Posted on 12/29/2004 1:15:12 PM PST by Stoat
From today's Ben Widdicombe column in the NY Daily News:
Sapphic cop
Don't look for gay ladies in the Gray Lady.
The New York Times paid tribute to the late Susan Sontag yesterday with a beautifully written obituary, plus a moving tribute by Charles McGrath, totaling almost 4,000 words. But apparently that wasn't enough space to mention that she was the partner of celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz for 20 years.
A Times rep told me: "Our extensive reporting in recent weeks did not substantiate the widespread reports of any relationship of Miss Sontag and Miss Leibovitz beyond friendship. We should probably have mentioned the friendship, but nothing further was warranted by the facts we could gather."
The paper did note that Sontag was once "photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad."
Which has to be the best euphemism for "lesbian" I've ever heard.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/266712p-228497c.html
Susan Sontag died on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 in New York. What is the legacy of the “obsessed moralist”, “besotted aesthete”, and “zealot of seriousness”? None of her many novels ever found much success with the public. They were exercises in narcissistic vanity more than literary works of art. Sontag was at best a dilettante and a wannabe.
It was as an activist for “humanitarian interventionism” and “military humanism” that she found her niche. She was at the forefront of the racist ant-Serbian demonization policy. This is where she found her lasting legacy. It was this absurd and anachronistic and atavistic spasm of race hate against the Serbian people where she excelled. She did not originate this anti-Serbian policy but became its outspoken champion and mouthpiece and cheerleader with her posturing and posing. It was an exercise in absurdity. Susan Sontag created a Theater of the Absurd in the Balkans.
Anti-Semitism in the 1930s, Anti-Serbianism in the 1990s Sontag was at the forefront of the dehumanization and demonization of the Serbian people. It was an atavistic spasm of Hitlerian racism and ethnic hatred. She was the major proponent of the Alija Izetbegovic ultra-nationalist Islamic regime in Bosnia. She made Sarajevo a global stage for her absurdist viewpoint. Sarajevo was the stage, the Balkans was the Theater, and she was the director of the tragicomedy.
Sontag was the main cheerleader of the illegal NATO bombing of Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Pristina in 1999. Like the obsession of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with anti-Semitism in the 1930s, she was obsessed with an identical anti-Serbianism, which was racist and genocidal. Just as Adolf Hitler saw the root of all evil in the world in the Jews, Sontag saw the Serbian people as the source of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Like Hitler’s obsession with the Jews and anti-Semitism, Sontag suffered from a sociopathic and psychopathic obsession with anti-Serbianism. She was ignorant but it was a willful ignorance, a purposeful ignorance. She saw only what she wanted to see. This is the most baneful and woeful ignorance.
The most blatant example of her anti-Serbian racism is found in her snide comment that the Serbs are not part of Europe in The New York Times Magazine justifying the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. She talked about how the French were a part of Europe. And then, when referring to the Serbs, wrote: “And ‘they’ are not.” This was over the top bigotry. Of course, Hitler made the similar argument about Jews. Jews were a Semitic, Asian peoples that were not a part of Europe, were not indigenous to Europe. Therefore, Jews should be exterminated. It is absurd that Sontag parrots Adolf Hitler. But Sontag’s entire life is an absurdity.
She was a narrow-minded and ignorant racist but masqueraded as a “humanitarian interventionist”. She advocated the illegal bombing of schools, bridges, nursing homes, residential districts in Serbia, all war crimes and acts of genocide. But she maintained that she opposed genocide. She lived an absurd life. She was illogical, irrational, deluded. She was as racist as Adolf Hitler or Ariel Sharon. And yet she deluded herself into thinking she was a humanist. Her thinking was irrational and sociopathic, absurd.
Nothing better illustrates the absurdity of her whole life than her staging of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.
Waiting for Godot, a tragicomedy, is an existentialist and absurdist two act play about the meaninglessness and boredom and tedium of modern life. But primarily it is about the absurdity of life. It is about the absurdity of the intellectual and intellectualism. In the final act, Vladimir and Estragon are engaged in the following colloquy:
Vladimir: Well, shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move.
