Paul Greenberg, in an essay titled “Two New Yorkers and Two Americas“, looks at the ultimate odd couple: Jerry Orbach and Susan Sontag, famous New Yorkers who have little in common, except that both died on the same day. But as Greenberg notes they share something else: “In a way, both were in show business, but only Jerry Orbach knew it”.
Read the rest. At the end, Greenberg notes:
[Sontag] seems to have taken both sides of every great question of her times — as if she wanted to shock those who had agreed with her the first time. Was she the last cry of 1960ish intellectualism? Or the first of 1970ish reaction — a kind of Joan Baez without the music? And, in the end, did it matter?
What a pity — like so much she did with her talent.
Remind you of a certain recent candidate for president?
Update: Sontag’s doublethink is also the sort of thing that leads an otherwise intelligent journalist and editor to discard logic and write straightfaced:
We don
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