Susan Sontag on September 11

methos

Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001

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 acknowledgement 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 super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?  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.  In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.   

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid.  Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war.  But everything is not O.K.  And this was not Pearl Harbor.  We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall.  A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush.  A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense.  But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality.  The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible.  The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.   

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management.  Politics, the politics of a democracy--which entails disagreement, which promotes candor--has been replaced by psychotherapy.  Let's by all means grieve together.  But let's not be stupid together.  A few shreds of historical awareness might help us to 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.

怀抱花朵的孩子

When Ammerican military bombed our embassy in Jugoslavia, Chinese government did nothing except for condemning. What we can say about 911? If we even can not protect our own people.

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2007-9-21 12:09 AM 编辑 ]

methos

Your comment is rather baffling.... How is the US's bombing of our embassy relevant to Sep.11? Are you suggesting that it was deliberate? And Susan Sontag was urging people to /reflect/ on the attack, to see the problems in American foreign policy which were partly responsible for the attack, not about how the government might or might not have failed to "protect the people."

And I posted it not to analyze Sep. 11, but to show the role that a prominent writer and public intellectual of today is supposed to play at the time of a crisis, partly as a response to your rather surprising annoyance with Harold Pinter, expressed here more than a year ago.

[ 本帖最后由 methos 于 2007-9-21 06:46 AM 编辑 ]