The death of Susan Sontag has wrought predictable outcomes among the commentariat, yet another to add to the litany of outcomes that exhibit the tendency to lionize or demonize one’s intellectual compatriots, or opposites, respectively. Can the merits of her entire artistic career be boiled down to one quote about her lofty, intellectaually elite observation over the September 11th attacks? This quote?

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? In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

In a Machiavellian analysis post-9/11, one can conclude that the spiritual nexus of a fat and decadent culture prone to capitulation to terrifying evil was the World Trade Center towers. One can also conclude that to stab at the heart of America those two same towers would have been the perfect accompaniment to stabbing the nerve center of its government, Washington, D.C. Her conclusion was a matter of opinion; to this day it is a stinging reminder that it still really is.

What grates at us is not the seeming praise that she heaps on those who struck at us, rather, it seems the heartless and cold assertions that she makes. I hardly agree with anything she has said, and her seemingly deficient social skills at framing her opinions are what have made people demonize her just as equally as the substance of her opinions has.

I do not write tonight to lionize her, nor to enshrine her as a thinker for our times. I write tonight to note that hers was not the heart of darkness that so many who have demonized her today imagine her to be. Her enabling of evil did not come close to the works of people like Engels, or Marx, or Mao, not even that of Rifenstahl nor of Michael Moore. No, her penny into the well was merely the matter of amoral intellectualism.

In our partisan times, post-election notwithstanding, it takes plenty of class, intelligence and effort to treat an intellectual opposite with any sort of fairness especially upon death, but then again, there is a reason Josh Trevino’s background as a Washington speechwriter and successful blogger is what it is:

If she could not quite grasp the inexorable logic that leads directly from her courageous stands (pace the deceased, courage is not morally neutral) for Poles, Bosniacs and Kosovars to the present struggle for Iraqis, are we to hold that so dearly against her? It is a long road from shilling for genocidal Communism to nearly arriving at a consistent worldview of freedom’s inexorable expansion. In the case of Susan Sontag, she ought to get credit for the distance traveled.

It is so much easier, instead, to collect the platitudes the media has heaped upon her—ignoring of course the conventional wisdom against speaking ill of the dead—and scream “liberal bias” . Susan Sontag did not carry the heart of darkness that even Jacques Derrida—whose philosophy showed no respect for the creativeness of man—had, and her death could be best met by her enemies with some sort of silence. If not in respect for her, then in respect for those who mourn her, and perceive value in her legacy.

The day’s darkest brought upon us a Viqueen named Egeland—working for the United Nations, what else—who slammed the United States among other rich countries as “stingy,” because, well, 99.8% of the income of these countries, quite remarkably, stays within these countries instead of being redistributed as foreign aid. Frontpage magazine has a powerful takedown of this attitude:

Aside from betraying abhorrent manners, the UN bureaucrat’s comments sounded a common theme of the Left: No matter how much time, money, or resources America commits to a humanitarian effort – and no matter how demonstrably unselfish our motives – greedy capitalist America never lifts a finger to help the downtrodden. Indeed, by our disproportionate consumption of the world’s resources and contributions to environmental degradation, we are the cause of the world’s suffering.

The left-wing blog TalkLeft anticipated Egeland. After accusing America of not doing enough to warn the victims, a blog entry from last night accused President Bush of responding to the tragedy at his Crawford ranch by “‘clearing brush’ and playing cowboy.” Upon hearing of the evidently unexpected financial aid heading to the disaster site, it added pathetically, “Update: The U.S. has pledged $15 million to the relief effort.” Ho-hum.

DailyKos and other leftist blogs have noted America’s efforts to help tsunami victims, without praising said undertakings. All miss the obvious point: America chooses to succor the world’s afflicted with millions of dollars of its own treasure because America is a generous, philanthropic, and altrustic nation.

That was after author Ben Johnson noted that the initial pledge—tip of the iceberg as it is—of fifteen million was bigger than what the European Union said it would give, at four mil. This is not, and never has been, a contest about who can help the downtrodden the most. The heart of this nation feels not grandeur nor self-aggrandizement in giving what it is willing to to help those of this tragedy, nor do we dwell on the numbers that we may buy our way into greatness. I for one join the author in noting this disparity, if only to stress the hypocrisy of people like Egeland, and others like him.

That reports exist (one of which is in the New York Times, big surprise) whose headlines indicate that the aid that we are giving to the affected nations of this natural disaster is an “irate reaction” to Egeland’s statement is a testament to just how much the people who hate America for its true good and bad qualities do not get it.

Rather than faint constantly over this kind of powerless criticism, our countrymen have continued to do what we can to help those across the world. Aid efforts in California started long before someone called us stingy, long before the news cameras were pointed away from Sri Lanka and towards our people. Our countrymen did not wait for the TV cameras to be trained upon them; they did not wait to be asked “what would you do,” rather, they did. And so do we continue. In the six hours that Instapundit noted that Amazon.com is accepting donations and had a total of $112,000 it has risen to a quarter of a million dollars and counting. We put our help where our mouths are, and many of us do not even talk of what we have done, which is more than what we can say for the distinguished Viqueen with a penchant for intellectual masturbation.

