The Essential Ellen Willis

Introduction

391 It was fitting that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 caused the Twin Towers to collapse on themselves, because the attack would make American intellectual culture perform a similar maneuver. The monolith of dread that defined the Cold War returned to destabilize America through an onslaught of historical analogy . The terrorists hated freedom and could not be reasoned with; this war required new methods and new recalibrations of the balance between liberty and security; and writing was the act delineating loyalty from treason. Poor Susan Sontag remembered that 9/11 took place in the context of “specific American alliances and actions”; and so she was denounced as a moral cretin. Graydon Carter more safely proclaimed that al-Qaeda brought about the death of irony, just as America was about to repeat many of its bellicose mistakes of the twentieth century while loudly declaring it was avoiding the mistakes of weakness. Nor were the left’s criticisms of the era immune to the same repetitions, including those of Ellen Willis. In “Dreaming of War,” written days after the 9/11 attacks, Willis attacked not a rabid, warlike political consensus but the cosmopolitan writers who hoped something beneficial might come out of the disaster. The Frank Riches of the world were flirting with “purification of our national soul through war.” And yet those who stood against such a destructive tendency were busy arguing with other writers over miniscule differences in their perspectives on the decade of war to come. It’s a good thing Willis never used Twitter. The left’s familiar templates—the power of media, government, and corporate elites to distract the public from actual dangers—reasserted themselves as easily as the right’s fixation on moral clarity. September 11 convinced both the right and the left that what mattered was restating first principles rather than INTRODUCTION Spencer Ackerman 392 THE AUGHTS attempting to reconcile them with the inconvenient complexities of an unfamiliar world. As Irin Carmon notes in this anthology, Willis considered “living in the past” to be “the worst insult” to writers of her generation, but the 9/11 era deployed the past like a leghold trap. Yet Willis got more right than wrong—and, at important times, smashed those same templates. “Why I’m Not for Peace” confronts the “mantra” that desiring peace is an amulet against a predatory world—a powerful rejection of the post–9/11 fetish for first principles. “Is There Still a Jewish Question?” provokes the left to examine its rage at Israel. “The Mass Psychology of Terrorism” insightfully observes that anyone motivated to kill for a promise of penetrating virgins in heaven has taken sexual repression to its logical conclusion. “Three Elegies for Susan Sontag” resurrects one of the most vital American critics out of the nadir of her reputation, and in the process embraces the “political stand” that Sontag demanded from intellectuals while remaining cognizant of its limits : “Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that.” That appropriately tragic sensibility runs through Willis’s twenty-first century writing, and it helped her avoid many of the now-predictable intellectual mistakes of the era. She stumbled, as writers will: Willis ought to have distinguished legitimate rage at Israel’s often-destructive policies from illegitimate rage at the idea of Israel. And The Sopranos self-indulgently reneged on the promise in “Our Mobsters, Ourselves” to hold up a dark mirror to the culture through soapy devices like putting Tony in a coma. But at least Willis’s mistakes were not mistakes of cant, convenience, or cliché, which would become the balm of the 2000s for the violence they unleashed. SPENCER ACKERMAN is the U.S. national security editor of the Guardian. He was previously senior writer for Wired, where he won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Digital Reporting. ...