CAMILLE as never before.

• Author: MADAR, CHASE
• Position: Camille Paglia - Satire

Let's face it: Today's universities are bombed-out craters of middle-class brain death, intellectual black holes barely even for vegetable life.

But when Camille Paglia descends on a college campus, look out: The computer system crashes and tenured professors start jabbering about Puff Daddy and Marilyn Manson; star quarterbacks and linemen come out of the closet and couple on the main quad as frigid anorexics writhe with spontaneous triple orgasms; a capella groups drop their pants and bay at the waxing moon; the Campus Crusade for Christ lies tangled in a moaning orgy as the school chaplain rips the still-beating heart out of some hapless passing adjunct.... "Kill for Kali, Kill for Camille!" they chant in the torch-lit auditorium. (These people, they're pathetic! When I spit at them from the lectern, they only scream for more!) Finally a dread hush spreads as I open my black leather attache and pull out my conference paper: "Sense and Sensibility and Sado-Sexual Domination: Jane Austen, you miserable worm!"

All yin and no yang makes Jack a dull little wussy! Yet the sperm count goes lower and lower; motility is down, too. Like Diogenes of old, I go looking for a Man: not some bearded sob-sister flouncing out in his Birkenstocks for a nice soft brick of tofu, his balls annulled by Prozac and an assistant professorship. No, I said A MAN. Whatever happened to men like Genghis Khan who used to thunder across the Asian steppe leaving pillage, rapine, and beheaded corpses in his dusty wake? It's hard to imagine any member of the Yale English department drinking fermented mare's blood or razing Samarkand to the ground. DICKens, COCteau, BALZac, EuriPUDes: Let's face it, we'd be nowhere without the Phallus.

After numerous appearances on Larry King, Nightline, and Ricki Lake, I am frequently stopped on the street and asked my opinion on important issues of the day. Let me tell you, sometimes it's not easy being one of America's most prominent public minds! For instance, at the airport last Thursday:

Old Woman: Excuse me, Miss, but--

Camille Paglia: Yes, that's right. I'm Camille Paglia as seen on TV. Afraid I don't have time to chit-chat right now. I have a plane to catch. (We're in an airport, duhhh.) But since you asked, let me just say that Slobodan Milosevic suggests a Slavic Jimmy Cagney gone sour--his beady, darting eyes recalling countless repressed homosexuals I knew in the sixties. Now I must say good-day to you, madam.

Old Woman: Er...