglia: My opinion is that there were not strong enough figures on the Republican side, okay? That is really what happened. If, for example, there had been a stronger Republican nominee this last time, there’s no way Clinton would have been reelected. But people still had doubts. I listen very closely to what my elderly relatives say in upstate New York. I try to stay in touch with what the general populace thinks about things — not what the elite is thinking in New York and Washington! If there had been a truly charismatic figure who was a Republican, I think it would have swept the Clintons quite away. The people would have gone in that direction. But there were no alternatives. I think people felt more comfortable with Clinton, with all his peccadilloes, and his boyish stumbling, and his frat house sort of antics than they did with some of the Republicans. My own party will become stronger if the Republican Party could become stronger.

Rush: You mentioned Anita Hill, and you have disparaged her actions and those of her defenders. Yet you’ve been critical of Juanita Broaddrick. Is there not a contradiction there?

Puglia: I was literally the only feminist who was out there immediately within one week of the start of the Hill hearings. My piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer opened: “Anita Hill is no feminist heroine.” I felt that that was a fascist exercise, the dragging of Clarence Thomas up in the full glare of the spotlight to answer questions about lunchtime conversations that were ten years old. And in point of fact, the man never laid a hand on her! Whatever he may have said or may not have said, it was hardly deserving of him not being approved to serve on the Supreme Court.

The case of Juanita Broaddrick, I felt was similar. That is, when so much time has elapsed. This is after all, America: it’s a democracy. No charges were filed, and you have the allegation of this one woman. I take what she said seriously. But I blame the media more for not having investigated this case when Clinton first came on the scene as a national candidate in the early 1990s. We should have heard all of this — fully, exhaustively. In other words, if this had been known or alleged about him at that time, then I think it would have been relevant. It would have swayed people’s votes. He may not even have been the nominee. But now, though, he’s already been in office, he’s been voted in twice. Is this evidence to remove him from office? No. What gets me mad about all these stories is that they are just the tip of the iceberg, okay? When people talk about Monica Lewinsky it’s as if she was like the No. I important mistress of Clinton. She was one, as far as we can see, of a whole bunch of girls. There are a lot of them and the media has been sitting on all that because they want to spin the story as Clinton and the occasional peccadillo. Like he was attracted to her youth and beauty. But it’s obvious that this guy was propositioning every woman down the pike.

It’s sick. It’s not even really sex! Most of the time he’s like an adolescent. He can’t even have the full sex act. The guy is sexually dysfunctional. He’s sexually pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. He’s stuck with Mommy! And the whole hot thing for him is doing it behind the scenes so Mommy won’t know. The chance that Mommy — who’s Hillary, you know — could find out — that’s what gets him going. The whole thing is so childish. It’s so embarrassing!

Rush: I’ve got a different theory. I think Mommy knows all of it. I’ve even suspected that Mommy was in charge of it, that they knew there was a problem, and it was Mommy who was in charge of making sure which ones got through and which ones didn’t based on which ones would talk, or could be bought off, and that somehow Monica slipped by. Because nobody expected he’d try it in the Oval Orifice. I’m really that cynical about Hillary. I describe her as Nurse Ratchet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” I think she’s in charge of everything that happens, and I think she’s known for all these years that this is his — whatever it is —sickness, behavior, problem. She’s known that it could derail him at any time, and so she’s done what she can to control it. I think one of the bits of evidence of that is what you so humorously describe as these “eunuch geeks,” these high I.Q. guys who hang around her, like Sydney Blumenthal, Ira Magaziner, Harold Ickes and David Kendall. It is clear that she needs a bunch of pantywaists that she can totally control. Now what is the political significance of these men that she chooses to serve her?

