Emily’s Reviews > At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches > Status Update

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

“The unceasing propaganda in our time for ‘the individual’ seems to me deeply suspect, as ‘individuality’ itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’— which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom...

“When the great Lincoln speeches are cited..., they have— in true postmodernist fashion— become completely emptied of meaning. They are now gestures of nobility, of greatness of spirit. What they were being great about is irrelevant. It is all in the grand tradition of American anti-intellectualism: the suspicion of thought, of words.”

“Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has happened, and what May continue to happen. ‘Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

“The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed to us contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by nearly all the American officials and media commentators in these last days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.”

This essay should be added to every 9/11 lesson plan. It points out the infantilization that even I noticed when I was a kid.

I really should learn me a thing or two about Russian history. Still, I like reading Sontag’s reproduction of history

“that feminism [war on men] suggests an avowal of strength—and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women— all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments...