"But that's not all America has to be."
By trevino Posted in Culture — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
"I believe in the soul, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, [and] that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap."
-- Kevin Costner, Bull Durham
Susan Sontag is dead. Let us not pretend that Sontag was a conservative, nor on her way to being conservative; but we can at least take a moment to acknowledge some of the service she rendered to conservatism in its various missions. She was capable of meaningful introspection, or irritating vacillation, depending on where you stood -- and it was noteworthy that you were more prone to the latter view the further you stood to the left. Take Vietnam, for example, whose tyrannical regime, as conflated with the totality of the Vietnamese people (excepting, of course, those countless numbers with the poor grace to flee on the high seas), Sontag celebrated, in the way that self-styled intellectuals did in those days. Vietnam fought America, and America was the enemy, the enemy of which was one's friend. So Cuba too and the Communist experiment in general fell into the orbit of Sontag's approval.
In this she was hardly alone; where she parted ways with her compatriots of those heady days, including those who eventually secured the Democratic nomination for President, was her reevaluation of her love affair with the hardcore left's war on humanity. Viewing with mounting dismay the Communist crushing of Solidarity in Poland, she famously declared to a gathering of fellow-travelers in the 1980s that "Communism is Fascism with a human face," upon which they transformed with a chorus of boos into erstwhile fellow-travelers. The storm of condemnation that rained down upon her for this was so much whining, with the predictable outlets -- The Nation, of course -- serving as mouthpieces for the irate defenders of America's enemies. Inasmuch as Sontag could divorce herself from that crowd -- even if she never could, Horowitz-style, fully and explicitly turn against their peculiar madness -- it was to her credit, and a service to the conservatism that she was never identified with. Later years found her increasingly on the wrong side of anti-Americans left and right, both in her frequent residence in Sarajevo under siege, where she produced Waiting for Godot at no small physical risk to herself; and in her rather remarkable call to arms over Kosovo. This latter piece set her against a range of ideological enemies who, as she finally explicitly acknowledged, were not so much in favor of Serbian genocide as they were "[a]gainst the idea of America," and consequently the exercise of American power. Even those against the Kosovo war -- such as me, in hindsight -- can recognize in her quiet exhortation the same sound logic that drives the present-day war on terror, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. (And in Israel.) What habitual scourge of the "anti-war" left -- a Hitchens, a Hanson -- is not called to mind at Sontag's condemnation of their facile sloganeering?
For Peace. Against War. Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?
In that light, then, it is a pity that so many of the blogging generation was first exposed to Sontag in her fading years via just that sort of facile sloganeering -- from Andrew Sullivan, who instituted a "
href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22sontag+award%22+site%3Aandrewsullivan.com&btnG=Google+Search">Sontag Award
Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy — which entails disagreement, which promotes candor — has been replaced by psychotherapy.
Sontag herself would disagree that there is such a thing as a war, in the broader sense of an indeterminate global war on terror -- it offended her rhetorical sensibility, for one, and reminded her perhaps of Jaruzelski -- and so her interpretation of the war in Iraq is fatally skewed: but she would not have disagreed with the proposition that there are things worth fighting and indeed dying for; that there is evil in this world; and that some of it is on "her" side. If she could not quite grasp the inexorable logic that leads directly from her courageous stands (pace the deceased, courage is not morally neutral) for Poles, Bosniacs and Kosovars to the present struggle for Iraqis, are we to hold that so dearly against her? It is a long road from shilling for genocidal Communism to nearly arriving at a consistent worldview of freedom's inexorable expansion. In the case of Susan Sontag, she ought to get credit for the distance traveled.
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"But that's not all America has to be." 15 Comments (0 topical, 15 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
"...she ought to get credit for the distance traveled."
But (as you know) I grow increasingly disinclined to cut our domestic opposition a break; I have a hard time remembering sometimes why they should receive any courtesy that they so consistently deny us.
Still, good essay and message received.
but her novels really are self-indulgent overrated crap. ;)
I have a hard time remembering sometimes why they should receive any courtesy that they so consistently deny us.
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." ~ Matt. 7:12 (NIV)
Sontag was a brilliant and original thinker, who, while holding strong opinions on matters of public consequence, was not enslaved to any ideology. In a perfect world, that would describe all "intellectuals", of whatever stripe.
Lovely essay, Trevino. A question -- what is the source of the title quote?
Thanks -
....of the 9/11 New Yorker essay that got her into such trouble.
Sontag was a good example of Lenin's phrase, "useful idiot". Like all 20th Century leftists she hated America and Capitalism but never refused the money that America and Capitalism threw her way. There is one word that describes that sort of behavior: teenager. Most of us get beyond that stage, Sontag remained stuck there. The money and adulation was simply too good.
.... and well received. I never was much a fan of Sontag (even in her more rational incarnation), but she was no monster or menace. Very few on the left -- or right, for that matter -- are. After all, wrong and occasionally foolish are not the same as evil; they're human.
That said, I respectfully request that care be taken in making even a passing defense of Malkin. After her In Defense of Internment, there's question as to whether she's ultimately playing for the right team -- even if she occasionally makes a good point here and there along the way. (I realize that your point is that Sullivan is a hack -- and he is -- but the chioce of the Malkin Award to prove his hackdom is a peculiar one.)
....the only thing that's relevant here is that Sullivan got things badly wrong, and consistently does so.
As for Malkin herself, I don't think her book was so completely off the wall (having not read it, which probably doesn't qualify me for much commentary on it), but that's another discussion entirely.
I don't think her book was so completely off the wall
We'll part company, there. Off the wall, illogical, inaccurate (sometimes blindingly so), bad for America, etc. .... (another time -- or not).
"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. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
You decide if she expressed a preference.
Von:
I've haven't read it either, but it's an argument, in my mind, that needed to be made -- if for no better reason than so that others might refute it. And Malkin was willing to take the heat: for several days there her blog was little more than a running answer to accusations about her scholarship and facts.
We can differ on the rest. But I spend enough time attacking my opponents' (and my friends') rhetorical shortcomings that I count myself able to judge that.
An eloquent and magnanimous essay, Josh. Well said.