Her praise for Marshall McLuhan is deserved and while I can see it 25 years ago, do not expect him to make a comeback. We are living in McLuhan’s media landscape now and I already know Paglia has, since “Glittering Images,” spoken out against the all-pervasive perpetual click-bait mobile social media bubble we currently inhabit. I’m reminded of the end of H.G. Wells’ short story “The Land Ironclads” – which prefigured the mechanized tank – where a European technocracy wars with a 19th century cavalry-based military and wins (All observed by an embed), and the former makes a assault with a secret superweapon, basically land-roving battleships crawling along on pedrails like giant centipedes. They’re victorious, but the final sentence, as they step out of their Land Ironclads and collect their prisoners, is telling of Wells’ ideas about social Darwinism and decadence (he will take this theme next-level in “The Time Machine”):

“And he was much too good a journalist to spoil his contrast by remarking that the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who were standing about their victorious and ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man.”

So they’ve devolved. They’re like today’s pajama boys – emasculated, living on laptops, surrounded by iron butterfly type women, watching anime. I think this is why Paglia has turned to the spiritual – her book on the Northeastern Native Americans and their spirituality. And I’m glad for that. We got McLuhan’s world, we got the ability to access almost everything written virtually, but we have something else now too. The media has effected man, but much, much more so than the stained glass windows he writes about. Young boys live on computers now, Nature itself has become the un-reality.

oh yeah, first lol.