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Home , Bill Maher, Rod Dreher, Ted Koppel

Salting the Wound 112 113 SUSAN SONTAG'S N E W Y O R K E R E S S A Y W A S

MISREAD, MISUNDERSTOOD—AND MISCALCULATED?

BY CRAIG SELIGMAN

THE MIDWAY REBORN SALTING THE WOUND: political discourse that followed the attack, and her message was clear: that we SUSAN SONTAG'S N EW Y O R K E R E S S A Y W A S needed to talk about what had happened intelligently. She later explained she’d MISREAD, MISUNDERSTOOD— been in Berlin on Sept. 11 and had been holed up with CNN for 48 hours straight AND MISCALCULATED? when she wrote the piece. She ordinarily avoids TV, she’s often told interview- ers—she despises it—and her irked shock at the banality of what she was hearing came through in her complaints that “the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality,” that “the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric” we were being fed was “unworthy of a mature democracy.” The key word, of course, is “mature.” Outraged that leaders and news anchors, in their “manipulative” attempts at “confidence-building and grief management,” were treating the public as children, Sontag reacted with all the fury of Athena patronized. “Politics,” she wrote acidly, “the politics of a democ- racy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid usan Sontag has been deriding together.” 114 the yahooism of American politicalS culture for 40 years, and she doesn’t appear Sontag is a writer I deeply admire—I’m sort of a Sontag junkie—and I 115 to be mellowing with age. Nothing published in the wake of the terrorist attack devoured her essay as soon as my issue arrived in the mail. There was little in it on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon caused more widespread apoplexy that I disagreed with (I loathe TV and the Bush administration, too), but the than the 460 words that appeared above her byline in the Talk of the Town minute I read it I knew her tone was trouble. And I was right. Almost immedi- department of ’s issue of Sept. 24, 2001, the first one out after ately, the conservative John Podhoretz came out swinging. Accusing the attack. Sontag of “moral idiocy” in a column headlined “America-Haters “The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the Within,” he all but sputtered, “She dares to compare the politicians we elect with self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures the totalitarian masters of the former Soviet Union.” What she’d actually writ- and TV commentators is startling, depressing,” she began. Amidst the lamenta- ten—I already quoted a portion—was this: tions and the shrieks of pain, her disdain was shockingly cool. When Leon Wieseltier, critiquing The New Yorker’s coverage of the disaster soon afterward The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a in , dismissed the slew of “fine writing” the editors had gath- Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the ered for the occasion as “cheap balm”—“a cautionary illustration of the limits of sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, literariness”—he didn’t mention Sontag. No one could accuse her of applying unworthy of a mature democracy. balm, cheap or otherwise. Pouring salt on a wound was more like it. Sontag’s disgust had less to do with politics per se than with the level of