Paglia: I think she has a serious sex problem, okay? There’s this fawning piece in the current Esquire talking about her as an incredibly sexy being, and I’m thinking, “What planet do you live on?” I really think she’s quite frigid. I don’t think she has any kind of sexual response — except for one moment, and that’s when he apologizes. This is actually part of the battered-wife syndrome, the apology, where the man meltingly promises never to do it again, and please forgive me. That’s the only moment she can actually feel anything sexually. So I think that’s why they’re truly a dysfunctional couple. She actually requires him to stray so that she can forgive him, because that’s the only time she ever feels anything!

But I think she has great ability not to think about unpleasant things. I think I understand the way her mind works. She really doesn’t think about it. These women don’t exist. I’d be surprised if she actually was involved in making the arrangements. I think it’s mostly the golfing buddies who make the arrangements. I think that her mind is very pristine. It’s like this cold white cube. She’s able to block everything out. It doesn’t impinge. It’s not important. She’s very lofty. That’s why she’s attracted to law, the manipulation of the law, abstract language, and also why she wants to deal with children, okay?

I think I was the first to say that Bill is a child in her constellation. She forgives him, the flawed child. But the idea that she would actually be picking and choosing the women — I have a feeling she’s more vindictive than that. But she likes to feel like a woman. So to feel like a woman, she surrounds herself with these men. But the men are eunuchs, they’re sycophants, okay? They’re like balloon heads! None of them have physicality of any kind.

Rush: You wouldn’t describe them as virile.

Paglia: Not at all! No, there’s not a milligram of testosterone among all of them. They would have to share that one milligram of testosterone!

Rush: So what does that say? There’s got to be a political ramification to that.

Paglia: She has a terrible phobia about the masculine. And it’s perfectly in line with the attitude of mainstream feminism for the last 25 years. She has a tremendous problem with masculinity. What she’s surrounded with is very artificial. She really does move in a kind of cocoon. That’s why it’s so ridiculous for anyone in New York State to imagine voting her to the Senate. This is a person who has had no contact with everyday reality.

Rush: Do you think she will run?

Paglia: As a native upstater myself, I’m hoping she doesn’t run. I’m hoping that she just gets appointed to the U.N. and becomes a roving ambassador for women and children’s rights in the world. That’s what she should be doing. But she’s delusional. When she goes out in the street, she smiles, she loves the acclaim. She loves the response.

Rush: I think she’ll drop out if she ever gets ten points down in the polls. She’ll drop out because that will be equivalent to losing. Any lower than that, and there would go this notion that she’s the smartest woman in the world, and capable of superhuman feats. If she can’t, as a liberal Democrat, go in as a carpetbagger and win in the liberal mecca of New York, then it pretty much derails her in her mind. I would be real surprised if she goes.

Paglia: Rush, it’s the media that created this candidacy, okay? The media let her go and go and followed her around and fawned in those early weeks and months, when this trial balloon went up, after Torricelli proposed it. This whole thing is just floating along on a layer of hot air.

Rush: It’s gotten much farther along than I think she ever intended it.

Paglia: She has no ability to be able to work in the Senate. She’s a backroom person. She’s a strategist, a hothouse figure. The idea that she could actually deal one-to-one in a team situation in the Senate is ludicrous. People would be crazy to vote for her. I think it’s mad, utterly mad.

Rush: You have said that we are raising up a whole generation of young people who are completely removed from any sense of the outside world, and you use Monica as an example. Now how did it happen? And is there an antidote?

Paglia: As an educator, I’m constantly trying to bring education back to its old rigor. I had the benefit, and so did my parents, of the old public school system that was intended to Americanize the immigrants who came from all over the world. It was a simple and highly disciplined education —fundamentals of reading and mathematics and so on. And I was the last generation to get that, when I went to school in the 1950s. My sister, for example, was born 14 years after me. It was gone by that point— thanks to my generation of the 1960s talking about “relevancy.” We’ve put self-esteem at the center of education. We have to make people feel good about themselves. And we don’t want to make anyone feel bad. So we’re going to promote people, even when they should be flunked because they haven’t mastered the fundamentals of reading and writing.

