"Susan Sontag to get German publishers' prize: Germany's book publishers association has announced that its peace prize this year will go Susan Sontag, the U.S. author and cultural critic. She will receive it at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October. Today, the association said Sontag stood for the "dignity of free thinking" in a world "of falsified images and mutilated truths"."(Deutsche Welle)

:: comment :: . . . peace out . . .

"We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. "(Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001)

11:11:48 PM     comment []   . .    Open firefly