Camille Paglia gets U2-ey

The new U2 song "Magnificent" has sparked a Bible/God debate over at Camille Paglia's column at Salon, as she and some readers battle over the song's meaning. Here's her retort to a long and detailed question from reader Don Stockton:

Thank you very much for your good wishes. And my thanks also to Joseph Hartman of Arlington, Va., who wrote in to argue as eloquently as you have that the U2 song is "a psalm to God."

However, I must respectfully disagree. "Magnificent" is definitely a magnificat, a hymnlike song of praise, and it is permeated with religious references -- much as love songs often were in African-American soul music. But as I interpret Bono's lyrics (from my classroom experience as a teacher of poetry), there are several key details suggesting that it is not God but the audience who is being addressed. "I didn't have a choice but to lift you up": Surely Bono is not telling God that He needs lifting! It's the audience who need intervention and exaltation. "You and I will magnify": Devout humans do the magnifying, not God, the subject of that magnification.

Yes, Bono is saying he was destined to sing -- like the Celtic bards before him. He was one of the chosen few even as a squalling infant. "I was born to be with you in this space and time": the "you" here is not God, who exists outside of space and time, but other mortals subject to limitation. The soul had to leave God to come to earth. In professing uncertainty about what is beyond the grave, Bono is rejecting Christian orthodoxy. The "Magnificent" to whom he sings might well be God, but it could also be the universe or life itself.

Pretty heady stuff for a rock band, eh?

Camille Slams Clinton

Camille Paglia is all over the place in this article on Salon, but I just had to point out what she is saying about Hillary these days:

"Media misogyny has reached an all-time high," screeched the National Organization for Women in a press release titled "Ignorance and Venom: The Media's Deeply Ingrained Sexism." Groan. If women are going to play in the geopolitical big league, they'd better toughen up and learn how to deal with all the curveballs. Never has the soppy emotionalism of old-guard feminist reasoning been on such open and embarrassing display. How has Hillary, who rode her husband's coattails to the top and who trashed every woman he seduced or assaulted, become such a feminist heroine? What has she ever achieved on her own -- aside from the fiasco of healthcare reform?

And if the media is treating Hillary in a gendered way, hasn't she herself constantly and cynically dramatized her embattled womanhood? It began with her snappish defense of her hangdog husband during the Gennifer Flowers imbroglio of 1992. Blame tail-chasing Bill, from Little Rock on, for sexualizing the popular perception of the Clintons. Nubile, exploited Monica Lewinsky will always hover around Hillary like ghostly baggage. Bill's serial abuses betray a profound ambivalence about and deep-seated hostility to women -- something the Clintons' giddy feminist flacks just don't see. Why was Hillary flying around the world to those 80 countries anyhow -- building her résumé while leaving her randy hubby unleashed? Anyone who thinks Bill's exploits are going to stop after Hillary is president has, well, a screw loose. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's entrapment in a sex scandal is coming at a particularly inopportune moment for the Clintons, since it simply reminds everyone again of tawdry, furtive, high-placed adultery.

It's time to go, Hillary.