Posted on 12/28/2004 10:01:32 AM PST by SmithL
NEW YORK -- Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71.
Sontag died Tuesday morning, officials at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said. She had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s.
Sontag called herself a "besotted aesthete," an "obsessed moralist" and a "zealot of seriousness."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Oh, well, that's too bad.
From Newsday: ""Ever the iconoclast, Sontag had a knack for annoying both the right and the left. In 1982, in a meeting in Town Hall in New York to protest the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, she declared that communism was fascism with a human face. She was unsparing in her criticism of much of the left’s refusal to take seriously the exiles and dissidents and murdered victims of Stalin’s terror and the tyranny communism imposed wherever it had triumphed.""
For some perspective, this is the woman who said, of the 9/11 hijackers "...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." In effect, suggesting we got what we deserved.
Her career is chock full of same similar bullspit commentary praising despots, and tyrants ...
Oh gee whiz, that's too bad...
While I certainly don't celebrate her passing... I won't lie and claim to mourn it, either.
What exactly did she do anyway?
I try not to speak ill of the dead, so I won't.
Why not? Where does this come from?
I have the same instinct as well. I'm just wondering where it comes from and is it really necessary with public figures being discussed publicly.
I don't mean nasty personal things such as "it's great they died" etc...
When Stalin died, for example, were people to not say anything bad?
So that's where Bill Maher came up with it.
I can also say something good about her.
She helped popularize Machado De Assis, an excellent 19th century Brazilian author, in the United States. He is one of my favorites.
For a living? As best as I can tell, she claimed to be an intellectual sponging off the largesse of the artsy fartsy crowd.
I think it's juse a deceny thing. Kind of like when I am a guest in someones home I will try not to point out that the couch is ugly. Of course, I was happy when Uday and the other one were killed, so there is no clear standard.
Susan Sontag was the keynote speaker at my son's graduation from Vassar College in 2002. I had never been so disgusted by a speech in my life. Fortunately there were many parents who stood and booed her rant and the college president had to interrupt and settle folks down. I hate to say it, but I won't miss her.
L
Does she get 72 virgins for her infamous 9/11 quotes?
"I've always thought one should speak good of the dead.... Joan Crawford's dead: Good...."
Who?
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