Issue #11/66, June 3 - 17, 1999  

This Week: Susan Sontag Wants You in Kosovo

by John Dolan

Remember Susan Sontag? Yeah, another name from the sixties, a critic whose slow decline into obscurity has been interrupted by that bizarre jolt of martial ardor which seems to have struck everybody who dodged the draft in the Vietnam days. Yes, Susan Sontag, who made the obligatory late-'60's pilgrimage to North Vietnam has now come out with her own call to war, a small but kinky little essay called "Why Are We in Kosovo?"

Take a good long look at that title. It suggests something of the shameless hypocrisy with which the baby-boomer elite has abandoned its every principle in order to shill for the war. "We"? As the old punchline has it, "Whaddaya mean 'we,' paleface?'" The pronoun "we", used to represent a nation, is the sort of rhetoric Sontag's generation taught its students to suspect, to reject. As Sontag and her peers said, over and over again, there is no "we."

But now that she wants a ground war, "we" reenters her idiolect, clearly standing for the good ol' USA. And Sontag seems not to feel the least blush of shame over her abandonmnent of lifelong principles.

The most shocking implication in Sontag's nationalistic pronoun usage is that the "we" who are "in Kosovo"--the US military--is overwhelmingly composed of the disenfranchised: blacks, poor whites, and Hispanics; the very groups who are, as they say in Sontag's profession, "othered by the dominant discourse." Perhaps I wrong Sontag; perhaps she has already enlisted in a US Infantry division slated to invade Kovoso. If so, then she has every right to say that "we" are "in Kosovo."

In fact, Sontag isn't "in Kosovo" but "in Bari," an Italian resort (I looked it up). Just listen to the arrogance, and the contempt for her American compatriots, revealed in in the first sentences of her essay:

"The other day a friend from home, New York, called me in Bari...to ask...whether I could hear the noise of the bombing....It is easy to mock my geographyless [sic] American friend's vision of Europ[e]..."

Well of course! Let's laugh at your stupid American friend for worrying about you!. Sontag's contempt for her native land drips from her every sentence; she obviously spends as much time as she can away from America; yet she demands that Americans walk point on the invasion of Kosovo.

And why must "we" "geographyless Americans" invade Kosovo? Sontag can't really make complete arguments for US involvement because the major premises which have ruled her life make such arguments impossible. To shill for an invasion of a strategically insignificant country like Serbia, you have to fall back on moral absolutism. Which Sontag does, in this gob-stopping claim: "There is radical evil in the world...." Wisely, she offers no argument at all for this assertion, instead leaping to a completely distinct intellectual-historical context:: "...which is why there are just wars..." "Just wars"? Surely Sontag must know that "Just War" is a term from Roman Catholic judicial philosophy--a field at once so ludicrous, and so steeped in blood, that invoking it--particularly when yoked to "radical evil" (Does it have horns and a tail, by any chance?)--marks the point of ultimate regression on Sontag's long march backward.

Hoping to discuss the essay with Sontag, I called her "Personal Assistant," Andrew Wiley. I was passed down to....But let the record speak:

eXile: Hi, Is this Andrew Wiley?

Languid male voice #1: He is not here, can I take a message please.

eXile: Uh yeah...I'm a reporter with the eXile..I was hoping I'd be able to ask Ms. Sontag a few questions about uh her essay, "Why Are We in Kosovo"....

LMV #1: Umm...hold on one second.

eXile: OK.

[Long pause]

Languid male voice #2: Yes?

eXile: Hi, is this Andrew Wiley?

LMV #2: This is not. This is Miss Sontag's agent.

eXile: As I was explaining, I'm a reporter [repeats intro] I was hoping I'd be able to ask Miss Sontag a few questions about her essay, "Why Are We In Kosovo?".

LMV #2: OK...would you mind faxing us that request just so that I can fax it towards her first and then I can get back to you.

eXile (uncertainly): Uh...OK...uh

LMV #2: If...if that's not a problem.

eXile: OK...uh, so that's the only way we can do this, huh?

LMV #2: Yeah, more or less, that's the way we do this.

So the moral of this story is that it's perfectly okay to make yourself as inaccessible as possible while on vacation in Bari and order an invasion--to go--from room service. After all, what else are all those `'geographyless" Americans for, if not to be cannon-fodder for your pet war?