Thousands Pay Final Respects to Susan Sontag

It was too good to be true. It had to be a dream. But as the sweet aroma of pot and patchouli filled my nostrils, my heart leapt with joy. After all these years, I was in Berkeley once again.

Yes, while mouth-breathing sheeple descended upon New York's Times Square to stare at a stupid neon ball last weekend, we Berkeley-bred intellectual elites were back at the ol' alma mater to pay our final respects to Susan "Boom Boom" Sontag, her lifeless body scheduled to visit the campus on a 15-state publicity tour for a posthumous Nobel. In an outpouring of grief not seen since Bush murdered Timothy Leary, millions of free-thinking progressives dropped their bongs and crawled out from under their sinks to say farewell to the courageous firebrand that dared speak out against the imperialist American agressors and the jingoists who love them.

Yet although Boom Boom is gone, her spirit walked among us that day, a ghostly gadfly mingling with her fawning admirers. Indeed, I could almost envision her glowering countenance, her eyes burning into my flesh as condescending bromides poured from her succulent lips like regurgitated prunes at an old folks home.

"Oh Susan, Susan!" I sobbed, wringing my hat in my trembling hands. "Death, that has suckt the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty!"

Suddenly, as if in answer to my girlish cries of despair, a helicopter descended from the clouds like a heavenly seraph and slowly lowered Boom Boom's casket to the ground. The crowd surged forward, and police fired into the air to keep back the throngs of aging hippies and wild-eyed young progressives desperate for a glimpse of her holy remains.

In honor of the event, Berkeley students and staff agreed to cancel all previously scheduled riots and postpone any school-sponsored martyrdom operations until Monday. That apparently wasn't enough to keep the pigs from showing up and trampling our free speech rights, and many of us were very nearly intimidated by their presence before the ACLU showed up and ran them off.

But as the police fled the area, chaos mysteriously erupted. Thousands of unemployed Philosophy majors yanked the needles from their arms, streamed out of People's Park, and converged on the campus. A mob of sneering feminists stormed down the Mario Savio Steps and grabbed pieces of Sontag's shroud, causing her corpse to tumble out of the casket and go rolling down the Ho Chi Minh Memorial Walkway. Apoplectic with grief, a large gaggle of New York Times columnists threw themselves atop her lifeless body, crying, "With our blood and our soul we will redeem you, Susan Sontag!", and wear nearly trampled by a stampede of burly lesbians who pounded their chests and flaggelated themselves with the customary rubber dildos. In a matter of minutes, the entire campus was a raging river of tie-dye, turtlenecks, and tears.

I tried to make my way to the front, but in the pandemonium I was knocked to the ground by a pair of communist rastafarian drag queens, whom I immediately recognized as my former Political Science professors. They helped me to my feet and we pressed forward together. I came close enough to brush a finger against Boom Boom's gorgeous long black locks before a legion of two thousand Starbucks baristas pranced onto the campus, reciting nihilist poetry peppered with catty remarks. They rushed into the crushing mosh pit of shirtless Sontag fans, threatening to scratch the eyes out of anyone who stood in their way, and lifted her delicate carcass up onto their shoulders.

Tears welled up in my eyes and my heart sank so low it nearly shot right out my catflap. Having briefly touched the flowing mane of Athena, I now watched as her white, shrouded figure drifted away on a sea of hands, like a feminine napkin floating down the Hudson.

Susan "Boom Boom" Sontag will continue her farewell tour across America this week, after which she will be given an enema and buried in a shoebox at an undisclosed location.

Lay her i' the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring!

Comments

[aurelius]

Susan, Susan, in the dirt
Susan, Susan, can't feel hurt
Susan, Susan, Susan, Susan, Susan,

She enriched my soil and my life.

/spies

[Stoney]

"given an enema and buried in a shoebox" is a stroke of pure genius. In keeping with the tradition of "TO each according to his need", I will take it and claim that I wrote it.

[Friend of USA]

Larry ,

reading this brilliant piece

I laughed

I cried

I improved my vocabulary

Thank you...

[Friend of USA]

"No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published."

Susan sontag

What ? ! ? ! ? ! ? !

