The Corner

Notes On Sontag

Here’s a column from 2001 by the late Richard Grenier on Susan Sontag. He offers a few of her quotations that you probably won’t find in Sontag’s NYT obituary:

On John McCain’s torturers: “The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets.”

On Castro’s Cuba: “The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality, and freaking out. … The increase of energy comes because they have found a new focus for it: community.”

On red-state America, circa 1969: “To us, it is self-evident that the Readers Digest and Lawrence Welk and Hilton Hotels are organically connected with the Special Forces’ napalming villages in Guatemala.”

John J. Miller, the national correspondent for National Review and host of its Great Books podcast, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.
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