KURT ANDERSEN: This is Studio 360 from WNYC in New York and Public Radio International. I'm Kurt Andersen. War is on everyone's mind right now and today we'll ask what artists offer us - how they help us understand war. Verdi reveals the frightening power of the mob.

[Clip]
We have a chorus that's screaming Guerra! Guerra! War! War! They're so bloodthirsty that even Aida, who was a slave, joins in.

KA: And when the novelist Emmanuel Dongala was caught in a recent civil war in Africa, books were his refuge.

[Clip]
During this bombing, while people were praying or crying, or whatever, what I was doing is reading.

KA: My guest today is the writer Susan Sontag.

[Clip]
I said, why do you want me to direct a play? Oh, because we have lots of actors who have nothing to do. I said, Actors? You don't have theaters, you just have bombed places.

KA: That's all ahead in Studio 360 where art and real life collide.

KA: In the Iliad, Homer tells the story of the Trojan War as a battle between heroes 3000 years ago. Hector, Diomedes, and Achilles are almost as powerful as gods and they thirst for glory and vengeance. Homer and admires both glory and vengeance. Here's the moment when Achilles is readying himself for battle, still mourning the death of his best friend.

[Clip]
Iliad, Book 19, starting at line 400 One heard his teeth grind hard together and his eyes blazed out like licking fire for unbearable pain had fixed upon his heart. Raging at Trojans, he buckled on the arms Hephaistos forged. The beautiful greaves fitted with silver anklets first he put upon his legs. And next the cuirass on his ribs. Then over his shoulder he slung the sword of bronze with silver scabbard. Finally, he took up the massive shield whence came a radiance like the round full moon.

KA: The Iliad is full of the horror of war as well. Achilles uses his weapons to wreak terrible deaths. Men beg for mercy before being cut to pieces, and Homer keeps us aware of the cost of war - that one soldier is the end of his family line, or that another was a great artist or a priest. Horror and grief never leave the Iliad.

[Clip]
Iliad, book 7, about line 510 With pails, they washed the bloody filth away. Then hot tears fell as into waiting carts they lifted up their dead. All cries of mourning Priam forbade them. Sick at heart, therefore, in silence, they piled corpses on the pyre and burned it down.

KA: Almost all great art about war deals with both the passions and convictions of the combatants and the tremendous losses. Today we're talking about the ways in which artists approach war. How they try to make sense of it before, during and after the fact. And why we need them to try to do that for us, especially at this nervous moment.

My guest is Susan Sontag. She's an essayist, a novelist, a filmmaker, a playwright, a director, altogether a central figure in American intellectual life. Her latest book is about images of war. It's called Regarding the Pain of Others.

SUSAN SONTAG: I'm glad to be here.

KA: You have been in war zones, most recently in Sarajevo during the Balkan conflict and you've seen those ravages. Did that experience, have those experiences changed the way you then subsequently look at photographs or other pictures of war?

SS: Well, my experience in Sarajevo between 1993 and the end of 1995 where I lived most of the time in that period, while the city was under siege in Sarajevo was really a very special experience in that I wasn't there all the time for that three years. I was coming back and forth. Actually I was there 14 times never less than two weeks, never more than two months because I did like to get out and take a bath. There was no water or electricity or any kind of communication with the outside world except the UN planes, and I had that unique experience of being in a very tight, confined war zone, experiencing what everybody was experiencing. We were all on the same level, whether we were foreign people or residents because the city was surrounded and under siege, and then being able to go out and see how it was reported, and I discovered that, oddly enough, the experience for most people of seeing the war, say, on television, because that would be the main access to the war - through the media, even more than the print images - it didn't fully convince people of the reality of the war. It was almost as if what they saw on television every night about the siege and all the people being killed in Sarajevo was some kind of photo op. I actually had people ask me when I would come back to New York, Well, do you - I remember one very intelligent person saying to me, Do you personally feel you're in danger when you're in Sarajevo? And I couldn't believe I was being asked such a question.

KA: Duh!

SS: Yeah, exactly, and I said - I found myself saying, I said, do you watch television? And he said yes. I said, Do you see what's going on every night on the news? He said, Yes. I said, Well, that's what it's like. And he said, Oh, my god. Actually, somewhere, it was as if for him, well that was something - the way(?)

KA: It was a film, in effect.

SS: Well, not too much a film, but the way something horrible, an accident might happen on one street corner here in New York City, and everyone would rush and it would be on the evening news, but in the meantime, the rest of the city, life was proceeding as normal. I think it is hard to take in the reality through images and I think every journalist and aid worker and foreigner who was in Sarajevo felt when they would leave, because of the peculiar protracted nature of the siege and how totally weird that was, that basically if you weren't there that you didn't understand. Maybe that's a feeling that everybody has who was in a war, that if you hadn't been there, if you hadn't been in a war, in any war, you couldn't really understand what it was like.

