Posted on 12/28/2004 10:01:32 AM PST by SmithL
NEW YORK -- Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71.
Sontag died Tuesday morning, officials at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said. She had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s.
Sontag called herself a "besotted aesthete," an "obsessed moralist" and a "zealot of seriousness."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Oh, well, that's too bad.
From Newsday: ""Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left’s refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin’s terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed.""
For some perspective, this is the woman who said, of the 9/11 hijackers "...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." In effect, suggesting we got what we deserved.
Her career is chock full of same similar bullspit commentary praising despots, and tyrants ...
Oh gee whiz, that's too bad...
While I certainly don't celebrate her passing... I won't lie and claim to mourn it, either.
What exactly did she do anyway?
I try not to speak ill of the dead, so I won't.
Why not? Where does this come from?
I have the same instinct as well. I'm just wondering where it comes from and is it really necessary with public figures being discussed publicly.
I don't mean nasty personal things such as "it's great they died" etc...
When Stalin died, for example, were people to not say anything bad?
So that's where Bill Maher came up with it.
I can also say something good about her.
She helped popularize Machado De Assis, an excellent 19th century Brazilian author, in the United States. He is one of my favorites.
For a living? As best as I can tell, she claimed to be an intellectual sponging off the largesse of the artsy fartsy crowd.
I think it's juse a deceny thing. Kind of like when I am a guest in someones home I will try not to point out that the couch is ugly. Of course, I was happy when Uday and the other one were killed, so there is no clear standard.
Susan Sontag was the keynote speaker at my son's graduation from Vassar College in 2002. I had never been so disgusted by a speech in my life. Fortunately there were many parents who stood and booed her rant and the college president had to interrupt and settle folks down. I hate to say it, but I won't miss her.
L
Does she get 72 virgins for her infamous 9/11 quotes?
"I've always thought one should speak good of the dead.... Joan Crawford's dead: Good...."
Who?
She describes the President as "that scary man from Texas" who has destroyed decades of multilateralism. She accuses the right wing of taking advantage of September 11th "to change the rules." Here is the final paragraph of the article:The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California is not only a "bad joke" but also "another step towards the end of politics," judges Sontag. Schwarzenegger, like Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, is a man who was elected because of his wealth and success. The two are also so dumb that people make jokes about them.Susan Sontag, of course, is no dummy. Obviously, however, she finds the Italian and the Californian commoner to be quite stupid. It is interesting that the leftist intellectuals -- who pretend to be the protectors of the weak and disadvantaged -- are the people who are most likely to publically suggest that their intelligence is far above the common man's.
--- Dawson's Danube
She is was an idiot.
Are you thinking of Susan Sarandon?
Author, activist, cancer survivor. I was subjected to many of her works while I was in college. Watch me dab those tears away. My invisible tears. With my make believe hanky. APf
I saw the word "activist"... that's all I need to know.
Sontag's record is atrocious.
Not only did she travel to Nicaragua to butter up the Sandinistas, she has praised Cuba and Fidel Castro as superior to the USA.
She also traveled to Vietnam- to dubious motivation.
In a moment of frightening candor, she offered the following gem: "Vietnam offered the key to a systematic criticism to America."
No doubt the New York Times will pen a nauseating obituary for this traitor.
I see. Did she ever write anything commenting on the election of porn stars (plural) in Italy?
As we say in the Corps to P.O.S.
"A.M.F."
Adios
M*****
F*****
No loss here. Well, actually, the worms and other lower life forms will make out at the banquet.
I only got hit with one of those class assignments and the copy of the book that I bought NEW at the school bookstore was a ripoff. Several chapters were duplicated while some others were missing.
It was a printer's binding error.
It was the only assigned work I did not read for the class (and the professor was aware that many students did not get a decent copy of the book).
Every time someone dies, we have the same discussions on FR, usually starts out with someone saying something nasty about the dead, then someone chastising them, then someone defending them. And on and on. It's par for the course around here.
Maybe she'll go to that great communist utopia, otherwise known as HELL.
Isn't she the one who said white people were the cancer of the human race, or something like that?
I just read some of the Bill Moyers interview you posted a link to. She was absolutely hideous. I'm sure Bill Moyers was enthralled with her.
My thoughts exactly. She will not be missed on my account.
Semper Fi.
Yup...that is so true. I never knew much about her although I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew her as some leftist till the day I saw her on an interview on C-SPAN. I was expecting some kind of wacko leftism and instead she talked about the evils of Saddam Hussein and that of communism. That let me know that she may be a type of leftist. But at least she was a reasonable sane one.
Of course there will. Because the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap.
Heh! And my brother gets mad when I called her, "Snotrag."
Some of the intellectual elites in the west ride high on the freedoms bought for them by the blood of many, all the while despising their naivete and their backwardness. Sontag was one of them. She was a hippie who never grew up, unlike Oriana Fallaci.
So...is it Maher or Sontag who will ultimately be remembered for that quote? I remember when Maher said it. Didn't know about Sontag.
Bill Moyers makes Sontag appear to be an intellectual giant. But then again my 12 year old newspaper carrier is a MENSA compared to Moyers.
From what I can tell, this woman had been educated well beyond her intelligence.
who's the other one....reminded me of her...oh yeah...Erica Jong....Fear of Flying.
Man...NYC is full of these prematurely gray old angry fembots...reminds me of when I lived there.....upper West Side daze....they would set up leaflet stands at 72nd and Broadway on weekends
Why are so many of the old NY fembot vanguard Jewish?
I doubt it's simply because they are in Manhattan which is sizably Jewish..
Germaine Greer was an exception....Faludi and McKinnon too?
Is there a dynamic in Jewish women at play?
Who cares?
Your interpretation of what she said is completely wrong.
Courage IS a neutral virtue and can be showed by evil as well as good people. She is NO WAY justified the acts of the terrorists (in that quote.)
Cool! Kudos to you and the other parents for standing up to otherwise unchallenged BS. Way to go!
I've always understood the death-etiquette thing to be about the inability of the dead to now defend themselves. But frankly, I don't get it either, TH....their lives and statements speak for them....even after death.
Thanks.
Yet ANOTHER grave I'll have to void my bladder on in my travels around this big ol globe.
While red flags fly at half-staff over Berkeley, Ithaca and Madison, and NPR broadcasts hours of eulogies by Noam Chomsky, Erica Jong and Stanley Fish, most Americans simply shrugged and said, "Damn! I thought they said Susan Sarandon!"
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