Fascinating interview with Camille Paglia, Professor of Arts and Media Studies at the University of Arts in Philadelphia.  (Link also here; you may have to register and login, but it’s worth the trouble.)

A true maverick with something to offend everyone, Paglia has been described as “a writer in a category of her own … a feminist who hates affirmative action; an atheist who respects religion” and “a Democrat who thinks her party doesn’t get it.”

Camille Paglia on education (particularly art education):

[Because of sneering liberalism], students are emerging from our schools mal-educated.

On the loss of art education programs in schools:

American school children losing their art programs are paying the price for the art world’s delusional sense of entitlement.

Camille Paglia on ObamaCare:

Of course we need health care reform in this country.  What a mess!  Everyone agrees about that.  But ObamaCare is, to me, a Stalinist intrusion into American culture. …

I don’t understand how any veteran of the 1960s who’s a Democrat could not see the dangers here, that Obama is a statist.  It’s exactly what Bob Dylan was warning about in Subterranean Homesick Blues.

You don’t want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people’s lives like this.  The controlling force in ObamaCare is the IRS!  This flies in the face of what the Free Speech Movement was about at Berkeley or about any of the values of my generation.

On the Democratic Party:

I don’t see progressives.  All I see is white upper-middle-class liberals who speak in this unctuous way about the needs of the poor.  They have no connection whatever with the working class.  It’s the professional class gone amok.  And that’s why they don’t notice what a bureaucratic nightmare ObamaCare is.

Entire interview: http://www.pjtv.com/s/GEYDSNZS