KA: Was, was this book aborning while you were there? Or did you suddenly feel, no, my view of what images can do has changed?

SS: It was the second. I didn't for a minute think about writing when I was there. I wasn't there to write. I wasn't there to write a book at all. I was there to pitch in and work in various projects in the city and it was a rather quixotic thing to do, but I wasn't there as a writer. No, it came because I began to think about what these images mean and I began to think about a lot of the reigning clichés about images of war. I'll tell you one which of course we're all familiar with, which is that we're very blasé now. We see so many images of atrocity, so many images of horror that we actually don't react to them anymore.

KA: A thought you had yourself had once published grandly.

SS: Exactly. I'm afraid I'm at the maybe the origin of that very widespread view. At least I thought it was a fairly original observation, when I made it central to that book of essays that I wrote in, that I published about 25 years ago called On Photography. Well, I don't think it's true. And I guess - I like to argue with myself and well, not because I just like to argue with myself, because I like to think that I have a better view, that my experience teaches me something. If we don't learn from our experience, then what what what else can we learn from? And I think my view, which I think has been influential, is too simple. I don't think we just become inured or desensitized. I think it's a much more complicated process and I think that people do feel turned off or indifferent to images of horror and war and suffering that they see and that they feel indignant about. I think it comes not because they're blasé but because they feel impotent or powerless. And I think that's a perfectly understandable reaction.

KA: So in a sense, your change of heart about the power of images to portray war and atrocity represents kind of a dis-disillusioning or a re-illusioning or...

SS: [laughs] Well, that's a very clever way of putting it. A dis-disillusioning, yes. Dis-disillusionment, that's right. That's absolutely right.

KA: You write in the book about the series of images that Francisco Goya made in the 1810s of the Peninsular War, called the Horrors of War. I wonder if you could describe one or two of those and explain why you think those are such important images.

SS: Well, you know, it's so interesting. You chose to have an excerpt from The Iliad, from Homer's Iliad at the beginning of the show and you talked about how in this great epic poem of almost 3000 years ago, Homer is portraying the horror and the pity of war because it's full of pity for the sufferings of those who are wounded and killed on both sides in that conflict, and it's very impartial I think. He treats - Homer treats war as something that's just part of human activity. It's something awful but it exists. It's something people do, it's something that people want to do, as painful and awful as it is. And obviously they get some satisfaction out of it too. It's a very masculine activity and connected with notions of glory and assertion. And I think that throughout most of history, all of history actually, that's been the attitude to war. It isn't saying that people like war, but it is saying that they think war is inevitable. Goya is a kind of turning point. I think what's interesting about Goya, what's magnificent and admirable about Goya is that these are images of protest. They're not just showing us what is horrible. They are saying, This shouldn't happen. I don't think Homer is saying, This shouldn't happen. I don't think Shakespeare is saying, This shouldn't happen in Henry V for instance, which is also...

KA: Quite the opposite, almost.

SS: Right, quite the opposite. Although Shakespeare too can see the pity of war and the pity of suffering. I mean no one had a greater range of emotions than Shakespeare, but there's no protest in Shakespeare. I don't think there's any protest really to speak of in the representation of these conflicts until the beginning of the 19th century and until Goya. I think Goya is a kind of turning point. Goya is actually saying we should be horrified. We should not just find this horrible, we should be horrified. We should protest, we should deplore. We should take a moral position.

KA: And which of his paintings do you find the most moving in its - or full of impact?

SS: Well, what he shows in this series of images is tremendous sadistic cruelties of soldiers against civilians. One of the most shocking statistics I know of is that in the First World War, 90% of the casualties were - I may be off by a few points, but more or less 90% of the casualties were military, were soldiers and in the Second World War something like 90% of the casualties were civilians and that's the direction we're going. And that of course is why the Peninsular Wars are kind of a forerunner of modern war where you have soldiers making war against civilians. They couldn't bomb them yet, but they were on their way. And Goya is reacting to a new kind of war, a new kind of war on European soil at any rate. And what he shows are the most awful things, I mean people being dismembered, hanging, people who are hanged who have had their limbs amputated. And what's so striking in these Goya images are the captions which are apparently by Goya himself, where he says things like Can you believe it? Can you look at this? This is impossible to look at. This…

KA: Which is a sort of modernist kind of...

SS: Very.

KA: ...caption.

SS: Yes. Not identifying and saying, you know, this happened in such and such a place, or sometimes he will say, I saw it, or I saw this too, or This is the truth, one of them says - his captions. They're utterly modern, unique captions. They're a cry of horror and indignation. There's nothing like it in the history of art.

