Who distorted language with self-important opacity and who inflated small ideas into giant, groaning bladder-bags

Jean Baudrillard recently passed away. Do you have any thoughts or opinions about this influential French thinker. I'm especially interested in your opinion of his idea regarding hyper-reality. Conor Ryan

I suspect Dante designing his Inferno would have had a very special little hot spot for poststructuralists and postmodernists (see above letter), who distorted language with self-important opacity and who inflated small ideas into giant, groaning bladder-bags.

I never encountered a single sentence by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan or Michel Foucault that drew or held my interest. As for Baudrillard's dizzy maunderings about mass media, they made no sense whatever to me as a professor of media studies or as an American who grew up on pop and whose vibrant patron saint was Andy Warhol.

Good riddance to that whole crew! Paglia Real inconvenient truths New Paglia column posted by MD Is here. She answers reader questions.