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Three now-infamous paragraphs from Susan Sontag stung like a slap to the face in the disorienting days that followed the 9/11 attacks. Asked by The New Yorker to reflect on what had occurred only 48 hours earlier, Sontag found “stupid” the “confidence-building and grief management” that filled the media. “Where is the acknowledgment,” she asked, “that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”
Most anyone with a heartbeat, and certainly anyone who could smell the acrid air of Manhattan at the time, clouded with the ashes of thousands of people, took offense at Sontag’s coldness. Her first error was one of timing and tone—surely there was a deeper context for the attack worth unpacking, but maybe wait just a couple of days? But even more appalling in retrospect was the shallowness of Sontag’s context, as predictable and one-dimensional as what George W. Bush would yell through a bullhorn at Ground Zero: To her, 9/11 was not a moment of American victimhood, but actually a revelation of American malignancy, proof of the country’s own victimizing nature.
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