KA: You write about a Canadian artist named Jeff Wall. Can you describe his work?

SS: Jeff Wall is one of a group of photographers who essentially photograph tableaus. They photograph situations which are set up and if you want to say staged. They also do a lot through digital manipulations so they're - the actual photograph in fact may be a composite of a number of photographs that are melded together digitally. And I was very - I was thinking about, well, we have all these horrible photographs and all these upsetting photographs and part of our life is looking at these images of terrible things that are happening to other people, not us, from, by definition, a situation of safety. If you're watching it as an image, you're not there. And I was trying to think if there could be images that could preserve their quality of protest, that that wouldn't sort of dry up or evaporate, and what images would continue to appall us or stir us or move us or make us reflect. I think it's clearly true, for me at any rate, that images which are part of a narration can continue to have that effect. I can think of certain war films that I've seen over and over again and I never get used to them, I never stop being moved by them and stirred by them and provoked to reflection. Uh...

KA: Jeff Wall's work that I've seen reproduced is this, as you say, this whatever the opposite of a tableau vivant is, a tableau morte I guess.

SS: Yeah, well, it is a kind of a tableau vivant, but that's just the point, you see, I was trying to think, well, I know that we can do this with movies, but the question was, could a still image have that and I thought, well, an image that continues to haunt me is Jeff Wall's reconstruction, in his studio in Vancouver, he's a Canadian, of an imagined event in the war in Afghanistan, that was waged futilely and with enormous loss of life on both sides by Russia in the late 1980s. And his picture is called Dead Troops Talk. And it shows 13 dead Russian soldiers, most of them are sitting upright and talking on a slope, and ah..

KA: But also horribly wounded and obviously dead.

SS: Horribly wounded, horribly wounded, many of them missing limbs or the tops of their skulls or whatever, and they're smiling and talking to each other. It's an extraordinary - I mean, at first when I saw it, I assumed, because it actually has a place and a date and the full title of the picture - I think the picture was made, if I recall correctly, 1992, but it's dated as something that happened I believe in 1986, it turns out it doesn't refer to a particular ambush by Afghan soldiers, Taliban I guess they would have to be called...

KA: Pre-Taliban I think.

SS: Well, proto-Taliban let's put it, very much supported by the United States at that time. There isn't a very specific ambush but certainly things like that happened all the time. And the candor of the image, the starkness of it, the kind of contradiction between the expressions that they have and the way - and what's actually happened to them, maybe that's part of the secret of an image which continues to move us. Jeff Wall, with his image of war, was giving us something horrible, but not allowing us to go to the obvious or clichéd respond to it. So the image guards its power. It keeps its power, and that is really the question. How do images keep their power? Goya, still for me, every time I see the Disasters of War in a museum, I mean you can see it at many museums in the world, many museums have copies of this print series, I never stop being horrified by it. [music up] Sometimes I have to walk out of the room.

KA: Susan Sontag is my guest today. I'm Kurt Andersen. In a minute, we're going to look at how the Vietnam War has been fought and refought in the movies. That's ahead in Studio 360 from PRI, Public Radio International.

Break 1

KA: I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 and we're talking today about art and war. My guest is the writer Susan Sontag.

War is a perfect subject for the movies. It has period settings, spectacular violence, tests of morals and of character. But what happens to our understanding of a particular war after we watch it re-enacted a dozen times in a dozen different films? The US pulled out of Vietnam in 1975 and we've been watching movies about it ever since. So we asked two film historians to help us sort through them. Larry Suid wrote Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. Frank McAdams is the author of The American War Film: History and Hollywood. McAdams fought as a marine in Vietnam and when he came home, he studied screen writing at UCLA.

FRANK MCADAMS: When I was at UCLA in grad school, I was what they called a closet vet. All I wanted to do, I was back there on the GI bill and all I wanted to do was to get there, learn as much as I can while I was there, get my master's degree and get out. But I made the mistake one cold day of wearing my marine corps field jacket and all of a sudden, I found out that I had compromised myself. People were asking me what I did in Vietnam and everything, did I serve over there. Then they would always go to the proverbial question: How many people did you kill over there? And I would just look at them and I would imitate John Wayne, "Well, Pilgrim, I wanted to go back again to put some more babies on the end of my bayonet." [music up] And they would look at me and they would realize that I was mocking them. That was the only way I could really handle that.

[Clip of John Wayne]
Out here due process is a bullet.

FM: John Wayne's The Green Berets, released by BatJack in 1968 has the dubious distinction of being the only Vietnam War film released while the war was still going on.

LARRY SUID: Most people in Hollywood opposed the war but they would not put their money where their mouth was. They were afraid films about Vietnam wouldn't sell, even if they were anti-Vietnam. Whatever you think of John Wayne, you must give credit to the fact that he put his money where his mouth was and told the story about the war, which he supported.