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN Is that comparing? Well—not exactly. She was pointing out a paradox: that commissars… I wanted to walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman’s apartment, grab the public discourse we’re currently swallowing has elements in common with a her by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and force her to say (far direr) public discourse we now universally condemn. That may be a defen- that to the firefighters. sible observation, but it’s not a neutral one. Sontag was baiting, and Podhoretz took the bait. “How many citizens,” Sontag had demanded, “are aware of the ongoing What bare feet and broken glass had to do with his craving he didn’t explain; American bombing of ? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be apparently some notion of martyrdom was mixed in with his wrath. In any case, more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high the Brooklyn Bridge had been closed to foot traffic. in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” This The next day, in , Charles Krauthammer charged Podhoretz paraphrased as “America is a cowardly nation because our military Sontag with “moral obtuseness.” Like many of her critics, he bristled at her bombs targets in Iraq from a height that makes it impossible for anti-aircraft assertion that the attack had been “undertaken as a consequence of specific weaponry to reach them”—and while his flat rehash murdered the elegance of American alliances and actions”: “What Sontag is implying,” he wrote, “but does Sontag’s phrasing, here he was on firmer ground. But he lost his footing when he not quite have the courage to say, is that because of these ‘alliances and actions,’ went after her closing comment. Sontag had written, “‘Our country is strong,’ we such as the bombing of Iraq, we had it coming.” That’s an unfairly reductive are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts summary, as what followed it shows. Krauthammer boiled Sontag’s “alliances” down to Israel (when I assume she was also thinking of and other 116 that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.” Podhoretz’s para- 117 phrase: “Our nation should be weak and defenseless, in Sontag’s view, because problematic regimes) and enumerated, among Sontag’s “actions,” American that is the only fair thing for an immoral and hateful nation to be.” Nonsense: bombing in the Balkans—a military intervention she had famously made herself Sontag’s “not all America has to be” clearly means that has to be some- hoarse calling for (where was Krauthammer?) long before the Clinton adminis- thing in addition to strong (intelligent, presumably), not instead of strong. tration took action there. If Podhoretz’s intemperateness was a match for Sontag’s, it paled next to a Also writing in The Washington Post, Peter Carlson, too, criticized the way column by Rod Dreher that appeared in the same tabloid the following day. The Sontag had “directed her rage at Americans”: attack had taken a heavy toll on Dreher: “I can’t sleep without pills,” he com- Sontag’s stated point—“a lot of thinking needs to be done”—is plained, “and these tension headaches have me eating Advils like M&Ms.” His undeniable, if banal. But her tone—belligerent, self-righteous and precarious mental condition probably accounts for the hysteria of the passage anti-American—is astonishingly wrongheaded. Regular people (at least I hope he doesn’t ordinarily write like this) in which he described him- can be dim at times but it takes a real intellectual to be this stupe- self as “consumed with hate” for “Americans who blame this on America,” of fyingly dumb. whom he offered a solitary example: Carlson was being either disingenuous or dumb himself, since he failed to I read Susan Sontag’s bit in The New Yorker, in which she opined note what Sontag said we needed to be thinking ab o u t : “about the ineptitude of that this was America’s fault, and compared our leaders to Soviet American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN America foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what consti- pairing mortified her. “Look,” she griped in a mid-October interview with David tutes a smart program of military defense.” None of this sounds banal to me—and Talbot, the editor-in-chief of Salon.com, “I have nothing in common with Bill who else was then demanding that we discuss it? But since Carlson was mainly Maher, whom I had never heard of before.” She was less offended at being criticizing Sontag’s tone, I find less in his remonstrances to take issue with. lumped with —“whom I am very familiar with”—although, as Martin F. Nolan, attacking Sontag the following month in a coarse opinion she stressed, “my position is decidedly not the Chomsky position.” piece (“high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense”) in The She wasn’t any happier when Frank Rich took up their cause in his Op-Ed Boston Globe, agreed with Krauthammer’s interpretation of “alliances”—“She column in . “Such has been the disproportionate avalanche probably meant Israel”—and added piously, “Many intellectuals dislike the of invective about Susan Sontag, Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky,” Rich wrote, Mideast’s only democracy.” That’s ignorance talking, and as a characterization “that you’d hardly guess they were a writer, a late-late-night comic and a lin- of Sontag’s loving but not uncritical stance on Israel (developed at length in her guistics professor—Americans with less clout and popular standing than a 1974 documentary “Promised Lands” and in her acceptance speech for last substitute weatherman on ‘The Today Show.’” Clearly miffed, she told Talbot, year’s Jerusalem Prize in ), it approaches slander. But then Nolan was “Sorry, but Noam Chomsky is a good bit more than a ‘professor of linguistics,’” out of his depth, as he demonstrated by trying to bring in some of Sontag’s other adding haughtily, “Our critics are up in arms against us because we do have a writing—specifically (and weirdly) her well-known 1964 “Notes on ‘Camp.’” degree of influence. But our own ‘defenders’ are reduced to saying, ‘Well, leave Quoting her observation that “Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a the poor things alone, they’re quite obscure anyway.’” 118 badge of identity even, among small urban cliques,” he sniffed, “Flag-waving is The “avalanche of invective” reached its climax on October 3, the evening 119 uncool in these precincts,” and then he got going about poor patriotism. Um— Sontag had agreed to appear on Ted Koppel’s TV news program “.” what precincts, exactly, might those be? Among Sontag’s critics, Nolan gets the (“It’s not my thing,” she told Talbot ruefully, “but I did it.”) No doubt she expect- prize for irrelevance, since “Notes on ‘Camp’” addressed a sensibility that had ed disagreement, but as she later said, Todd Gaziano, of the conservative flowered among urban gay men; Sontag distanced herself personally, explain- Heritage Foundation, “practically foamed at the mouth.” She was lauding the ing that she was “strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by value of public debate and the First Amendment when Gaziano broke in: it,” in the very paragraph Nolan quoted from. There were some winning ironies. Shortly after the terrorist attack, Bill g a z i a n o : Well, you are also a very offensive writer. Maher, the host of the (later-canceled) late-night television discussion show k o p p e l : Hold on just a second. Let’s get Todd Gaziano here “,” had questioned President Bush’s characterization of the into the debate. s o n t a g : Yeah. I want to defend that… perpetrators as “cowards” in much the same terms Sontag had used. “We have g a z i a n o : You are part of the “blame America first” crowd. You been the cowards,” he said on the air, “lobbing cruise missiles from two thou- said that we were to blame for our foreign policy. sand miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the s o n t a g : Absolutely not. building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” When Maher’s sponsors g a z i a n o : That the 6,000 dead— started running for the exits, he quickly had to display himself in sackcloth, but s o n t a g : I said nothing of the kind. Absolutely not. in the ensuing weeks his name was inevitably lumped with Sontag’s, and the g a z i a n o : You certainly—you certainly did and—

