A Warm Welcome for Susan Sontag

If you don’t recognize the name of New York’s most overrated intellectual, consider yourself fortunate, move on, and go wrestle with your kids or something you’ll be glad you did when you die.

If you’re still reading, it may be because you were confused by fawning tributes like these, inspired partly out of doctrinally mandated reverence and partly out of another kind polite societies (in contrast to this site today) offer cheaply to the deceased. Speaking of which, here’s Susan Sontag’s 9-12 take on 9-11:

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? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.

Later on, in the same essay, she compared Congress’s reaction to that of a Soviet Party Congress, which is perplexing, given that Susan Sontag hoped in 1968 that a new “revolution” in America would make us more like North Vietnam, which, incidentally, “genuinely care[d] about the welfare of hundreds of captured American pilots and [gave] them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets.” Who knew? Not these guys, anyway.

One of the many blasphemous ideas with which I’ve toyed is that hell is living in the prison of your own self-loathing, self-absorbtion, contempt for others, and irreconcilable contradictions, only to have your soul summarily extinguished between the Almighty’s calloused thumb and forefinger without leaving a lasting mark on either. If there is any merit to that idea, Susan Sontag’s afterlife would be superfluous.