Writer Susan Sontag, one of
“In my view,” she once explained, “the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.” An yet, in her rage against the West, she displayed no complexity in simplifying the white race as pure evil, concluding that “the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
When it was time to go, unsurprisingly, Sontag died at
In life too, unsurprisingly, it was straight New York for Ms. Sontag, not Somalia, with Joan Didion in the village two tables away at Da Silvano, and Fran Lebowitz across the aisle schmoozing with celebrities, and Elaine’s for late nightcaps on 88th Street and Second Avenue, with Sontag holding court at her regular table by the door, a table away from Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, and sometimes Rudolf Nureyev, and Woody Allen at his usual table in the back, next to Kurt Vonnegut and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and it’s doubtful that any of them ever wished, no matter how much Tuscan red had flowed, that the whole shebang should be turned back into the swamp that it once was, so as not to “upset the ecological balance of the planet.”
“We live in a culture,” Sontag also contended, “in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression,” and yet off she flew to Hanoi during the American bombing in 1968, and then to Cuba, in what appeared to be a globe-trotting mission in “search for radical innocence,” minus any application of intelligence that was “critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.”
Subsequently, she wrote essays flattering to the resistance of the Vietnamese communists to American power and sympathetic to the communist regime in
More than three decades later, a week after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, she had this to say in The New Yorker: “The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a
