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COWARDLY_LIONIZED

                                              December 16, 2006

Susan Sontag made some relatively brief
remarks shortly after the 9/11 attacks,
in the September 24, 2001, New Yorker

These are not hard to find on-line:

   [ref]
   [ref]

It begins:

   "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.   ...
   Where is the acknowledgment 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? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing
   American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly'
   is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those
   who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in
   the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in
   order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a
   morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the
   perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not
   cowards."

The responses to this were equally
depressing, e.g. ranting about how           Though I think Sontag
it was an insult to New York's               was wrong about the
brave fire men to tell them that             neutrality of courage:
courage is morally neutral.
                                             Effectiveness is better
                                             than ineffectiveness;
                                             there is nothing noble
I think a lot of us looked at                about paralysis.
these strange emotional
reactions toward some                           Courage would only
relatively reasonable remarks                   be neutral if we
and backed off: we waited for                   ourselves were neutral.
people to calm down, to get
over it.  You don't speak ill                   One can make a case
of the dead at the funeral,                     for being biased
because the audience isn't                      toward action.
ready to hear it yet, so you
give them time to grieve                                     DARK_HOPE
before demanding reason of        They react to
them.                             attempts at
                                  understanding
    I'm afraid that this          as calls for
    was a mistake --              appeasement,
                                  but that         UNDERSTAND_JUSTICE
    An act of cowardice.          really doesn't
                                  follow.


The greatness of the United States
is not that it always gets things
right, but that it has a network of        We can learn from
corrective forces.                         past mistakes and
                                           try to prevent
For these to work, it's crucial that       future ones.
we remain capable of generating and
listening to criticism.

If we allow criticism to be
shouted down, if we allow
censorship to rule, then the         Whether self-censorship,
game is over:                        or some more blatant variety,

    America is dead.
                        DEATH_OF_THE_REPUBLIC

To my eye, the United States is in very bad
shape at the moment, perhaps the worst it's
been since the Civil War:

   Crony capitalism;
   unrestricted surveillance;
   a contempt for due process;
   government kidnapping and torture;       And now we're
   election fraud;                          actually looking
   a biased, unreliable news media;         to a bare
   bloody, illegal wars engaged in on       Democratic
   trumped up, patently false excuses...    majority in
                                            Congress as
                                            A New Hope.
                                                              Good luck.

                                                              (And good night.)
          What will it take to get
          us mentally prepared for
          the next emergency?

          We didn't do very
          well with this one.

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