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December 31, 2004
Susan Sontag Goes to Her Reward
Posted by Dave Blount at December 31, 2004 1:49 PM
Susan Sontag has passed away, much to the regret of her fawning admirers in the mainstream media. Ironically, considering Sontag's assertion that "the white race is the cancer of human history," she succumbed to her third bout with cancer. Other nuggets of wisdom by this rigorous intellectual include:
- "The AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia."
- "Risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism."
- "The people staffing IBM and General Motors, and the Pentagon, and United Fruit are the living dead."
- "The Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization."
- "America has become a criminal, sinister country--swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world."
Anti-American, pro-totalitarian political activities took her to Cuba and North Vietnam in 1968, and China in 1973. To quote Roger Kimball (my source for the quotations listed above), "Few people have managed to combine naïve idealization of foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable effect" -- which probably explains her popularity in the MSM.
At one stage of her life, Sontag seemed capable of maturing into an adult. She enraged fellow members of the intelligentsia during the crackdown on Solidarity by stating that "Communism is fascism with a human face." Personally I don't see the human face -- the faces I associate with communism are more demonic than human: Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Jaruzelski, etc. But the comparison with fascism is certainly apt. Maybe she should have said, "Communism is fascism with trains that don't run on time."
On the war against Slobodan Milosevic and his merry band of genocidal maniacs, Sontag had this to say: "There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars" -- a quote that could just as easily be applied to Iraq.
However, the events of 9/11 caused an appalling relapse into adolescent leftism. Following the most heinous act of terrorism in American (if not human) history, Sontag's essay in New Yorker made heavy use of sneer quotes to make clear where her sympathies lay:
Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?
This shameful and outrageous essay went on to make clear who the real cowards were in her estimation -- you guessed it, Americans -- and inspired blogger Andrew Sullivan to create the Sontag Award (awarded for "glib moral equivalence in the war on terror and visceral anti-Americanism").
The regrettable lapse in discipline that led to the Abu Ghraib fiasco resulted in a feeding frenzy for MSM leftists. Sontag joined the party with a piece that was granted the front page of New York Times Magazine, in which she argued that the college fraternity-style pranks inflicted on suspected terrorists were actually "torture" -- that is, indistinguishable from the real torture carried out in the same prison under Saddam. (I'd rather have woman's panties put on my head than have my tongue ripped out; I wouldn't even have to ask whose panties they are. Although I'd prefer if they weren't Ms. Sontag's.) The crux of the article: "the photographs are us" -- meaning, apparently, that the pictures from Abu Ghraib sum up America.
Susan, if you can hear me down there, look at the bright side: at least there's one less white person on the planet.
