the Enemy of my Enemy

I had forgot--reading the short list of those Ms. Paglia found intellectually stimulating as an undergraduate--I did just read, a month or so ago, Leslie Fiedler's "Montana, the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau," and I was both amused and piqued by it; so I re-read it again this morning, with a tad more cultural insight (having wikipedia'd the biographies of those on Ms. Paglia's list whose names I didn't recognize--I try to remain oblivious to mere names, and, of course, ethnicities--Fiedler's and Norman O. Brown's).  And wouldn't you just know (it's evident from his invidious remarks about the "Montana face"), Fiedler was an East Coast 2nd-Generation Immigrant Jew, whose Jewishness and familiar sub-standard dialect were, for him, core values: He had much resented, as a high school student, his non-Jewish teachers' insistence on Standard (WASP) American English, and felt keenly that they undervalued the barbarous Urban Yid-Speak he'd learned at home.  What enrages him about Montanans (or, perhaps I should say, simply, galls and irritates) is their placid acceptance of immense emptiness and their right to belong in it, and their ignorance of, and indifference to, Culture, including, specifically, his, Leslie Fiedler's, Ethnic Culture, and also the Native American culture which they ignore at the same time as they expropriate it.  So, says Fiedler, they do not, cannot, feel. 

Turns out: that Dame Paglia, whom I'd always in a vague way supposed to be my friend, because of the unsparing ridicule she heaps on my heretofore least favorite people (K.A. MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Joseph Campbell, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Lyotard), is, nonetheless, probably, now that I get down to reading the stuff she's been publishing in Salon.com, my most representative enemy and deeply, consciously (though with women--even lesbians--who can say?) wicked falsifier of men.