Sontag OTM

Give this woman the Pulitzer.
This paragraph was of particular interest:
“It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys — can the video game ”Interrogating the Terrorists” really be far behind? — and on to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools — depicted in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, ”Dazed and Confused” — to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun.”
While I’m always skeptical of the lionizing of video games-as-scapegoat and pop culture nature-vs-nurture argument, the notion is accurate. I don’t think it’s a right-wing notion to reconsider the agents of our death culture, to hold them and ourselves accountable to basic standards of humanity. I think it’s a radical notion. We in fact have a duty, as Americans or progressives or as humans, to reject the glorification of power and conquest, of what is tantamount to a global caste system. Hard evidence: today’s NY Times front page on black-market kidney sales in Brazil; on the military’s claim that imprisoned Iraqis are somehow less deserving of human treatment; shit, read about Shaq’s housekeeper stabbing his own mother—all suffocating entanglements in complex oppressed/oppressor dynamic, even at this late stage of human evolution.