SUSAN SONTAG, AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL

I have just watched a TV bio of Susan Sontag.  She was the last of a kind.  Being a United States resident now,  I am struck by the many paradoxes I encounter.  The bizarre "non place" which "intellectuals" occupy in America nowadays comes to mind.  The country is packed with the better universities, intellectuals or luminaries in all fields: science, politics, arts, and the list is endless, while on the other hand, the "conversation" is deadlocked in some hermetic negativism, only having time for debating negative's : race, torture, inequality, the steady Gotterdamerung of the American Dream.

The demagogues and amateurs of the Right and the Left rule, in the quasi-total absence of a creative input of intellectuals, who have chosen to abandon the Capitol for the Aventine. 
The likes of Sontag, Vidal, Hitchens are no longer. The space for intellectual debate has been hijacked. The same goes for Europe, by the way, with the exception of France and Germany, The former still feels the need to come to some Kantian "closure" since World War II. The latter revers intellectuals as it revers labels. The Sartrian writer in the cafe is depasse. The "poseur" has stolen the chair from under the thinker.  Bernard-Henri-Levi belongs more to a Moliere farce than to a serious symposium.

It is strange that the "official" United States has marginalized intellectual conversation. Excellent reviews, sophisticated TV debates and Academia no longer occupy the front-lines as was the case years ago. The overall political alienation has created a negative vortex. Unfortunately, President Obama has unwillingly played a part in this. His initial message was enlightening until people realized that they were led into Plato's cave, looking at a Utopia. President Kennedy may have been too cynical but also too clairvoyant to get lost in lofty speeches, but he ended up getting Pablo Casals and the moon, the Nobel Prize winners in and the Soviet missiles out.  It is less important to know if he believed in his show than it was for others to feel they were part of it.  Since then, the "Georgetown set" and the Eastern elites of the 60's appear to belong to the silent movie times. The ghost of McCarthy seems to be back under a different cloth.

Susan Sontag was one of the last "intellectuals" who confronted the American psyche and who reached a kind of supra-national status as did Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Berenson, Gore Vidal and many others.  She opened all closets--in Paris and New York--and was truly a commentator of the world avatars.  I met her in Sarajevo, which she inhabited like an existentially offended citizen, different from visiting voyeurs (the photo-op in the burned library was a must) and diplomats (myself included). 

Now we prefer to pass the baton in the creepy relay race of successive catastrophes, from Sudan to Bangladesh, to movie stars and other past political celebs who can cash in on what is left of their 25 minutes of Warholian celebrity.  True, there are Medecins sans Frontieres and others, who still have staying-power.  Sontag wrote the ultimate analyses about illness and camp. She was a great homosexual transformative personality, before being gay became as current as a sitcom character.  Gresham said it all:  Bad money drives out good.