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN Looking back on s o n t a g : I did not. This is total fantasy. g a z i a n o : And Charles Krauthammer called you on it, and now the mood of you’re trying to—now you’re trying to backtrack. s o n t a g : I did not say that. k o p p e l : Hold it folks, just one second… those dark weeks, s o n t a g : I’m sorry. I never said anything of the kind. k o p p e l : Let me—let me just— I believe that, s o n t a g : I believe I’m just as patriotic and against the terror- ists as you are. perhaps inadvertently, g a z i a n o : Well, your version of patriotism is rather strange.

Sontag had hit A few minutes later:

g a z i a n o : She said that the terrorist attack, quote, “was a con- on a startling sequence of specific American alliances and actions. How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?” I—I think it speaks for 120 truth: 121 itself. You are deigning in your elitist, liberal out- look to say that we deserved this terrorist attack. There was a s o n t a g : Absolutely not. g a z i a n o : That the foreign policy, because of our bombing of national need to be Iraq— s o n t a g : That’s slander. g a z i a n o : —blame America. Blame America. stupid together. s o n t a g : Oh, dear. I was absolutely not. That’s garbage.

It got worse:

k o p p e l : And, Todd Gaziano, the question, at least the one I’d like you to address, is not whether you agree or dis- agree with what Susan Sontag said, but whether you defend her right to be published, as saying it.