- - -

"risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism"

Susan Sontag

What ? ! ? ! ? ! ? !

- - -

"Rock, grass, better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature--really grooving on anything--unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life."
Susan Sontag

What ? ! ? ! ? ! ? !

- - -

" The traumatic failure of capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsession, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend "the person" is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. "

Susan Sontag

Oh now I see...of course !

It's obvious !

It means NOTHING !

[Masked Menace©]

Of course it means something. You just have to hit the bong a few more times and it will mean anything you want.

Personally, it tells me that there are people saying that are claiming Bush either let Sontag die, or made her die. I don't know if it's true or not, I'm just saying it's out there.

[Deeply Compassionate Liberal]

That's good enough for me. I'll spread the word.

[nobody important]

Laughed my ass off! Thanks.

[Friend of USA]

" PLANET EARTH IS FLAT "

Apparantly we have all been brainwashed into thinking planet earth is round.

It was all part of a big conspiracy to make us buy maps , books , plastic globes , make us believe in "globalisation " and make us buy GPS equipment and make us eat more McDonald and buy bigger gas guzling SUVs( there has got to be a connection to those two last items... if only Susan Sontag was still around she'd write a long unreadable complicated book about it , full of intelligent words that no one ever uses and full of long sentences that no one would understand but that we would have to believe , because she held the truth , she was the truth , she smoked the truth , she drank the truth , she ate the truth , she farted the truth...)

This idea that planet earth is round is a creation of imperialist america.

Spread the news around the ...well ...horizontally over the pie !

[aelfheld]

"[...] after which she will be given an enema and buried in a shoebox [...]"

If the corpse is given an enema, you could fit the remains in a #10 envelope.

[MrGrumpyDrawers]

Hey Lar,
A little bit of respect here.
Remember, "De mortuis, nihil nisi . . ."
Screw it - I loved every word - especially the enema and the shoebox.
Best laugh of the day.

Recommend Kevin Myers' droll column on the Sontaglette, "I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/01/02/do0206.xml

[Cricket]

Damn, the woman could Chomsky! In reading about the demands of the mourners to have closure, your writing transcends the visceral need to see and touch their idol...indeed, you commune your spirit and in so doing, you touch ours with the result that our cyberpresence has been enhanced by the intense mourning and needful resolution to know that as cliched as this aphorism might be, life goes on. Beautifully stated and nary a hint of necrophilism.

[Friend of USA]

Cricket

you might want to have the doctor check you for a case of Suntagtite or Chomskysis

Your writing skills are a bit too good !

Especially your thesis / anti-thesis / synthesis stuff !

Groovy stuff !

[Friend of USA]

And remember ;

groovy stuff is un - american .

Suntag said it , thus it is a truth.

[Cricket]

Friend of USA,
Thanks so much. It is the thought of the bong which inspires me. There have been times where we here at BlameBush have not been so charitable and several times we have had to tussle over it.

*hanging my head in shame and looking for a sink of my own under which to correct my lack of communal awareness*

[JannyMae]

Wow, these posts are getting really DEEP, again! Cricket, for an insect you certainly have a way with words--and philosophy. I agree with Friend of USA, your writing skills are amazing...of course I realize that the bong helps keep things, "nuanced." You have nothing to, "hang your head in shame," about Cricket, but if you are going to insist on chirping under there at two o'clock in the morning, please make sure you are not under MY sink!

[slickdpdx]

"tie-dye, turtlenecks, and tears"

Larry, you have the eye of a most perceptive social scientist and the heart of a poet. Kudos.

[Cricket]

Well, Larry is very annal retentive about what he cleans his house with. After a few good sniffs, I passed out.
Completely forgot the fork therapy.

[Thurber Hamm]

I'm still angy about Leary's assassination. Those goddamned jello-dicks just had to take him out ("bumblebees and bumblebirds...... make the bastards eat their words") because he was on the verge of making the world *beautiful*.

[jwpaine]

"I now watched as her white, shrouded figure drifted away on a sea of hands, like a feminine napkin floating down the Hudson."

Christ, the imagery of that! I'm near tears. Poetry, dammit, pure, transcendent Poetry!