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Thursday, December 30, 2004
Susan Sontag
As I indicated in the previous post, I had been looking for obituaries of Susan Sontag. Unfortunately, most are like this nauseating piece by Christopher Hitchens. I understand that they were friends, but many of the people he mercilessly criticized after their deaths had many friends, too. His failure to honestly appraise her ideas is uncharacteristic and disappointing.
The obituary that frames her life most like my notion of it is this one by Roger Kimball.
I'm sure that Sontag had many nice personal characteristics; and perhaps she had some useful ideas about art and culture. Unfortunately, her political ideas were so deeply hideous that she deserves to be remembered not as an "intellectual heroine"; but as a pretentious enemy of liberty and western civilization.