FM: And by the time the film was released in 1968, it didn't have the type of reception that John Wayne and a lot of other people that had a World War II mentality, it didn't have the reception that they thought. I know one Vietnam vet who told me that his compound in Vietnam, when they showed the Green Berets, at the end when John Wayne is walking off into the misplaced sunset with the Vietnamese boy, troops threw beer cans at the screen.

[Film clip from Patton]
All this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, about wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung.

LS: Some people saw the movie Patton...

FM: ...released in 1970...

LS: ...as a non-Vietnam Vietnam movie, and showing what was wrong with the American military in the shape of Patton.

[Film clip]
Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war.

FM: When that film was shown on the USC campus, there was a great deal of concern because on one side of the audience in Bogart Auditorium was the West Point Glee Club, which was in town for a television appearance. On the other side of the audience was a tremendously radical antiwar group.

[Film clip] An army is a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap.

FM: And as he's saying this, people in the audience are starting to guffaw, because you're hearing it from the biggest individual of them all.

[Film clip] We're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel. [music up]

FM: After the end of the film [music down] that this wasn't just a war film, that this was a story about a very deep troubled, complex, ego-driven man, [music up] everybody filed out quietly. [music down]

LS: On the other hand, Nixon watched the movie twice in the White House before he decided to invade Cambodia.

FM: Right after Patton came out, there was kind of a dearth so to speak. The Vietnam War film door was still locked to Hollywood.

LS: The real movement started with Apocalypse Now in May of 1975 when Francis Ford Coppola came into the Pentagon with a script. Coppola took four years to make the movie and in the meantime, you had a whole series of movies about Vietnam, [music up] starting with Boys in Company C...

FM: Go tell the Spartans...

LS: The Deer Hunter.

FM: The Deer Hunter which was 1979 and Apocalypse Now 1979.

LS: Most of these stories show the worst things, real and imagined, with an emphasis on the imagined.

[helicopter sounds]

[Film clip]
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

FM: Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

[Film clip from Apocalypse Now]
Are you an assassin?

FM: It was a very surreal film, but nonetheless it was a journey up river into darkness.[music up]

LS: There is some beautiful things in it, some beautiful film making. The problem is at least some of those scenes are taken directly from other movies and, you know, the rest of it is Coppola's mediations on war and life, but he'd never been in war, so it ultimately doesn't ring true.

[guns, cries]

FM: It wasn't until Platoon in 1986...

[Clip from film Platoon]
That's what this place feels like, hell.

FM: It was much more realistic obviously. It was done by Oliver Stone who came back with a bronze star and a purple heart.

[screams]

FM: There was a time when I couldn't see Platoon a second time. That final fire fight in Platoon really did something to me, I sat there in the theater and I felt… I was perspiring, and I remember my wife Patty and I walked out in silence and we went to a nearby pizza joint and I think - I unloaded on her and talked non-stop for two hours, all about Vietnam. And I never thought that a movie would ever move me like that, but that final fire fight did.

LS: The United States thinks they're a peace loving people. The reality is the United States was created out of war.

[Film clip from Patton]
Americans traditionally love to fight.

FM: The American Revolution.

LS: The War of 1812.

FM: The War against Mexico.

LS: The Civil War.

FM: Spanish American War.

LS: World War I, World War II, and even Korea...

FM: The American war film genre reflects American history.

LS: And I've always argued that war movies are popular because the American people, whether they will admit it or not, love violence.

GCS: All real Americans love the sting of battle.

[Film clips]
Somebody once wrote Hell is the impossibility of reason.
The Horror . . . 
That's what this place feels like, hell.
The Horror . . .

KA: Larry Suid is the author of Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. We also heard from Frank McAdams, author of the American War Film: History and Hollywood. Jonathan Mitchell produced our segment.

I'm Kurt Andersen and my guest today in Studio 360 is Susan Sontag.

Susan, do you think the fact that most Americans, certainly most Americans under 40 know everything they know about the Vietnam War from these Vietnam movies and given that most of these movies treat our involvement in the war and the nature of that war in a highly ambiguous fashion, full of grays, has that body of cinema do you think trained Americans to think about war in a more nuanced, mature, morally ambiguous way?

SS: Well, Kurt, I think that for most people under 40 or over 40, since blessedly this country, maybe in some respect to its detriment, has known much less of war than most other countries. All most people know about any war is through, let's say movies or television programs. What do they know about World War II for instance? That's just a bunch of movies also. I don't think people learn very much from these movies because I think what is much deeper in this country is glorification of war. What we're seeing right now is the views, let's say, of Theodore Roosevelt, who is really the first very articulate spokesperson of the American Imperialist Dream who thought that war was the noblest sport. And that combined with the American self-righteousness and the American sense of being always on the side of the right, or that God is always on the side of America and that whatever America does promotes justice and freedom for the rest of the world is what I think leads people to at least some consent, although it's not… it's hardly unanimous and I don't think it's even that firm..

KA: Although…

SS: I think against all that, the war movies don't mean anything. They're just - these same movies could be showing us the pity of war or they could be encouraging us to feel that in the worlds of Theodore Roosevelt, War in the pursuit of righteousness I the noblest sport.

KA: It seems to me that war movies about World War II, about Vietnam, whatever, in the last 25 years, have portrayed a more complex, far less glorifying picture of war. Even a recent one like Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, which is about the good war and all that, show war at least in its complexity and ugliness in a way that John Wayne and Audie Murphy never did.

SS: Oh, that's absolutely true and I think again, as the Spanish Civil War was the point at least we have the first really close in the middle of it kind of imagery of war with the camera, so Vietnam is the turning point. That's the first moment in which photographers and people who reported on war for mainstream media actually came to feel that they were criticizing war and that by showing the horror of war, they were protesting against war. People forget that for instance in World War II, Robert Capa along with every other accredited photographer wore combat uniforms. They were actually completely integrated into the military. There was no sense of an independent press which was assessing what the military would do. But World War II was that unique war which does remain a kind of benchmark in our total sense of what war has been, could be, a war that was genuinely felt by people to have been necessary. If ever a war was necessary, it was World War II.

KA: The writer Susan Sontag is my guest, I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 and my subject today is art and war.

When the Congolese Civil War broke out in 1997, the novelist Emmanuel Dongala was there, teaching at the University of Brazzaville. He and his family fled to the edge of the city, thinking they'd be safe. Dongala remembered the terror of hiding in a house with 40 other people. They listened to rockets hiss by them and explode a few meters away.

EMMANUEL DONGALA: During this bombing, while people were praying or crying or whatever, I'm not a very religious person so what I was doing is reading. You know, you had six hours of bombing, you have nothing to do, just sit there, so to keep your sanity, you have to do something. I remember one poem by Robert Lowell. Just the last stanzas stick to my mind and it keeps coming up, coming up. And I remember… the poem is called Waking Early Sunday Morning. Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone. Peace to our children when they fall in small war, on the heels of small war. Until the end of time. To police the earth. A ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime. So that's it. So it keeps coming up to my mind, you know? Pity the planet, all joy gone. After this war, I was very lucky to know a writer, African writer, called Chinua Achebe, and after the Biafra War, because he went through a civil war too. And he wrote a collection of poems called Christmas In Biafra and Other Poems and one of the poems which really struck me, it's called A Refugee Mother and Child.

[ED recites]
No Madonna and Child could touch 
That picture of a mother's tenderness 
For a son she soon would have to forget. 
The air was heavy with odors 
of diarrhea of unwashed children 
with washed-out ribs and dried-up 
bottoms struggling in labored 
steps behind blown empty bellies. Most 
mothers there had long ceased 
to care but not this one; she held 
a ghost smile between her teeth 
and in her eyes the ghost of a mother's 
pride as she combed the rust-colored 
hair left on his skull and then - 
singing in her eyes - began carefully 
to part it. . In another life, this 
must have been a little daily 
act of no consequence before his 
breakfast and school; now she 
did it like putting flowers 
on a tiny grave. 
I exactly saw this women and you know the kid is going to die but yet you see this mother there trying to save her kid. This poem brings all that back to my mind. I came to the sad conclusion that any crime you can imagine, any worst thing you can imagine, a human being can do it to another human being.

KA: Emmanuel Dongala is a novelist from the Congo. He now teaches at Simon's Rock College in Western Massachusetts.

SS: That's so moving to me, the, the poem of Robert Lowell, the idea that he was sitting and reading this...

KA: In the middle of the Civil War in the Congo.

SS: Absolutely extraordinary. But he does say something - this is obviously a marvelous guy. I've never heard of him but I'm very glad to...

KA: He's a lovely writer.

