December 28, 2004

• LA Times link. Reg required.
• Hate. But still sad.
• This is my first real exposure to her; she sounds like someone who cared about people and directed the majority of her thinking to that end, but I suppose I could learn to hate her with more information.
• one of America
• I often disagreed with her, but she was a hell of a writer, and led the kind of intellectual life that seems to have disappeared from the American scene. And leukemia is a lousy way to go.
• Her verbal defense of the 911 attackers should have given her pompous ass a one way ticket to Iran where should could meditate on freedom , and pontificate her anger at the USA.
• Quite the knee jerk reaction, ironsculler. She said that the bombers weren't cowards, that no matter your take on what they did, that they were quite brave. I don't know if I completely agree with her (suicide is often termed as a cowardly act) but I do believe that these were people of a great deal of conviction and that this act (9/11) did not happen in a vacuum, that there was a reason it happened.
• The last thing of hers I read was messy. Perhaps that was a result of her illness. The TES took it down shortly after publishing it.
• September 11th was an attack on the military and financial symbols and centers of American imperialism that was perpetrated by people who felt that they and their homelands were victims of that same imperialism. It does not mean that their viewpoint was right, and it does not mean that their response was reasonable. It means that they had a traditional reason for the attack -- they felt that they were responding to military aggression. I hope that ironsculler does not continue to believe the naive fantasy that the attackers hate freedom that the government encourages us to believe. As a child, I could not understand why adults could not seem to be able to distinguish the difference between an excuse and a reason/cause for the behavior. They are entirely different. Every action has a reason/cause. Not every action has an excuse. To pretend that the reason/cause for September 11th was evil or insanity is childish and will not help to prevent something like it from happening again. Most people would agree that understanding the reason/cause of an event is one of the keys to being able to prevent the event from happening again. Cowards? Being willing to die for a cause is apparently cowardice if one does not believe in the cause. If one does believe in the cause, then that same action is generally perceived as heroic, brave, or patriotic. It is such a happy coincidence for us that bin Laden, Hussein, Castro, Stalin, Hitler, Noriega, Ghadaffi, Arafat, Kruschev, etc. are all madmen or evil. Imagine what would happen if those we war with were not inherently evil or crazy: we would have to examine their motives, reasoning, and position in a realistic light. If we are going to do that, then we might as well buy ourselves a one way ticket to Iran to meditate on freedom and pontificate our anger at the USA.
• I had been joking that " Rhyslain " who's writing very well written Harry Potter slash fictions on the net here was actually Sontag. I saw her at Stanford once. She was really smart but totally dippy. This was during the war in Bosnia and she was actually going back and forth trying to put on a production of " Waiting for Godot " there, because that would be so deep and meanful, what with the war and evertying. Like I said, dippy, but she really cared. Some people live entirely in their feelings. And I love those people, I think they're great, but don't take anything they say too seriously ( like regarding 9-11 ) they're not really thinking, it's all emotional.
• Don't forget to provide an example of actual cowardly behavior to help those who need it along: Pushing your own child in front of you so you can run from an attacking dog (it would be less cowardly to push someone else's child, but not much).
• bernockle and squidranch hit that nail on the head. While I personally would like to see the likes of Bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, and pretty much any other religious fundamentalist who believes that violence and murder are ok in pursuit of their dogmatic goals (including many a person here in the US of A who think that Jesus wants them to shoot abortion doctors) meet a very painful and very quick end, I haven't been so foolish to believe that the rhetorical underpinnings of current American politics are in any way an accurate representation of the facts. Sontag had the guts to call it like she saw it: those 19 hijackers, hate-filled, desperate, zealous, and, yes, evil as they were for specifically targeting civilians, were no cowards. Rhetorically, what you see on American media nowadays is heavily skewed into two directions. First, these murders were "cowards" (this is intended to be comforting to Americans in two ways: firstly, being cowards, they will easily be beaten when we retaliate (and we all know how that belief turned out in Iraq), and secondly, the fact that they are "cowards" demeans them to the level that, by making them less than "true men" it is not only acceptable, but necessary to exact our revenge, but alas, since those 19 men are dead, we must go after the "cowards" who are like them), and second, that they "hate freedom" (obviously intended to convey a message of fear to the populace, for is not freedom the thing we hold most dear? They hate the very basis of our society, and because of that fundamental difference of belief, there is no negotation with them). While the cowardice rhetoric is patently false, there is some solid indications of the second. But then, go into your average Southern Baptist church in the US and as them what they think of civil rights for homosexuals. They hate freedom, too. And perhaps it's only a matter of time before the extreme right-wing Christians organize into a Jesusified Al-Qaeda. Sorry about the Christian digression, but we have seen the destructive power of a few religious fundamentalists who believe that dying in pursuit of murdering infidels (or, if you prefer, unbelievers or pagans) will guarantee them a spot in paradise.
• .
• I would argue that right and wrong depend on one's point of view - it is a choice, rather than an absolute fact. Cowardice can then be defined as an avoidance of making the choice for right, without necessarily defining what is "right". At least part of the problem stems from the idea that there is are absolute right and wrong, which doesn't seem to work well in the real world. Take for example, the idea of "thou shalt not kill". Simple on the face of it, but totally dependent on the meaning of "kill". Freethought: not necessarily cowardice - it can be considered an selfish advantageous survival mechanism in that your child survives as opposed to someone else's child. Still, in light of our general societal view that children should be protected, it's way over on the wrong scale.
• The bottom line is she was playing ball in their court.... I am not some jingoistic Bushush Luvin , Kill Em for Jesus Right Wing Nut. You guys took my comment the wrong way..Way too much over dissection with no purpose. The politicians have never properly addressed my questions and never will. Why did there have to be a military base in Saudi Arabia? This kind of in your face presence was a big cause of the 911 tradgedy. No one has gotten back to the real why of that. You want something to dissect Dissect that.
• ironsculler, I have no idea what you're talking about, but you sure derailed this thread to no good purpose. Is that vaguely remembered factoid all you know about Susan Sontag? You might try learning something before you go off half-cocked.
• I have had little experience with Sontag's work, but she was certainly a huge influence on so many thinkers & writers I admire. I'm saddened by the illness she endured; I lost a friend to this disease many years ago & it's a bastard of a thing. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It is a great pity that her voice has been stilled at this time. The voices of logic & reason seem to have been drowned by the marching of booted feet, lately. My hope is that there will be a resurgence of reason in the world soon.. but not too late.
• I still consider "Against Interpretation" to be one of the most important things I read in college, and I still have the photocopied pages that my professor distributed to the class. Time to pull them from the archives...
• "The niceties, Fred. The fine points: diplomacy, compassion, standards, manners, tradition... that's what we're reaching toward. Oh, we may stumble along the way, but civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag. Everything your society has worked so hard to accomplish over the centuries, that's what we aspire to; we want to be civilized." She was, I think, a good person - and that is perhaps a larger compliment than it may at first seem.
• flashboy's quote is from Gremlins 2. Now, that is cool.
• All hail the public intellectual. Should be more of it.
• I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag