Free Republic

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious. A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She...

This week, the Met Gala took place in New York City. The event has always been a showpiece for celebrities seeking to make a splash, from Rihanna in her Pope costume to Katy Perry dressed as a chandelier. This year’s event was designed in homage to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” According to Sontag, “camp” is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” In reality, camp according to Sontag is something else: a deliberate attempt to tear down boundaries. “Camp taste,” Sontag wrote, “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” “[H]igh culture,”...

Hitchens had a serious problem with Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism. The universal encomia for the departure of Christopher Hitchens, the most celebrated atheist in the world, has been matched only by the earlier demise of Apple’s guru, Steve Jobs. Some of Hitchens’ praise is deserved, since he had been an exception in the leftist debacle after 9/11. But Hitchens had a serious problem with Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism. Despite the well known fact that the journalistic superstar boosted a deadly Judeophobic propaganda, Hitchens was given a pass by many US Jews for the anti-Semitic cheap shots about Israel just because...

Recently, I was at a boomer backyard barbecue in Boston.The males had Ivy League degrees and high incomes evident in subtle ways. The wives who were white had the perfect cheekbones and teeth that only generations of breeding and expensive maintenance can produce. The nonwhite wives had PhD’s instead. The host in a Yes We Can T-shirt sneezed. “Barack you!” said a preppie-looking man, and explained with a broad smile that it’s a new locution replacing “Bless you.” I walked up to the Obamapod and said, “I like your barackhlo line.” “It’s Barack you,” he said, with the typical linguistic...

Once more we are having to listen to the black is white, up is down Dem-speak we’ve been subjected to for the last forty years. The Democrats, and their allies in the extremist lobbying organizations know how wrong Durbin’s comments were and that his “apology” on Wednesday was anything but a legitimate apology. They know that such a comment could be damaging to their election hopes in 2006 so they are running to cover Durbin’s egregious statements by trumping up a comparison between Durbin’s comments and those made by Carl Rove at a conservative fund raiser. Okay, I know that...

Why Men Prefer Pretty Faces So you think beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Think again. According to new research from the University of Exeter in Great Britain, the preference for pretty faces over ugly ones is embedded in our brains from the moment of birth and possibly prior to birth. Newborn babies come fully equipped with built-in preferences, including a preference for an attractive face, that help them make sense of their new environment, report the BBC News Online and Newsweek magazine. The Exeter researchers showed more than 100 infants two images that were placed side by...

Read this passage slowly and carefully, especially the second sentence: "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." It was not the fault of the...

HOW TO WRITE A SUSAN SONTAG OBITUARY  By Michelle Malkin   ·   December 29, 2004 11:25 AM Washington Times editor Stacy McCain sends along his newspaper's Susan Sontag obit, which begins: Novelist, radical Susan Sontag, 71, dies in New York From combined dispatchesSusan Sontag, a critic, novelist and essayist who blamed America for the September 11 terror attacks and once declared that "the white race is the cancer of human history," died in New York yesterday at age 71.  Read the rest here. And then compare it with the rest of the mainstream media's deifications: A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in...

Susan Sontag's death brings grief and sadness to all those who were close to her and is thus a very sad occasion. It is only fitting to begin even this anti-eulogy with a proper expression of condolences to those stricken by her passage from the terrestrial vail of tears. So for those who loved Susan Sontag, I hope they find solace in their grief. What looms sadder and more grievous than the attenuation of her lifespan is the meaning Susan Sontag gave to her life. If John Paul Sartre speaks the truth and we really become the summation of all...

Last Updated: Tuesday, 28 December, 2004, 23:46 GMT Susan Sontag dies: Your tributes Susan Sontag, the celebrated American author, has died aged 71. Her work included the best selling historical novel The Volcano Lover and the essays On Photography and Illness as Metaphor. The feminist writer died in New York after suffering from leukaemia for some time. Send us your memories of Susan Sontag using the form on the right. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Derrida and Sontag, that's too big of a loss for one year. And I am sad to say, I don't see a hopeful new generation to replace such geniuses......

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."

...And while President Bush sought constantly to sharpen his differences with Mr. Kerry, the Senator largely succeeded in blurring them, turning an argument about ideology into one about competence. Given the current parameters of Democratic orthodoxy and Mr. Kerry's sincerely held reservations about the use of force, it was the only thing he could do. As it is, Mr. Kerry was not exactly the night's lonely Democratic loser. This is the third consecutive election in which the Democrats have lost to George Bush's Republicans (with each loss bigger than the last) and that is no accident. In part it has...

Sunday morning Susan Sontag received the prestigious "Peace Award of the German Book Trade" in a nationally televised ceremony in Frankfurt. Sontag - no stranger to awards - was honored as an "intellectual ambassador between the two continents": "In a world of forged pictures and mutilated truth she engaged herself in free thinking." Sontag didn't mince her anti-American feelings during her stay in Germany. As a warm-up to Sunday's ceremony Sontag on saturday called the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Californian governor a "bad joke". She said she'd feel sorry for the Californians. In her acceptance speech for the "Peace...

No one can say precisely when the Culture War started nor, indeed, exactly what it is, but roughly it is: A contest between Left and Right for the cultural high ground begun about two hundred years ago, sparked by the French Revolution and given grim impetus by Karl Marx and his successors. For much of the twentieth century,the Left appeared to be winning all the battles. The Left was joyous and triumphant. The Right persisted, but the myths of the merits of socialism as benefactor of the poor and oppressed, deliverer of peace and prosperity, nurturer of liberty, fraternity, and...

<p>FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — New York-born author and human rights activist Susan Sontag on Saturday criticized President Bush's policies as imperialistic and a break with 50 years of U.S. foreign policy tradition.</p> <p>Sontag, 70, spoke to reporters a day before receiving the German book trade's prestigious $17,700 Peace Prize.</p>

Vargas Llosa on Friday took a swipe at the Colombian Nobel Literature Prize winner and longtime friend of the Cuban leader, calling him "a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi." "And he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released," the Peruvian-born Vargas Llosa told Caracol radio. "It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once...

The standard by which both Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stand condemned. Susan Sontag, in her classic exchange with Andrew Sullivan on 9/11, repeated that oft-quoted line that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." And if you had asked her for the source of this supposed truth, it is quite probable that she would have alluded to the principle of cultural relativism. And the same argument may be seen behind those anti-war protestors who argue that we should respect the autonomy of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, however abhorrent the conduct of this regime may appear to our own parochial...

March 3, 2003: Why is there so often an alliance between wordsmith intellectuals -- poets, novelists, playwrights, literary critics, journalists -- and anti-democratic, anti-capitalist totalitarians? Not a day passes without a Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Amiri Baraka, Susan Sontag or Norman Mailer denouncing America. None of these luminaries uttered a peep of protest when the Taliban systematically destroyed centuries old cultural artifacts. Nor did they cheer the liberation of Afghanistan by force of American arms. Even when one of their own, Salman Rushdie, was threatened with death by the forces of Islamofacism, there was barely a murmur of protest against...