SS: ...make his acquaintance and I'll look for his books. He does say something that to me is very, very important. He says that everything that you can imagine that's most horrible, you can be sure that human beings, some human beings have done this or will do this to other human beings. And I really feel that is the basis of being - that knowledge, that acknowledgment is the basis of being morally adult. What drives me crazy is people perpetually expressing surprise that terrible things happen in the world. It seems to me that when we grow up, that's what.. that's what makes us grownups morally is we're not going to be surprised. I mean it doesn't mean we aren't going to be horrified, it doesn't mean we aren't going to be appalled, it doesn't mean that we're not going to protest and do whatever we can to limit or undo these horrors, but we shouldn't be surprised. I mean it's like that old thing that people like George Steiner keeps saying, How can it be that the Commandant at Auschwitz would come after a day of ripping babies from their mothers' arms and bashing their heads against the wall and sending people off to the crematoria and then he would come back to his house and kiss his wife and children and sit down at the piano and play some Schubert before dinner. How is this possible? I think it's absurd to ask such a question. Of course it's possible. Who said that wicked people don't have family lives, or have good taste in music? Monsters don't come with signs over their heads saying, I'm a monster and then they don't participate in any other human activities. I think we have to understand that it's human beings that do this and we have to stop being surprised. It's really the beginning of being an adult, I think, not to be surprised. Every other reaction, we shouldn't be surprised.

KA: It interested me listening to that poem about a particular African child dying in its mother's arms because one sees images and you see a million images of a million dying African children and yet to have a story attached to a particular child, to me, makes it much more powerful than any number of those images can be, which I think goes to your point in the book about a story is much more powerful than an image in and of itself.

SS: A narration, yes. But the other thing that it brings to mind is that we, in our part of the world, are much more accustomed, are very accustomed to seeing precisely these images coming from Africa or Asia. When we see these images, the implicit subtext of those images is, this is the kind of thing that happens in a place like that. We're much more protective of ourselves and of people with whom we identify, which is to say, for instance, Europeans and North Americans and what we show of the horrors that befall people. You remember there was a lot of discussion about what was right or what was in good taste to show of ... among the photographs that were taken after September 11, 2001, here in New York at the World Trade Center and there certainly were photographs that showed body parts and a lot of the horrors that resulted from all those - the horror of all those thousands of people who were murdered there and the general feeling is oh, we mustn't show those pictures. It's in bad taste, I mean which is always a very dubious criterion, especially when offered by institutions. It always sounds very repressive to me, when people talk about good taste, when it's a newspaper or a television network, and and and the whole issue of giving offense to relatives or further pain to relatives, we mustn't do that, but we don't have a problem about showing these images if they come from Africa or Asia because we don't identify with those people. For instance, there's an appalling image which upset me enormously, which I think about all the time, of a Taliban soldier being murdered. He's naked from the waist down, his bloody pants around his ankles, it's the most [takes deep breath] horrifying image, and I think when we look at it in the New York Times and it's - Tyler Hicks is a wonderful war photographer, I think we don't think, well, his relatives, say, in Kabul might have seen this image too and what did they feel? So it's very much a double standard about the horror that we show.

KA: My guest is the writer Susan Sontag. I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360. Coming up we'll talk about lovers and bloodthirsty mobs in Aida. Stay with us in Studio 360 from PRI, Public Radio International.

KA: I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 with the writer Susan Sontag and we're talking about war and art.

Imagine traveling abroad for a few weeks, you'd turn on the television one day and see your hometown in flames and under siege. That's what happened in 1992 to the Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon, the author of the novel Nowhere Man. Hemon was in Chicago when the Bosnian war began. He found out as much as he could through the TV news and by trying to phone Sarajevo and he read letters from home, including from one man who was a fellow journalist.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON: The man who's a friend of mine, Semezdin Mehmedinovic who was probably the greatest Bosnian poet who lives in Washington DC now, where the air is tinted with evil. He was in Sarajevo during the siege and left shortly after the war ended and he wrote a great book called Sarajevo Blues. They're very short little vignettes. This is one called A Relatively Calm Day. In the daily reports, when dozens of shells hit downtown proper, when snipers are and at intersections, and only a few have been killed or wounded, we are informed that a relatively calm day has passed. People are relatively normal or relatively loony since death as been accepted as a statistic. That is to say, in Sarajevo, the issue is a surplus of death. A flustered young man begs to cut into the water line. He soaks his plastic canister. The line in front of the cistern twists to make a place for him. Since he's already loaded his canister, he hurries to the end of the street and gets hit by a grenade. All that's left of him is a bloody trail on the pavement that seems like sap but is easier to clean. Just then it starts raining and everything gets washed away. Not even a trace of the young guy is left, nor a trace of the canister. Just water. As if nothing in the street changed except that everyone got just a bit quieter. The motor of the water truck rumbles to the sound of plastic canisters, softly bumping against each other. The experience of war is too big to be captured by one person. I had known his work before that, you know, he was a good friend of mind, and with good friends, you always think that in some way they are like you. So the way that he experienced the war allowed me to imagine how I would experience that war on the one hand. On the other hand, because he's so articulate and so thoughtful, I could see how he, never mind me, how he experienced the war. I mean in some ways you can read literature for warnings, but literature is always in some ways about someone else's experience and when it becomes your experience, then it's a little too late.