The play symbolizes the sterility, nihilism, and bankruptcy of 20th century thought and intellectualism. The 1960s rock musical “Hair” would also be staged in Sarajevo. This was a propaganda ploy to demonstrate how Westernized and Americanized the Bosnian Muslims were, to prove to us ignoramuses just how secular and progressive and hip they really were. Never mind that “Hair” is passé and laughable and an archaic joke in the 1990s. Does anyone want to engineer a Cowsills revival? Maybe bell bottoms will come back in style someday? What do we know? For Sontag, what is “in” is what she says is “in”. Mozart’s Requiem would be played in Sarajevo to show that the Bosnian Muslims were part of the Western world. It was another absurdist propaganda stunt. Sontag also liked nothing better than to play with our minds.
Nothing better exemplifies this absurdity than the notion of “military humanism”, of bombing cities like Belgrade, Novi Sad and Pristina to achieve humanitarianism. There is nothing more absurd than taking sides in a civil war where each side is merely protecting their interests. She was a powerful advocate of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 because she did not believe borders mattered any more. Sovereignty was archaic. Of course, this is hypocritical and disingenuous. What she meant was that Serbian borders don’t matter and are irrelevant, not all borders.
Sontag argued that some wars were just: “There is such a thing as a just war.” She argued that US military intervention on the side of the Bosnian Muslim faction was an instance of a “just war.” She wrote that the so-called Kosovo War was a “just war” to prevent “genocide.” But there never was any genocide in either Bosnia or Kosovo.
Sontag never retracted her erroneous statements. This is because she did not care about the truth or reality. Susan Sontag made her own reality. She was an intellectual, she was part of the elite and part of reality she made. She exhibited all the psychopathologies of the intellectual elites. First, she exhibited an intellectual moral certainty that mere mortals never do but the intellectuals are dead certain in that sociopathic way. Secondly, intellectuals elevate the illogical and irrational to the absurd because they deal with abstraction and a pseudo-reality, a fantasy world of illusion and delusion than borders on megalomania. The intellectual is detached from reality. Sontag is the intellectual.
1930s Redux
The intellectual manufactures a delusion structure for reality and Susan Sontag created, a delusional fantasy world. Just like Hitler saw Jews in stereotypical terms, she saw Serbs as caricatures manufactured by neo-Ustasha propagandists.
Sontag was a throwback to the 1930s when racism was in vogue. It was a simpler time where it was easy to divide the world between good and evil, between good people and bad people. It was a time when Jews could be portrayed as evil monsters bent on enslaving humanity and controlling the world. The world was so simple. US; Good. Them: Bad. Sontag resorts to this type of Us versus Them enmity and racism. She refers to the Serbian people as “they” or THEM. It is a simple conflict of Us against Them. In the 1930s, it was the Jews who were evil. In the 1990s, it was the Serbs. Just change the names, everything else is the name. Just fill in the blanks.
Can you really divide the world morally in this oversimplified way? Sontag was convinced that you could. Adolf Hitler was convinced that you could also.
Sontag, in a perverse way, was seeking a return to this less complex period. It was a 1930s redux for her. Of course, the Clinton government was sponsoring this kind of post-Cold War racist atavism. But Sontag, Anthony Lewis, Bill Kristol, Fuad Ajami were all on board. You couldn’t have racist attacks against politically correct targets who were well organized and financed like Jews and blacks, but the Serbs were fair game. Anything goes with respect to them. Sontag was instrumental in driving a wedge between Serbs and Jews, who had no history of animosity before. Along with Abe Foxman, Bill Kristol, Tom Lantos, and Anthony Lewis, she created a rift between Serbs and Jews and poisoned and soured relations between the two groups. Sontag’s Hitlerian racism and bigotry troubled many. Is this all she learned from the Holocaust? Did she learn to mimic and parrot Hitler? Is this what she learned?
