Even the bats had flown to the fallout shelters. The sky was charred black, except for the ovum of deepening red in the western sky. Gray smoke curled from blasted bombs and newly made ruins, which had stood indomitably for three thousand years just minutes before.

Yes, there was a time when I liked Camille Paglia. It was the early 1990s. P.c.-ideologues had usurped university faculties from coast-to-coast. Many of them had studied precious little outside their narrow areas of specialization. Instead of educating students in primary source materials, many took up class time parroting the cant of their various Marxist, feminist, and/or post-modernist camps. In their fiefdoms and classrooms, they brooked no dissent. Given that status quo, I feasted on the writings of Camille Paglia, a sanguinary lesbian dominatrix in academe, who torpedoed these pseudo-radicals’ every piety, inveighing against their lack of scholarship and suppression of independent voices. Although I found her literary and art criticism hard to follow, she introduced me to a canon of great authors that I would have never found without her. And her writing was as explosive, original and exhilarating as Side One of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.