Sontag

Edward Said, then Jacques Derrida, and now Susan Sontag, all icons of the intellectual left, have all died this year.  They were a far cry from the intellectual "Brains Trust" that helped FDR solidify the Democratic Party's hold on power for 40 years.  And a good case could be made that the intellectuals of the left have contributed to the shrinking success of the once majority party.  But today is not the day for that discussion.  Here's a balanced obit on Sontag:

Susan Sontag is dead. Let us not pretend that Sontag was a conservative, nor on her way to being conservative; but we can at least take a moment to acknowledge some of the service she rendered to conservatism in its various missions. She was capable of meaningful introspection, or irritating vacillation, depending on where you stood -- and it was noteworthy that you were more prone to the latter view the further you stood to the left. Take Vietnam, for example, whose tyrannical regime, as conflated with the totality of the Vietnamese people (excepting, of course, those countless numbers with the poor grace to flee on the high seas), Sontag celebrated, in the way that self-styled intellectuals did in those days. Vietnam fought America, and America was the enemy, the enemy of which was one's friend. So Cuba too and the Communist experiment in general fell into the orbit of Sontag's approval.

In this she was hardly alone; where she parted ways with her compatriots of those heady days, including those who eventually secured the Democratic nomination for President, was her reevaluation of her love affair with the hardcore left's war on humanity. Viewing with mounting dismay the Communist crushing of Solidarity in Poland, she famously declared to a gathering of fellow-travelers in the 1980s that "Communism is Fascism with a human face," upon which they transformed with a chorus of boos into erstwhile fellow-travelers. The storm of condemnation that rained down upon her for this was so much whining, with the predictable outlets -- The Nation, of course -- serving as mouthpieces for the irate defenders of America's enemies. Inasmuch as Sontag could divorce herself from that crowd -- even if she never could, Horowitz-style, fully and explicitly turn against their peculiar madness -- it was to her credit, and a service to the conservatism that she was never identified with.  ...

In that light, then, it is a pity that so many of the blogging generation was first exposed to Sontag in her fading years via just that sort of facile sloganeering -- from Andrew Sullivan, who instituted a "Sontag Award" for those who shared her purported "post-9/11 preference for the 'courage' of Islamist mass murderers as opposed to the 'cowardice' of NATO air-pilots over the skies in Iraq."