It's All Susan Sontag's Fault
The Poor Man, on the importance of staying in touch with reality:The true situation is that there is a large and popular insurgency in Iraq, made up of disparate interests, but all drawing their strength from the long-standing popular discontent with the American and coalition occupation, a discontent based on a very understandable dislike of foreign armies, and fueled by the thousands of Iraqis we have killed, intentionally or not, to say nothing of Abu Ghraib - here, 6 months later, almost completely forgotten. This is the reality that was apparent to journalists well outside the “Sunni triangle” last March, as well as to the Marines who first “liberated” Baghdad. True, many soldiers in Iraq have been in places where people were nice and glad to have them, which is great, but misses the main point. Kennedy was shot on a sunny day, but most newspapers didn’t lead with the nice weather.
Appreciate this. Understand that the people killing us in Iraq aren’t motivated by Gore Vidal or inspired by Susan Sontag or organized by Michael Moore or in cahoots in any way with any of the right’s celebrity piñatas - not literally, not metaphorically, not if you look at it in a certain way, not to any infinitesimal degree, not in any sense, not in any way at all. They do not lead a clandestine international conspiracy of Evil which has corrupted everything in every foreign country plus everything in America not owned by loyal Bush Republican apparatchiks; nor are they members of such a conspiracy; nor does a conspiracy remotely matching that description exist. To think otherwise is, literally and to a very great degree, insanity. It is insane.
As Michael Berube correctly notes, "the Iraqi insurgency has not issued so much as one statement of sorrow at Ms. Sontag’s recent death, and Muqtada al-Sadr has so far failed completely to thank her for her distinctive and pathbreaking work as an American public intellectual."
Maybe Emily Post hasn't made it into Gulf Arabic yet. (Note to Titan: $100 million summer project?)
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 1/08/2005 01:00:00 AM
<< Home