SUSAN SONTAG:

“Did I really say it, you mean do I really say it of course I did say it what a way to ask me did I really say something that Entertainment Weekly reported. Yes I really did say it.

Excuse me are we not speaking English…listen I don’t read Entertainment Weekly why don’t you ask me a direct question, excuse me.”

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Sontag is Sontag is gone she I mean I’m so happy she came out of hiding I have been talking about Sontag sinceimsosmart from my rise to fame for the last three years right no one is interested.

For further artistic reflection, see the official youtube transcript below, a truly artistic and further non-sensical rendition of a non-sensical conversation. “Isn’t wind in my memory”? “I’m like one of a series of vacuum and carpet you wanted”

The transcript even suggests bringing out a turntable, which is much needed for this particular video clip.

The article is raw and uncensored and exposes her fears of and for her teenage son, who has upon occasion threatened to kill her while wielding a knife.

Long’s viral post has sparked controversy, as many outlets (including feminist blog Jezebel) believe gun control is the issue, not mental illness.

Everyone’s so busy trying to figure out exactly what was wrong with Adam Lanza — and that’s a discussion to have at some point — but right now we really need to stay focused on gun control,

Writes Laura Beck in her article, “That Woman is Not Adam Lanza’s Mother, and She’s Distracting us From the Real Issue”

That Woman.

Considering the recent shootings were perpetrated by an adult man, the media has had a lot to say about that woman, known as “Mom.” That woman, who in Nancy Lanza’s case, was gunned down by her son. That woman, who in Karen Kay’s case, was bludgeoned to death by her son. That woman, who in Long’s case, admits to being scared for the day when she can’t control her boy.

In death, Nancy Lanza seems to be getting her share of the blame:

Now, the secrets [Nancy] Lanza kept are at the center of the questions that envelop this New England town, grieving over the slaughter unleashed by her 20-year-old son Adam, who investigators say killed his mother Friday with one of her own guns before murdering 26 children and teachers at a nearby school. [AP article]

In some ways, this hearkens back to the 1950s “refrigerator mother” theory, in which moms with mentally ill children were thought to have been cold and withholding, thus unknowingly causing the illness.

Meanwhile, Long is getting reamed for writing about her son by mothers who say she has no right to share his story with the public. Basically, if you are a mom with a mentally ill child, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. If you love your child too much to say anything, you are negligent, but if you cry out for help, you are incompetent and disrespectful of your child’s privacy. Thanks, double bind.

Obviously, the much bigger issue is that Liza Long is not Adam Lanza’s mom. The similarity begins and ends with the having of mentally ill sons. That’s all we know, and it’s dangerous to assume more than that. We can’t lump all people with mental illness together into one big “crazy” pot, it stigmatizes the ill and disconnects us, as a society, from their humanity.

Writes Beck, who also objected to the public nature of Long’s post, which included a photo of her son.

But, at what point does the story of a mentally ill family member become your own? And does hiding the stories of people with mental problems do anything but stigmatize? Further, if something happens in the future and Long stayed quiet about her son like Nancy Lanza allegedly did, we all know who would get blamed:

That Woman.

Sarah Kendzior, a writer for The Atlantic and numerous other publications has gone after Long, examining her blog “Anarchist Soccer Mom” for signs of instability.

Long has written a series of vindictive and cruel posts about her children in which she fantasizes about beating them, locking them up and giving them away

Kendzior writes, citing numerous passages which she believes show Long as an unfit mother. Long’s blogs posts are off the cuff, falling in the style of Ayalet Waldman’s “Bad Mother” genre (Waldman is writer whom many may remember as the first to openly admit to loving her husband more than her children on “Oprah,” prompting the audience to boo her).

Waldman’s style has been embraced as writers like Sandra Tsing Loh have used the “Bad Mother” quasi-confession to allow for their own imperfections to spew forth like tongue-in-cheek volcanoes.

While we have been able to accept the often humorous confessions of self-proclaimed “Bad Moms” assisted by our latent love of irony and our natural comfort with female self-effacement (often peppered into the genre), the combination of Long’s “Bad Mom” style and her serious post about her son’s mental problems was too much for many people to bear. The idea that Long could be a multi-dimensional human being is still out of step with our conception of motherhood. The fact that she could joke and be authentic was apparently mind blowing to Kendzior, proving perhaps that the “Bad Mother” trope is not as hackneyed as we thought. It is as if motherhood is the last bastion of authenticity and the last torchbearer of the “Cult of Domesticity,”–which fyi is the farthest thing from authentic (if there is even such a thing as authentic blah blah post modern blah).

Mothers are not people, they are mothers, they belong exclusively to children and any form of self-possession is forbidden. Meanwhile, the child to whom they belong is the possession of the world, and everyone has the right the duty to tell a mother how to best bring up her offspring.

Some people have written that I must have criticized Long because I am not a parent. In fact, it is precisely because I am a parent that I wrote what I did,

Kendzior wrote, before she and Long made peace (like all good moms do) and published a joint letter of solidarity in support of the mentally ill.