Absurd Hypocrite
The central absurdity of her life is that she was a militant advocate for the Bosnian Muslims but never lifted a finger to help the Palestinian Muslims. This could perhaps be explained by her statement that she was a Jew first, a writer second, and an American third.
Sontag never took any interest in the real genocide in Rwanda where up to a million people were killed. Why? Because the victims were black. As Sontag herself noted, the Albanian Muslim refugees should be supported because they were people “who look like us”, that is, are white like her. She waged a campaign to get NATO and European states to go to war with the Serbian people. She was bitter that the European countries did not take sides in the Yugoslav civil wars. She wrote: “The Europe that let Bosnia die.” She saw herself as the midwife of Bosnian independence.
Why this obsession with the Muslims of Bosnia? They had business suits and drove Mercedes-Benzes. Butros Butros Ghali said Bosnia was “a rich man’s war,” Why didn’t Sontag help the Muslims in occupied Gaza and the West Bank? Why didn’t she show the same fanaticism and militancy and commitment towards establishing a Palestinian Miuslim state? Why the hypocrisy and double-standard?
Her true talent lay in this kind of racist fiction. She would have made a top-notch propagandist and indeed this was where she was most effective, as a propagandist for the New World Order.
Literary Legacy
She was born as Susan Rosenblatt in 1933 in New York. He father was a fur trader who died when she was five. Her mother was an alcoholic. Sontag attended the University of Chicago where she married historian Philip Rieff. She was a literary dilettante, critic, playwright, essayist, film critic, film maker, activist, and failed novelist. She was competent in many different fields but really exceptional at none. No one will remember Sontag as a writer. She was a hack. No one remembers or reads her books “Death Kit”, “Benefactor”, “In America”, “The Volcano Lover”. She also wrote an unsuccessful play called “Alice in Bed”. Gore Vidal noted her self-delusional and narcissistic vanity when he wrote in a review of “Death Kit” in 1967: “Miss Sontag’s intelligence is still greater than her talent.” She won the National Book Award for “In America”, but it was really based on her connections with the board. The book flopped in sales and was never popular. She was accused of plagiarism for not crediting her sources which she borrowed from liberally. The award did not improve her literary standing, it just buttressed her vanity. None of her books ever sold. She never achieved popular or critical acclaim for her literary works. It was only as a dilettantish “essayist” and roving intellectual that she gained notoriety. And it was only as a humanitarian interventionist that she achieved any wide-spread influence and success. She was at best a minor writer and so she will not be remembered for her literary output which was mostly self-indulgent and narcissistic in nature.
Absurd to the End
Sontag continued with her absurdist take on reality. In 2001, she wrote an article in The New Yorker in which she argued that Ossama Bin Laden’s 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was based on a US foreign policy that was hostile to Muslims: ”Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack …undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” She also argued that the 9/11 hijackers and the Al-Qaeda planners of the terrorist attack were not cowards: “They were not cowards.” This is a trite truism. Do we need an intellectual to tell us this? But it is another instance of Sontag’s delusional vanity. She was telling us, the unenlightened and ignorant, what we didn’t already know. She continued to be contrary just so she could stand out from the crowd, the herd and an intellecuat mob that she so despised but was part of. It was contrariness that was rooted in absurdity. She continued her Theater of the Absurd until the end. She personifies the age when one could use words to prove that black is white and white is black. Sontag was the perfectionist at this fiction of reality.
Check out this passage from the Times' obit of Susan Sontag:
"Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull."
In fact, a 2000 piece in London's Guardian observed: "You read Sontag's early work, and it lies flat and lifeless on the page," which would seem to refute the claim that "no one ever called her dull."
-- BEST OF THE WEB TODAY, December 29, 2004
Good post.
By the way, why is cantankerous the opposite of clever?
Most modern "intellectuals" are pompus windbags who loathe Western Civilization, Christianity, the white race, and anything resembling decency, prudency, or temperance.
Wow, pretty picture. Didn't know she was once so attractive.
Are you sure? That looks like a still from the "Rocky Horror Picture Show"...
Bump for later..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.