I’m appalled. I’ve been in the college classroom now for almost 30 years, and I’ve watched it happen. Year by year by year, the kids are emerging from high school knowing nothing. They know nothing! Even in the Ivy League schools, the sense of history is blank. Even students coming out of the prep schools often know only about the 20th century.

The attitude is, “Well, we’ve got to give them what’s hip, what’s now — instead of doing the opposite, taking them into the Far distant realm, showing them all the great civilizations of old that collapsed because of internal problems. Giving them a sense of how many cultures like Rome — or Egypt, or Assyria, Persia, there’s so many — thought that they would live forever, but because of their own internal problems, and their self-indulgence, collapsed. So I feel education is the key — a kind of education that brings the bad news. It must have substance, teaching students about business and the economy, things based in reality. Not this soft stuff about “we’ll have sex education, and we’ll teach you not to be homophobic.” Everything’s the “rainbow” — you’ve got to have a nice easy attitude toward life. “I’m okay, you’re okay, and we’re all accepting of everything.” Instead of giving them the nuts and bolts of facts. Because facts are out. I don’t know if you realize this — Facts are out!

Rush: Oh, I know. It’s very frustrating to me.

Paola: So education reform is the key. All the problems that we see in high school — the kids are reacting to the crap of what they’re getting there! It’s total crap. Meanwhile the inner city schools, with all these social liberals in Washington, are in a terrible state of disarray. Awful. Whereas my parents’ generation of immigrants were able to get substantive basic education. That’s now being denied.

Rush: What do you think about vouchers?

Paglia: I don’t want to take a position yet on that. I feel that if parents can be helped to purchase a good education, for example, at a Catholic school where it’s very disciplined, and if a voucher will help them to do that, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be their right to get a voucher. On the other hand, I think it’s a kind of cop-out in the long run, since what we have to do is build the public school system back up again, bring it back to basics, and throw all this social engineering out of it.

Rush: You’ve got to get rid of the teachers’ union to do that.

Paglia: Oh, yes, absolutely. But I do feel that orderly classrooms and clean schools and books in good condition —this should be the bequest of every American child and it isn’t right now. It just isn’t.

Rush: Camille, thank you so much for your time.

Paglia: We met once, you know. We were at the 25th anniversary of “60 Minutes” back in 1992 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We sat at the same table and you gave me a Cuban cigar.

Rush: Steve Kroft set that up, and I happened to notice him during dinner stroll by the table three or four times. He was expecting fireworks. He thought, and the CBS people thought, that by seating you at the same table with me, here you are an ardent feminist, and me, the supreme anti-feminist, or whatever, that there would be fireworks at the table.

Paglia: It was the opposite.

Rush: And it didn’t happen. And it turned out we liked each other.

Paglia: Of course.

Rush: — and Kroft was disappointed as he could be.

Paglia: Well, he had no idea that I already admired you and knew your influence. By the way, when I was speaking at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard about four years ago, someone dared take your name in vain at the dinner that preceded my lecture, and I went ballistic in front of the entire room. I chewed them out. I said, “All you people who think you’re such great political analysts up here in Cambridge, if you’re not respecting Rush Limbaugh, then you are insulting his entire audience out there. Millions of people, real people! You know nothing of the real America that’s out there when you insult Rush.” It was like a total scene! And I threw them back on their heels because they’re liberals who think they speak for the people. I accused them of being totally cut off.

Rush: You’re one of the few who’s ever done that.

Paglia: Well, Rush, I’ve said this repeatedly in public, that you are this tremendous intellectual influence in America. You help people to learn how to think, and how to sift through evidence, and I think that you’re a far more important figure than any of those grand panjandrums that are at the Ivy League who think of themselves as intellectuals. Those are people without influence, without knowledge of the real world, of the contemporary scene. But you do the work of the mind, Rush. Every day you do it.

Rush: Well, you’re very kind. Thank you. You’ve made my day!

Paglia: Terrific, Rush. And more power to you!

Rush: Same to you.