KA: The Bosnian writer, Aleksandar Hemon lives and writes in Chicago. Studio 360's Michele Siegel produced that story as well as the earlier segment with Emmanuel Dongala.

Susan, you went to Sarajevo for off and on for several years during the siege. You describe it as quixotic. But why did you go? Why did you put yourself in that place?

SS: Well, I think I should act on what I believe, and I think [deep breath] how can I put it, it's an extraordinary experience, it's a deepening experience, it's actually a privilege I think to be able to do something. Otherwise I guess I just would go crazy thinking about what's happening. I think I wouldn't want to think about it after a certain point if I didn't know that once in a while, every few years, I would just step out of my own life and try to get involved with something larger, where I could make a tiny, tiny, tiny contribution, and that's of course all one can do.

KA: One of the things you did there was to stage Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. How did that work and why did you do that?

SS: Well, I have directed in the theater. I had no idea of doing that while I was there, but while I was there, when I... at the end of my first stay, which was a couple of weeks, and I told people there I wanted to come back and they asked me what for and I said, well I want to work. And, well, what can do you? And I said, well I can do some paramedic things. And I can type and I can teach and... anyway I was trying to think of things that would be useful. And then I said, well, and I know how to direct in the theater. And they said, oh that, do that. And I said, why do you want me to direct a play? Oh, because we have lots of actors that have nothing to do. I said, actors? You don't have theaters, you just have bombed places. Yes, but ... you know what people said to me, that it was so moving, they said, we're not animals you know, we're not people just standing on water lines and bread lines and cowering in basements during the shelling and the sniping. I mean, there was theater in Sarajevo before the war. There should be theater now. And I was very moved by that, but actually it was not my choice. We performed every day for about six months and people came. People came through the shelling and the bombing. It was risking their lives to come to the theater. It was a most extraordinary experience.

KA: I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360, and my guest today is Susan Sontag. We are talking about art and war. In 1871, the composer Giuseppe Verdi set his opera Aida in the glory days of the pharaohs. It premiered in Egypt to mark the unveiling of Cairo's new opera house and the opening of the Suez Canal. Judith Kampfner reports on spectacle and militarism [music up] in Aida.

JUDITH KAMPFNER: Both traditional opera and traditional warfare involve drama, ritual, heroes, martyrs, and masses and masses of spear carriers. Aida has been performed in the history of the Metropolitan Opera more than any other work, and it seems especially relevant today because it's about armies battling in the desert. William Berger, author of Verdi with a Vengeance.

[Clip from William Berger]
The music that Verdi used to create this framework of war for Aida is totally unforgettable and has seared itself onto the communal unconscious you might say. People know the triumphal march from Aida. It's just something that's known. [whistles - segue into orchestra]

[Clip from Steven Blier]
It's not his greatest music, it's populist.

JK: Steven Blier, leading accompanist and vocal coach teaches at the Juilliard School.

[Clip from Steven Blier]
It's supposed to appeal to the common man and make war seem kind of heroic. That's the message that Verdi is saying, is that we're selling this war to these people, to show how people are manipulated by politics, essentially.

JK: At the beginning of the opera, a messenger comes in and says, Egypt has been invaded by Ethiopia. The king of Egypt addressing his people goes into powerful public relations mode. He tells them, our fields have been laid waste, our crops burned, and they get riled up for action.

[singing]

[Clip from Steven Blier]
You know the chorus that's screaming Guerra! Guerra! War, War! And Verdi's attitude towards this is that these people are bloodthirsty. They're so bloodthirsty that even Aida, who is a slave, and an Ethiopian, joins in. She finds herself screaming for war against her own people. So it's her lover who's been chosen to be the head of the army.

[singing]

JK: The fighting happens offstage. The next thing we know is the parade of spoils with the Egyptians glorifying in their plunder. There's a scary moment in the current Met production, when in amongst the real horses, a chariot and shackled prisoners of war, there's a cart with a mound of bodies piled face down. There's a sense of "look what we've got!" This European opera is much loved in the country it was romanticizing, says Egyptian Nimet Habachy, a classical music radio host. Habachy says Her homeland is even jingoistic about Aida.

[Clip from Nimet Habachy]
When I was growing up, the news every night on the radio was preceded by the march from Aida so I would almost have to admit that it's one of the first pieces of music that I ever learned or knew and I still roll my eyes a little bit when I hear it because I think of it in that context, and I gather today for example, that piece is still played before a football game in Egypt.

JK: Throughout the opera, the chorus and the leads sing, Gloria Al Egyptu - Gloria to Egypt.

[chorus singing]

JK: The patriotism in the opera has often been fodder for politicians. For Mussolini it was useful because it was about going to war against Ethiopia, which reflected his own ambitions. He even called his daughter Aida. But in the end, this opera is about romance triumphing over war. Essentially Aida is a desperate triangle. The Ethiopian slave and the Egyptian princess are in love with the Egyptian general, who should marry the princess but loves Aida. It's just like a classic American epic, says William Berger.

