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At a moment when the prevailing sentiment was grief, she’d already moved on to critiquing the language, and she came across as insensitive at best. An early clip in Regarding finds her defending her position on ABC, a representative of the Heritage Foundation interrupting and talking over her to explain that Sontag is “an offensive writer,” part of the “‘blame America first’ crowd,” whose “version of patriotism is ‘blame America, blame America.’”

When she eventually succeeds in getting a word in edgewise, she explains that her point in the New Yorker wasn’t that America was to blame, her point was that “this sort of build-up of moralistic words to describe this horrendous atrocity was not helping us to understand and reach an intelligent response, political and military, which I’m absolutely in favor of. I’m not a pacifist.” 

Humanities: Susan Sontag, Essayist and So Much Else, September/October 2014