Sontag’s Legacy
Tobi Haslett, in his thoughtful article on Susan Sontag, perpetuates a long-standing error about the Vietnam War (A Critic at Large, December 11th). He writes that, in 1968, Sontag “flew to Hanoi and visited the Vietcong,” and that 1978, the year of Sontag’s “I, etcetera,” was “three years after the official Vietcong victory.” North Vietnam, however, was not the Vietcong. The term, an epithet that meant “Vietnamese Communist,” was employed by the Saigon government to designate a guerrilla movement in South Vietnam—the movement was officially called the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, and more commonly known as the N.L.F. Though the exact relationship between North Vietnam and the N.L.F. remains the subject of heated debate among historians, the N.L.F. operated independently, at least in part, of North Vietnamese support. This mistake in terminology has long obscured and oversimplified the complex history of that tragic conflict.
Gene H. Bell-Villada
Williams College
Williamstown, Mass.
Before Sontag became the preëminent public intellectual of her generation, she was the little-known teacher of a course on aesthetics in the philosophy department at City College, in New York. In the spring term of 1960, Sontag, speaking intently while she chain-smoked, demanded that the class confront classic questions of aesthetics, and insisted that we purchase a group ticket to the French dramatist Jean Genet’s highly stylized play “The Balcony,” at Circle in the Square, in Manhattan. Sontag was an exemplary teacher who brought her students face to face with the “seriousness” that Haslett describes.
Ed Hundert
Vancouver, B.C.
How Fake News Hurts
Steve Coll, in his editorial, writes about President Trump’s use of the term “fake news” (Comment, December 11th). Interestingly, research suggests that there is a particular dynamic at play between fake news and alternative facts: third parties, including the news media and respected individuals, can be effective antidotes to the toxicity of alternative facts, sapping their staying power and lessening their impact. Trump’s consistent attacks on the objective reporting that he dislikes weaken the persuasive effects of these vital—and all too scarce—counterweights to his false narratives. In other words, every alternative fact that Trump disseminates on Twitter, in interviews, and in statements serves to further delegitimatize sources of accurate information, and also to normalize both the act of spreading misinformation and the misinformation itself.
Mark Bayer
Arlington, Va.
Part of the difficulty of identifying fake news is that the public and the media place so much trust in Twitter. Tweets are essentially the modern-day equivalent of unsigned, typewritten letters; they should not be given the same weight as statements and press releases from the White House. That’s especially true when it comes to Trump’s Twitter accounts. I find it frustrating that the President can throw out one inanity after another and not have to answer for them; indeed, the White House has gone so far as to claim that it can’t say for sure whether he even wrote particular tweets. Why, then, should tweets from his accounts have the force of an official statement from the President? The more attention we pay to Twitter, the more our political discourse is degraded, and the lower our standards for political leaders sink.
John D. Pasco
Tucson, Ariz.
