A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I've usually taken the high road when someone passes to the great beyond (just as Ms. Sontag did eight years ago today). However, it is hard not to be cynical in today's world. Some folks just rub me the wrong way. Susan Sontag is such a character.
Below you will find a little essay that leaked out of my pointy head just after the 911 crisis at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and western Pennsylvania. The catalyst was Ms. Sontag telling us it was our fault. There were all kinds of adoring OpEds in the media on this day when she passed on back in 2004. They paid tribute to, in my mind, a charlatan intelligentsia type. I found it easier to portray the truth. In the present, we are being governed by the Susan Sontags, and the Noam Chomskys of the world. So yeah...Susan Sontag is not dead enough.
I was never a fan of Susan Sontag in life. I am just as indifferent to her "importance" in death. But, now that she has assumed room temperature, I gather that I could be categorized as "mean spirited." I accept that...gladly and without reservation.
I’m With ‘Crash’ Davis, Ms. Sontag
November 13,
2001
One often wonders who is there to assist Susan Sontag in the event
of a thunderstorm. There is always that risk in the undertaking of
self-righteous nose raising that she may drown in the downpour. Be comforted in
the realization that drowning requires the depletion of oxygen on the intake.
Sontag has long been accustomed to existing without adequate oxygen reaching the
brain.
Thomas Wolfe has her pegged as “
just another scribbler who
spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium
encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at
Partisan Review.” That’s why Wolfe makes the big bucks.
At the risk
of portraying a valid point wrapped up in the fictitious Durham Bull soliloquy
of “Crash” Davis, “
I believe…in the soul ... the small of a woman's back,
the hangin' curveball, high fiber, good Scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag
are self-indulgent, overrated crap...” So, in the interest of comparison,
what is it, exactly, that Sontag believes? She believes in herself. That is a
meritorious endeavor. However, despite that very act being the goal of any
caring parent to instill upon their child, there are serious repercussions to
placing one’s confidence in an irrelevant claptrap.
Face it, she is
amusing. No matter the issue. No matter the importance. Sontag is the moral
equivalent of Benny Hill in a nunnery. She ensconces her percipience, and in the
fashion of a drunk baker twists, kneads, and manipulates her message into a
preexisting expectation of where her lapdog gnomes of the cultural garden expect
her to be. That is all well and good except for the fact that the very
foundation of her pedestal is a bunch of hooey. The Sisters of St. Augustine
would, certainly, experience trepidation in the acts of Benny Hill. A thinking
populace is no more swayed by Sontag.
In fact, I invite Sontag to speak
at length, on any topic and at every occasion. It’s not because she says things
I want to hear, or encourages a healthy discourse. I don’t and she doesn’t.
However, the very nature of her ludicrous points of view is damaging to the
credibility of anyone who, somehow, mirrors that high school lesson of
“
guilt by association.”
When she was interviewed by the
New
Yorker in the days after the September 11th terrorist attack she did not
disappoint. The piece’s title “
Observations by Susan Sontag” would have
been enough. Where most would use that encumbrance as the header in their
personal diary entry. Sontag, somehow, perceives her view as something to be
showered upon the great unwashed. I always wondered what entitled her to that
luxury. Surely, it wasn’t something that she regurgitated in the past. I have
read a number of her “works.” The most impressionable on me was not her intended
message I fear.
Early in her career she wrote a number of essays dealing
with art. She expounded on Antonin Artaud, proclaiming him a failure. Sontag
deduced that Artaud was unable to complete a thought and that his numerous
varied works “
amount to a broken, self-mutilated corpus, a vast collection
of fragments.“ It never occurred to Sontag to look at Artaud’s endeavors as
a means to a goal. Despite his own admission of his difficulties in grasp and
concentration, perhaps he enjoyed what he did. Perhaps he enjoyed the challenge
that accompanied the profession. Perhaps it was the striving for improvement
that drove Artaud to cover the gambit of art, cinema, poems, prose, painting,
music et al. Instead, Sontag could only see her picture of another artist’s
work. There lies the cornerstone of
her failings. And there lies the
basis of her warped assessment of the events of September 11th. Her audacity to
categorize Artaud as a failure in her definition of the word shows the epitome
of hypocrisy when you digest, quite forcefully, one of her most well known
pieces.
In
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966) the
intuitive response, as she would call it, was the concept of avoiding the
intellectual and analytical evaluation of a piece. “
The 'meaning' of art
lies in the experiencing both style and content together without analysis.
“ That’s an interesting revelation coming from someone who, quite solidly,
categorized Artaud as a failure based on the inability to stay focused on a
specific idea. I suppose, sometimes one has to twist, knead, and manipulate
until the soft pretzel resembles what the public would recognize and consume.
Regardless, in the
New Yorker Sontag queried, “
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?” In her “
intuitive response” Sontag
failed to acknowledge the minor analytical detail that she is an American
Citizen, and that the acts of the terrorists were defined by the actors to be
murderous, callous acts in cold blood against
all American citizens.
No. Instead, we ‘intellectuals’ should ponder the all encompassing innate
observations and deliberate the feelings of the rat bastards who butchered 4,537
human beings in the name of their “God.” To Sontag, that would be the reasonable
response.
Sontag doesn’t think America plays fairly. “
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.
What a wonderful argument for
the necessity to initiate an immediate program to provide “certificates of
participation” to all parties of conflict (no matter the purpose) so as not to
have to go through the uncomfortable foible of having to declare a winner or
recognize right from wrong, sane from insane, smart from dumb. I am reminded of
the profound words of chronic law abuser Rodney King and my heart just runs with
endearing warmth. “
Can’t we all just get along?” The answer is “no,”
and there are very valid analytical (sometimes intellectual) reasons for that
disclosure. Life is not an exercise in participation. Life is not something to
be pondered. It is more than that I hope. Maybe it is an ongoing mission in
personal accomplishment and achievement. Life could be an effort to better
yourself in all capacities. It is not an application in holding back your own
potential so as to allow others achievement at your expense. The whole concept
of freedom affords the opportunity to accomplish goals as an individual and as a
nation. Making the battlefield one of equality is the “intuitive response” of
inept logic. Show me a boxer with short arms, and I’ll show you a throw rug.
“
Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid
together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has
just happened, and what may continue to happen. "Our country is strong," we are
told again and again. I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts
that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be.”
By
all means we grieve together. And, by all means, we shall not be stupid
together. Instead, I leave that to Susan Sontag alone. Historical awareness is a
conscious motivation to act in a capacity that would guarantee a desired outcome
and future deterrent. History holds the souls of Beirut in 1983, Kenya in 1998,
Tanzania in 1998, Somalia in 1993, Yemen in 2000, Saudi Arabia in 1996, New York
in 1993, and New York, again, in 2001. We are finished with the history lesson
Ms. Sontag. The class is entirely too loud. Our country
is strong. We
are strong in character and pride. I find that extremely consoling, because I
realize that character and pride are not given, but earned. They are earned,
sometimes, at the expense of those who would try to tarnish those innate
qualities within us. A strength-of-purpose lives within the knowledge that
our Republic has the ability to control our own destiny so that those
cherished freedoms are not on loan from others.
Susan Sontag would say I
didn’t understand her point. But, in the very color of her position I understood
the whole encompassing view of her work. It initiated an intuitive response. I
didn’t take away a single, one-sided, analytical perception as to what she was
trying to express in each sentence or phrase. It was pure, unadulterated
discord; all of it.
A lesson in reverse to Susan Sontag, never teach the
unwashed how to juggle knives, lest they learn to throw them.
