THE SONTAG AWARD
BY RIGHTS, the latest Susan Sontag Award--our acknowledgment of inanity by intellectuals and artists--belongs to playwright Tony Kushner, author of "Angels in America." He started by telling the Los Angeles Times, "I'm hoping people will be respectful of the horror--unlike Bush, who led what seemed to be a pep rally on a mass grave. . . . If Americans begin to realize the interconnectedness of things through even something as horrible as terrorism, then perhaps we can start to realize the world is a complicated place." Then he told the New York Times, "People who have suffered oppression can recognize oppression when it appears. . . . New Yorkers are a lot less hawkish. . . . We know what collateral damage, as the Pentagon calls it, looks like up close."
But Kushner's prize was snatched away at the last moment by Oliver Stone, director of such films as "JFK" and "Natural Born Killers." At a recent film panel, according to the New Yorker, Stone began by denouncing the "new world order": "I think the revolt of September 11th was about 'F-- you! F-- your order.'" (Christopher Hitchens interrupted at this point to suggest it wasn't revolt but "state-supported mass murder." "Whatever," Stone replied.) Stone later added, "All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood. . . . I think, I think . . . I think many things." The trouble is that they aren't worth thinking.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
A Life in Full: Midge
Decter Remembers
By J. Bottum
An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War
by Midge Decter
(HarperCollins, 234 pp., $24)
IF ONLY THE PALACE OF WISDOM really were found on the road of excess, we would be so wise these days. So wise. But it turns out that wisdom is found mostly down the long road of everyday life. Some turn crochety and strange in age. Some become petulant and self-absorbed. A few grow wise. And the measure of a culture's health is the capacity to pass a little of that hard-won wisdom back in acceptable ways to the young.
Midge Decter is now in her seventies, and part of what makes her new memoir so fascinating is the wisdom she's found along the way. But what makes it even more fascinating is that she lived her life in the midst of the deluge, the era in which American culture decided all the old wisdom was outmoded. At each point in her life--confronting the assaults of communism, Freudianism, feminism, and all the rest--she was the voice of sanity, insisting that life has a shape, an arc from birth to death, that we cannot alter simply by wishing it were otherwise.
The arc of "An Old Wife's Tale" runs from Minnesota, where she grew up, to her life in New York. Along the way, she reared four children, two from her first marriage and two from her marriage to Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary. She worked for Harper's in the exciting days when Willie Morris was the editor. She edited for a period at Basic Books, ran the anti-Communist "Committee for the Free World," held a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation, and landed for a time at the journal First Things.
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