We are doing this not because the pesky words of an insignificant Viqueen struck a nerve in us; I for one knew that there will be those for who our impoverishment will not even be enough to satisfy their lust for forcible egalitarianism. We are doing this because we can and because we want to. A society that is free to be kind and generous usually tends to be so, and that is what we are seeing today, and what we will further see in the days to come, despite the “misunderstood” haranguing of socialistic Viqueens.

“Offensiveness alert,” yes, I am calling that Nordic prick a girlie-man.

UPDATE: The epitaph at the Korean War Memorial, which reads “Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met,” could not be any more relevant than it is to the events of today.

The violence that killed fifteen bodyguards of the top Shia candidate, Abdelaziz Hakim, has triggered two different reactions, whose trends are starting to be predictable, and unsurprising if not ironic. The Sunnis decide to back out of the election (reg’n required, sorry) while Hakim’s supporters throw a rally demanding that the elections push through on the set date (no link this late at night; it was mention on Fox News tonight though).

So. The people who are “supposed” to be freaked out by assassination attempts are further emboldened to fight for their freedom, and the ones who would gain the most political (if not institutionally political) capital in a failure of the elections in Iraq, are backing out, which in my mind is not a safety concern as it is their way to contribute to such failure. There has got to be some sort of strange irony in this all. Bin Laden appears on tape and the coward basically signed off his authority in Iraq to Zarqawi, the end of a power struggle that Venomous Kate observed long before any of us realized it. His tape threatening the people of Iraq isn’t going to help him much either; has that old coot not learned the lessons of the post–Bush-campaign era that he is not a boogeyman that would scare Iraqis (not Americans for sure) into cowering under their covers? On January 30th the people of Iraq will have a strong message for him: “Fuck him and the mountain goat he sleeps with.”

The wheat and the chaff, folks. The grain is tossing in the wind and we know who’s being blown away.

I basically have to parrot Glenn Reynolds’ conclusion in his TCS Column about the aftermath of the Asian tsunami:

Over the longer run, of course, the best protection against catastrophes, whether foreseen or unforeseen, is a society that is rich enough, and diverse enough, to be well-prepared for all sorts of contingencies. Which means that economic growth, and the freedom that produces it, may be the best guarantor of safety for us all. A rich society can afford to worry about things that a poorer one wouldn’t have the resources to think about. A rich society can take steps to prevent disasters before they happen. And a rich society is better positioned to survive disasters once they occur, even if they are completely unforeseen, or unforeseeable.

Where survival is concerned, rich is better. That’s something to keep in mind when people describe economic growth as “anti-human.”

And James Joyner’s observation:

The combination of natural disaster, an island location, poverty, and government corruption is deadly. Even this level of earthquake would have inflicted substantially less property damage and loss of life in a developed area with proper construction.

“Heartless” as they may seem—as most post-facto analyses really are—these analyses all basically point out the same thing: rich (as Glenn calls it) or first-world or developed countries can handle the aftereffects of a natural disaster much better than developing countries can.

Glenn, however, misses the chance to underscore one perspective, one that he could have further emphasized with this sentence of his as a lede: Poverty, of course, leads people to live along the waterline in ramshackle housing…

Poverty on a national level, and the immediacy of meeting basic needs, leads to environmental destruction. For all the talk and doomcrying of American environmentalists against our technological advances, the running proof is that higher tech is more environment-friendly. The simplest example is in our petroleum use. Efficient engines, the products of technological advancement, produce less pollutants than inefficient ones.

A disaster like this, or that of the earthquake that hit Bam last year, underscore the stupidity of Rosseau’s Noble Savage ethos. At one point or another a society has to make sacrifices in its culture in the name of taking responsibility for its own progress, and its own safety. Rarely do I flat out say that some peoples’ opinions are wrong, but those who think that universal impoverishment through redistribution, along with cultural preservation of back-asswards practices that ravage the environment in the name of “preserving cultural wealth,” have it wrong. We saw it yesterday in Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. We saw it earlier this year in the Philippines. Where will we see it again?

I’m making a few year-end lists, as is the meme as the year closes, according to some requests by Zombyboy. Today, we have the political gaffes of 2004.

1. “Screw them.” — Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga. No two words have expressed such utter lack of sympathy over the deaths of Americans in Iraq. More info on the subject at Roger Simon’s.
2. “The capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer.” — Howard Dean. Early Dec. 2003. (Hey remember the December of last year counts.) In the general scheme of gaining political capital to win a primary, this was the beginning of the end for Howard Dean’s aspirations for the presidency. I’ll give him credit though: he wasn’t so nuanced a politician that he would sacrifice his anti-war beliefs and total Bush-hate that he would have bit his tongue.
3. “I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it.” — Senator John F. Kerry. Karl Rove called it the gift that kept on giving. Well, yeah. Need more be said?

I really don’t have much to offer in the way of political gaffes. I’m not really that big of a political junkie than most known politically inclined bloggers.

UPDATE: Here’s a follow up, how about Teresa Heinz Kerry saying that Mrs. Laura Bush doesn’t know anything about the real world? Pot meets the kettle moment right there.

My list on 2004′s Movies is better than this. Zboy also has his list of movies up.

I suppose it is more cost-effective to just keep the masses entertained down in DC than to educate them and actually let them have the means to move out to a city that already has its own baseball team.