CAMILLE as never before.

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, Miss, but your duffel bag's unzipped, and your knickers are falling out--

C.P.: Can it, bitch, Dionysus is a maelstrom! Don't you or Gloria Steinem or anyone else from the feminist thought-police try to lay down your party line with me, got it, Toots? So what if they have little flowers on them? They were on sale, damn it! I am an amalgam of Simone de Beauvoir and Ozzy Osbourne, loopy and seething, a top-secret hybrid of Janis Joplin and F. R. Leavis. Come back here, lady, I'm not finished....

Monica--aren't you sick of her? Miss Lewinsky, with her gaping, unquenchable maw, is a type I recognize from twenty-six years of teaching. I call it the "Fatted Heifer," and I've taught literally tons of them. The Fatted Heifer is pasty, pudgy, and overdressed in brand-name clothing, most likely charged to the Visa account of her unloving but guilty divorced father. My generation--the generation of the sixties--would have chomped off the President's member and eaten it for breakfast, but not the middle-class Fatted Calf of the late nineties. What went wrong?

Monica Lewinsky: dontcha love her? Zaftig yet svelte, an endomorphic Venus on a Bloomingdale's halfshell. Anti-sex feminists, the grey-lipped heirs of Cotton Mather, have always hated her yes-to-life-with-a-dripping-chin attitude. I see her as belonging to a line of modern female personae like Anouk Aimee, Mary Tyler Moore, Jessye Norman, Twiggy, and Roseanne Barr.

Forget that uberbitch Hillary--I think Monica should go for that New York Senate seat!

What are the Teletubbies? Emissaries from an androgynous/kinky future world, come to show us the way! (Not for nothing does Pat Robertson fear you, Tinky-Winky!)

Who was Dr. Seuss? A latter-day Marquis de Sade, only nastier.

A yet more burning question is, Where's Waldo? I find his goofy smile conceals a horrible secret we cannot know, and probably are not meant to. Like Luther's God, he is everywhere implied but nowhere visible--except for there, in that corner buying ice cream!--nope, wrong again. To find Waldo; to catch Waldo; to roast him slowly till the flesh is just falling off the bone, his blood-red and white striped hat throbbing and erect on his bushy head. In these at first glance innocuous picture books, the pagan energy that has ruled postwar America comes roaring back, making the Waldo series easily the most libidinally explosive books since Goodnight Moon.

Mitch, you tawny Apollonian man-god of Baywatch; Seinfeld, you rubber-gummed trickster-monkey; Lucy "Xena" Lawless, you mouthwatering kiwi glamazon, the best damn Xena that I've ever seen-ah.... Television is our Circe, and she's a date rapist. Just lay back, relax, and spread your sense organs: Ally McBeal, skinny thing of Troy whose oddly duck-like face a thousand torts could launch, er, what else, Paul Reiser, you rug-rat annoying Adonis, Dan Rather, you raging ... [that's enough archetypal TV actors--Ed.]

There can be no doubt that the most influential mind in America is ... well, let's just say she's someone I happen to know better than anyone else and her initials are "C. P."

I have been described in the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "possibly the most important intellectual in America today" by none other than Camille Paglia, a figure I consider the most important intellectual in America today. And my influence on Harold Bloom, Martha Stewart, and Nelson Mandela is justly celebrated.

Less well known, even to the billions who click on my web site daily, is the indelible imprint I made on a certain great Russian novelist. When I was at Yale in the seventies, Dostoevsky was only a hairy grad student growing turnips in the basement of our New Haven high-rise, a kindred spirit with whom I soon bonded. He showed me his manuscript, a novel provisionally titled Morbid Mopers.

"Fyodor," I told him, "what Mopers needs is more sex, more ax-murders, and more haute couture. Make Raskolnikov a fey bisexual designing prodigy, clad head to toe in de la Renta, and have Sonya Marmeladova be the complaisant victim of a vampire lesbian rape, like the one strongly hinted at in Emma, and maybe instead of all going to Siberia at the end they could go to Milan for the spring show."

He didn't take all my advice, and Crime and Punishment is the weaker for it. But even so, I can safely say I secured a place for Fedya in the global literary pantheon--just one more thing for which future scholars will thank me....

Chase Madar, formerly an editor at a Chilean financial journal, now writes parodies.