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN g a z i a n o : I not only defend her right, I’m glad that she’s learned—fast—to back away from these arguments, because they were not truly exposed herself. That’s one of the values of the First arguments about the definition of a word. Amendment. We—a much wider audience is “Let’s by all means grieve together,” Sontag had written. “But let’s not be exposed to the idiocy of Susan Sontag that we can stupid together.” Looking back on the mood of those dark weeks, I believe that, properly condemn her. There has never been such a clear distinction between good and evil. And those perhaps inadvertently, she’d hit on a startling truth: There was a national need who blame America should be criticized harshly and to be stupid together. Hardheaded logic wasn’t what people craved. Sontag was should not be permitted, you know, to speak in—in on to something when she wrote, “The voices licensed to follow the event seem honorable intellectual circles again. to have joined together in a campaign to infantalize the public,” though I don’t think she went far enough in acknowledging the public’s complicity. The emer- No wonder Sontag told Talbot she was “stunned.” The right—and not only gency left the nation with a childlike need for authority figures. The mayor of the right—had turned her into the national villainess. “I don’t want to get defen- New York rose to the occasion, and two terms of disgracefully confrontational sive,” she said, “but of course I am a little defensive.” and mean-spirited leadership were obliterated from memory. The president went from being the butt of jokes to a figure of widespread acclaim weeks before the early successes of the war in Afghanistan offered any rationale for the What conclusions can we draw from this sad comedy? Not many, I’m afraid, change in opinion. Sontag had called him “robotic” in her essay, and while her 122 that will make anybody more sanguine about the possibilities for a national con- description rang true with me, ours was clearly a minority view. The public des- 123 versation, especially during periods when feelings are raw. Consider Sontag’s perately needed leaders to look up to. remark about the use of coward. “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral As I said, there’s little in what Sontag wrote that I disagree with myself, and virtue),” she wrote: “whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s I find the intellectual level of the venom that’s been directed at her, in her words, slaughter, they were not cowards.” Her logic is straightforward, and it didn’t “startling, depressing.” But that’s not to say that I think she bears no responsi- strike me as inflammatory. Webster’s Third New Unabridged Dictionary defines bility for the rage her piece elicited. She may have been right, but she wasn’t coward as “one who shows ignoble fear: a basely timid, easily frightened, and innocent. For a writer whose reputation rests largely on the brilliant sensitivity easily daunted person.” In Webster’s New World Dictionary it’s “a person who of her literary criticism, Sontag can seem remarkably deaf to nuance. “Let’s by lacks courage, esp., one who is shamefully unable to control fear and so shrinks all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together”—are these the words from danger or trouble.” For The American Heritage Dictionary it’s “one who of a writer stung by any grief at all? Readers responded angrily to language they lacks courage in the face of danger or pain; an ignobly frightened or timid perceived as cold, hard, unfeeling. They wanted emotion that matched theirs: person.” Is there anything there to argue about? And yet after Sontag’s piece witness the acclaim for when the newscaster wept publicly over the appeared in The New Yorker, I saw men and women redden with rage over her events of Sept. 11 on the show. comment, as though she had offered it in explicit support of international I wouldn’t go so far as to say, though, that Sontag’s essay represents a fail- terrorism. The perpetrators of the attack were cowards, they insisted. And I ure of tone. On the contrary, I think she’s in firm control of her tone. She delights

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN in its hard, disdainful edge, and at her age (she’s nearly 70) she’s not about to give it up. It’s certainly not a tone she invented for the occasion—a circumstance that helps explain why her interviews so often find her protesting that she’s not a cold fish but a passionate and vulnerable person. They’re exercises in damage control. And so it was with Talbot, to whom she insisted that she was consumed with grief:

I cry every morning real tears, I mean down-the-cheek tears, when I read those small obituaries that The Times publishes of the people who died in the World Trade Center. I read them faithfully, every last one of them, and I cry. I live near a fire- house that lost a lot of men, and I’ve brought them things. And I’m genuinely and profoundly, exactly like everyone else, real- ly moved, really wounded and really in mourning.

“Genuinely,” “profoundly,” “really,” “really,” “really”… The passion is there, 124 she wants us to understand. The passion is there in her New Yorker essay; unfor- 125 tunately, it takes the form of anger and contempt. And there’s a disastrous omission from the essay that forced Sontag to work overtime declaring her per- sonal devastation (“exactly like everyone else”) in her later appearances and interviews: at no point did she direct any of her anger and contempt at the ter- rorists. Was her horror at the slaughter of thousands something that went without saying? Of course it wasn’t—especially for the many readers who don’t know her work as well as I do. They needed to hear it before they heard anything el s e . I revere Sontag. I value her opinions even when I disagree with them, and I have tremendous admiration for the moral urgency that leads her to take her often unpopular stands. A republic needs contrarians. But it’s hard to feel unlim- ited sympathy for her distress at the avalanche of fury her New Yorker essay brought down on her. After all, if you choose to engage in political discourse, especially if you’re a public figure, then one of the fundamental requirements— and isn’t this obvious?—is a sense of diplomacy.

SALTING THE WOUND CRAIG SELIGMAN