After this tragedy, everyone has tried to pull rank–mothers, teachers, gun control advocates, students, people who are mentally ill, people who know the mentally ill or work with them, gun owners– everyone is a self-appointed expert based upon this or that facet of identity. We are looking for someone or something to blame, thinking about what we would have done differently if we were Adam Lanza’s mother. But the bottom line is that woman, that ideal mother, that person who would have known exactly what to do in Nancy Lanza’s situation does not exist. If your child is mentally ill, you will never be an ideal mother, not to the world, not to your child and not to anyone.

Nancy Lanza.

Liza Long.

Early school photo of Adam Lanza, above.

If you or someone you know struggles with mental illness, NAMI may be able to help. Visit http://www.nami.org/

However, in addition to taking a moment to dwell on the spellbinding nail polish FLOTUS was sporting (it was a lovely blue- grey, which we will be attempting to purchase later), we would like to highlight some problematic aspects of the evenings’ affairs.

The First Lady’s speech focused on Whitney Houston-esque “I believe the children are our future” rhetoric, which we have seen and heard so many times before, but in this particularly disturbing economic climate, her words (and the words of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro who spoke before her) were earth-shatteringly depressing. Both Castro and Obama spoke of the sacrifices their parents and grandparents had made in order to create a better life for them. Castro talked about how his grandmother, an immigrant, worked all sorts of odd jobs so that his mother could get an education, and how his mother had made sacrifices that had afforded him the opportunities he had in life.

My grandmother’s generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances, Castro said. “And that’s the middle class—the engine of our economic growth. With hard work, everybody ought to be able to get there. And with hard work, everybody ought to be able to stay there—and go beyond.

What about those of us who are not doing as well as our grandparents? Should we blame ourselves? It was as if Castro was saying that we should have modest dreams now, and have babies (sons?) who might someday be lucky enough to have a future. But how are we going to afford those adorable babies, and what if (God forbid) we don’t want to have them? It was as if he was saying that people who are dissatisfied with and focused on their current situations are just being short-sighted.

Mrs. Obama echoed a similar tale, discussing the life of Barack’s grandmother:

Barack’s grandmother started out as a secretary at a community bank…and she moved quickly up the ranks…but like so many women, she hit a glass ceiling.

And for years, men no more qualified than she was – men she had actually trained – were promoted up the ladder ahead of her, earning more and more money while Barack’s family continued to scrape by.

But day after day, she kept on waking up at dawn to catch the bus…arriving at work before anyone else…giving her best without complaint or regret.

And she would often tell Barack, “So long as you kids do well, Bar, that’s all that really matters.

No. What matters is that you, grandma, are being discriminated against! How can you teach your grandchildren to stand up for injustice if you don’t take up the fight?

In both of these instances, stories centered around women sacrificing all they had so that their children could succeed. Mrs. Obama consistently identified herself as a “Mom,” which is all well and good, but quite frankly, this type of self-sacrificing motherhood being celebrated as the norm is extremely problematic. It might be argued that Mrs. Obama herself has sacrificed (or rather altered) her own ambitions so that her husband could live out his dream. Granted, many women would happily quit jobs to be FLOTUS, still, seeing ones own identity defined by her husband’s job may give even the most liberated woman pause.

Of course the story about Barack’s grandmother was used to illustrate how personally important the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was to the President. Some day, the little boy raised by his grandmother will grow up to save womankind!

In other problematic ideas, Mrs. Obama shared some of the things she and her husband had learned.

“We learned about dignity and decency, that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…That the truth matters, that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules.

It’s as if she was trying to slip some things by us! Dignity: awesome, decency, yes, “that how hard you work matters more than how much you make” wait, what? Tell that to unpaid interns. Tell that to minimum wage workers who earn $7.25 per hour in New York City. Tell that to the unemployed who have full-time jobs looking for work!

Then, she reels us back in again with “Truth matters,” yes, something we all agree on. “You don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules,” she slips in. We should totally play by the rules we have right now, because they are obviously working so well and so fast!

Couldn’t it be argued that many entrepreneurial ventures or even civil rights struggles were the direct result of people playing by their own sets of rules? This idea that ‘government rule makers know what is best’ casts President Obama as the father who reads letters everyday from 10 Americans (his children) and then wisely decides what is best for us. While we can only hope this will be what happens, Mrs. Obama’s trust in Government seemed to be in direct contrast with the campaign Obama waged four years ago with his almost revolutionary focus on “change.”

While it was nice to see the Obamas try to cast themselves in stark contrast to wealthy Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the contrast may not have been stark enough. Mrs. Obama may have been a touch too deferent, portraying her family as too accepting of the great injustices that have created the class divide in America. As Mrs.Obama frighteningly said of her family:

They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did…in fact, they admired it.

Image: First Lady Michelle Obama addresses the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Feel free to stop watching after 3:09, unless you have some strange desire to learn how glasses are made.