Okay, sorry to all my loyal reader, you royal you, for not posting yesterday, but I was enjoying a vegan dinner yesterday with left-wing radicals who may or may not consider themselves revolutionaries.
Anyway, a friend of mine once said that politics was like a circle- the farther left "wing" you become, the more right "wing" you are. Reading Andrew Sullivan's critique of Susan Sontag's scathing essay on the Abu Grahib photos, just proves this little bit of wisdom to me.
Knight (Robert Knight, conservative) and Sontag differ, of course, on who is to blame. Sontag sees the "new, bellicose America" as the source of this cultural corruption. Knight blames it on decadent liberalism. But notice how both far left and far right seem to agree that there is no real difference between consensual adult S&M and coerced torture; that this widespread American culture created Abu Ghraib; and that we can draw broad inferences from the abuses in that prison in order to calculate the moral state of the entire nation.
Both see America going down the proverbial tube, yet differ on the reasons why. Still, its funny that at least over this, the far-left and the far-right can come and howl rabidly together, while everyone else ignores them.
Eve
2 comments:
I think sullivan's reaching a little bit too hard; the connection comes out somewhat opportunistically, and I can't imagine these two authors as reps for the far left and far right (Susan Sonntag? I mean, sure she's vocal, but perhaps we'd have someone else like michael moore be representative of the far left, especially since he's so active in pseudowood and all ...). I'm just throwing out suggestions here. On the other hand, the one thing these three authors seem to have in common is a unified grasping for ... how do you say, overgeneralizations? Just something to consider.
true true....but you have to admit the difference in rhetoric...one is stern
the other somewhat rabid...whatever. cheers
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