I’m sorry to keep quoting Camille Paglia, but I can’t help it sometimes (in fact, let me take it back, I’m not sorry at all, this stuff is too good to ignore). In her recent column, Camille responds to a number of letters from readers. There’s a lot of good stuff here but the response below was to a letter expressing outrage over the attacks on Sarah Palin and how insulting the media has been toward her because she attended five colleges before graduating from the University of Idaho. Here’s CP’s response:
Thank you very much for your personal testimony. I too have been repulsed by the elitist insults flung at Sarah Palin in the massive, coordinated media effort to destroy her. Hence I have been thoroughly enjoying the way that Palin, despite all the dirt thrown at her by liberal journalists and bloggers, keeps bouncing back as if unscathed. No sooner did the gloating harpies of the Northeastern media think they had torn her to shreds than she exploded into number one on Amazon.com with a memoir that hadn’t even been printed yet! With each one of these amusing triumphs, Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.
Yes, the snobbery about Palin’s five colleges is especially distasteful, given the Democratic party’s supposed allegiance to populism. Judging by the increasingly limited cultural and factual knowledge of graduates of elite schools whom one encounters working in the media, blue-chip sheepskins aren’t worth the parchment they’re printed on these days. Young people forced through the ruthlessly competitive college admissions rat race have the independence and creativity pinched right out of them. Proof? Where are the major young American artists, writers, critics or movie-makers of the past 20 years? The most adventurous and enterprising minds have gone into high tech. We’re in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system.
Oh, and one more, this regarding the nefarious Roman Polanski and his arrest for drugging and seducing a 13 year-old girl:
When I first heard that Roman Polanski had been arrested in Switzerland, I thought it was absurd because of his advanced age as well as the gravity of other issues facing this war-torn world. It seemed like a publicity stunt by Los Angeles authorities with too much time on their hands. However, on reflection, I soon concluded that Polanski, whatever his artistic achievements, has no right to claim exemption from the law’s demands. He is not a political refugee but a proud sybarite who has flaunted his tastes and conquests. If you live like the Marquis de Sade (one of the principal influences on my first book, Sexual Personae), then you should be willing to be imprisoned like Sade.
yes indeed. Nail blasted by hammer on head.
If anyone doubts that we’re in a different world now in regard to how people view sexual immorality, listen to 
THE AVENUE 