[Clip from William Berger]
It's very much like Gone with the Wind, which is about war but isn't. But it shows the other people, like Ashley and everybody at the party 12 Oaks starts going, whoopee, there's a war. But it acknowledges that sort of group hysteria that comes out at the beginning of a war.

JK: And as in Gone with the Wind, the focus here is on two women against the backdrop of war. Aida's first words on stage are alas I have heard the frightful war cry sound. The princess who has the last lines of this tragic opera rebukes her militaristic government and cries out, I pray for peace.

For Studio 360 I'm Judith Kampfner.

KA: I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360 today with the writer Susan Sontag. Susan, it's interesting isn't it that what Verdi intended apparently as a kind of critique of war hysteria is used, has been used, even to this day in countries like Egypt as we heard as a kind of patriotic glorifying piece of music.

SS: Well, you know I think most art has shilled for war, has promoted war. If you think statistically, most things that are created, most poems, most images, most songs, most narratives have cooperated with or supported state violence, which is then defined as patriotism. If you're not for the war, then obviously you're not a patriot. But obviously what lasts and what matters are more complex works that at the very least are not simply celebrating war, even if they acknowledge the availability of war, they don't celebrate it.

KA: I look back before this program to read a piece you wrote in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago about Bosnia and the Balkans that was an absolutely spot-on, it seemed to me, critique of European in action and kind of - a kind of taken for granted European anti-Americanism, and as part of your argument for the need for us to intervene militarily. Does it strike you not as a contradiction at all, your feelings about that war and what I presume are your feelings about this war that we're about to be involved in, but perhaps I'm presuming too far.

SS: Well, I think unfortunately, we are going to wage this war. We didn't move - our government didn't move 100,000 troops and all that material to Iraq to back off. This is a tough question, and one I think about a lot, I'm not against the proper use of American power. I'm absolutely for the intervention in Bosnia, I wish it had happened a lot earlier and I wish it had amounted to something. I'm for and continue to be for the intervention in Kosovo, even though I deplore the way in which it was pursued, which incurred a lot of unnecessary civilian deaths from American bombing. I wish that the Americans had intervened in Rwanda, which I think is the most single horrible thing that's happened anywhere in the past decades. I am against the punitive pre-emptive war in Iraq because I thin it's folly. I think it won't accomplish what it's designed to accomplish. I think it is the wrong way to deal with this monstrous dictator, whose overthrow I ardently look forward to.

KA: But why was it right in Slobodan Milosevic's case and not here?

SS: Because it was bound to do what it could do at a very minimal cost of life. And this is opening a can of worms, a Pandora's box that will destabilize the whole region, that involves an imperial ambition that I don't think we're prepared to carry through. We may be prepared to kill a lot of people, civilians in Baghdad, I'm not sure we're prepared to rule the Middle East yet.

KA: Although we don't want to kill civilians in Baghdad.

SS: No, but if we decide to pursue a war in which the presumption is we will take ideally no casualties, then we will have to bomb. And I think it's folly, I think it's mad, I think it's dangerous.

KA: So you don't think there's a high possibility, or any possibility that you will be proven wrong by how the war goes?

SS: I pray to be proven wrong, but I don't believe it. I think it's much more dangerous and much more reckless. I'm against it for practical and political reasons. I'm not against it because it's a use of American power.

KA: In this time of war and rumors of war and imminent war perhaps, are there works of art that we should go to for explanation, illumination, solace?

SS: Well, I talked before about art as a platform for moral consciousness. What finally matters to me about the arts, whether it's literature or film or other dramatic arts or music or dance, is the way it deepens us, the way it extends our feelings, and tenderness and compassion and the ability just to recognize everyone's humanity, because in the end, the most important thing is that we are all human beings, including the people that commit these wicked acts.

KA: Susan Sontag, [music up] thank you very much for joining me in Studio 360.

SS: Thank you, Kurt, it's been great, thanks.

KA: Susan Sontag's new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, is being published by Farrar Strauss & Giroux. To find out more about Susan Sontag and about any of the stories you've heard today, check out our Website at studio360.org

[Announcer]
Studio 360 is produced by WNYC along with PRI, Public Radio International. The production team includes Julie Burstein, Kerrie Hillman, Peter Clowney, Michele Siegel, Leital Molad, Rob Weisberg, Andy Lanset, Gardner Allen, Sara Lilley, Michael Raphael. The music is by David Van Tieghem. I'm Kurt Andersen and I do hope you'll join us next week in Studio 360.

[Announcer]
Studio 360 is funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.