Susan Sontag was right

Today’s authoritarian regime of punitive mass infantilization started 9/11/2001

After the twin towers in Manhattan were reduced to rubble Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the New Yorker commissioned a group of their top writers to pen brief essays about the event. Most of these epistles have passed into oblivion with little notice, but the briefest essay among them by Susan Sontag caused a disproportionate eruption of outrage in both official government circles and the media organs dedicated to amplifying their messages. It is still controversial today.

Photo of Susan Sontag courtesy of Wikipedia

An excerpt from Ms. Sontag’s comments.

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.

“Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

Within a month of 9/11, then President George W. Bush declared a never ending war on the ill defined noun “terror.” His war message was amplified uncritically by sycophantic media, which gushed that he had already risen to the occasion to become a wartime president. A year long, historic spike in his approval ratings followed, giving him political carte blanche that ended with large swaths of the Middle East destabilized and engulfed in the flames of permanent war.