susan sontag - a jewish accident , page-14

re: susan sontag - says
Susan Sontag, on ......

intelligence ......

"We live in a culture," she said, "in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying."

the US of A ......

“I am depicting in this book someone who adapts to the United States, to a culture that is both very money-minded and very moralistic. America is a country which is entertaining itself to death. The extent to which entertainment values prevail in America is extraordinary. It's a very odd society, and it's a society which worships money. The American admiration for success is totally braided with the idea that if you make money, that's good. And if you do something that has no financial reward, then there's something very peculiar, or you've made some incredible mistake.”

fascist art .....

“Fascist aesthetics include but go far beyond the rather special celebration of the primitive to be found in The Last of the Nuba. More generally, they flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, "virile" posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”