Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky's assistant comments below that there is an illness in the linguist's family and that's why he had to run, to make a plane back to Boston. Also I note that Chomsky gave good weight at an earlier event at Columbia the same day. I'm feeling bad about the meanspiritedness of my original post. Not the substance, but the sniggeringly oedipal tone. Chomsky has my apology for that.

I think I was too harsh on Noam Chomsky yesterday. Oh well, I said it. Anyway, here's Peter Voskamp, editor of the Block Island Times, offering a better picture of the great man:

I saw him a few years ago in Austin and he was up there for what seemed like hours-- a true marathon. He spoke in one theater, and it was pumped into another sold-out theater on a screen. He had his sleeves rolled up and kept going and going, a real inspiration. So I wonder what happened in NY yesterday. Maybe he's tired; maybe there was a mix up in communications.

The analogy of his that I always pull out is that of the sports fan: the common man, as illustrated in the stats-steeped sports fan, can handle complex issues if they are presented truthfully. He or she can get involved in the debate equally well-informed, and their takes have just as much credibility as the so-called experts.

This would certainly be the case in regard to the Iraq situation. What joys the best and brightest with their endless credentials have brought to the region.

Nice.

Last night Noam Chomsky was to give a lecture at the Miller Theater at Columbia University in N.Y. The Miller Theater was sold out 2 weeks back for the event, $5 a head. Probably 500 people. The outside walls of the theater were plastered with posters calling Chomsky un-American. When I came in a tall African guy was trying to chivvy tickets from others. Later I saw where he had gotten in. There was a table of Chomsky's books out front and a crowd of young hipsters. Pretty Asian girls, guys with snowboarding jackets. Not a lot of oldsters (except for mwah, of course). I had to sit in a back row, a disappointment. I wanted to watch his face, this son of a great Hebrew scholar who can take apart Zionism like an old radio.

The lights went down, a screen lit up. We got to watch Harold Pinter's speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Litteratoor from 2005. The playwright wore a red lap blanket and said the crimes of the U.S. were legion and unreported, from Nicaragua to Chile to Indonesia to Iraq, and Tony Blair was the U.S.'s poodle. The speech went on for 40 minutes, it felt like; and was a little motheaten.

After the speech the lights came up and without fanfare Chomsky came to the podium. He said he was going to take questions now. Well I thought that was odd. The event was advertised as a lecture from Chomsky. No. He was just taking questions, after Pinter's taped old speech.

There were a half dozen questions, and then Chomsky said, OK, Thank you, and walked off the stage. A short burst of applause, and that was the end of it. He had answered questions for 15 or 20 minutes, it felt like. Most of it was a tired attack on the big corporations, and—a newer thread—celebrating the democratic movement of integration that is occurring now in South America. I wanted more, much much more. I wanted to see that mind in real exercise, on the jumbotron. (I wanted to hear more about Israel than the idea that it is America's client, trying out 100 new warplanes—his one statement about Israel.)

As it was, the event seemed faintly squalid. The mind at the end of the day, in its nightclothes, wandering around a house. It was so casual as to be insulting to us, all the folks who had paid to hear him. And I heard a lot of grumbling as I went out on to Broadway.

When someone had asked a more difficult question, Chomsky said, Well that is a complex question, I've written about it. As if to say, don't make me jump thru any hoops, kid, you can go buy the book.

He had one interesting idea/emotion. Maybe I will get his actual words off my taperecorder later (for now I'm infected by his laziness). He kept saying that If we wanted to stop the war, we could. We possessed the power. He said that the people of Venezuela had shown great resolution, and any people was capable of democratic resolution, if they only cared. There was something wonderful and sour about this idea. He was judging us pitilessly, and saying, You are responsible for this war because you are doing diddly and you have all the rights in the world. You could be holding your elected representatives' feet to the fire. A student asked him to endorse the Feb. 15 strike by students, and Chomsky had said, Well that's good, maybe you will actually do something. Another time he described us as privileged with free speech, and we face no risks to expressing ourselves, unlike South Americans, or Russians, or Saudis.

It was a theme that wanted to be developed, in a grand speech. No grandeur. Just nightclothes.  read more »

A few possible explanations:

To judge from What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Michael Bérubé, a literatu  read more »

A book about Jewishness by the playwright David Mamet, you might expect it to be personal, even conf  read more »

When is the last time the New York Times did major stories on Noam Chomsky two days in a row, one jumping off the front page, and excerpted his work? Like... never.

Let's understand what's going on. All the American politicians may be denouncing Hugo Chavez, but he's gotten into the water supply. His Diablo speech was a big moment, and actually successful, in a way that so many other gestures the right wants to dismiss as the U.N. Follies have not been. Because his ideas have resonance in the United States. A few leftwing friends have grinned, telling me how much they liked what Chavez said. The resonance springs from a problem only the left has grappled with so far: the U.S. is losing moral legitimacy, globally. And as Chris Matthews pointed out on Hardball, Chavez wasn't afraid of Bush. He made fun of him, in his house. Made him look weak. If Chavez was a monkey, then how come Chomsky's #1 on Amazon?

There's an old rule in journalism you're are supposed to have three examples when you posit a trend. I've just got two, Chavez and Chomsky. But the writing's on the wall: The left is back. The Iraq effect is finally happening; you can finally get something beside a lump of coal for the position: I was against this stupid war because I thought it would hurt America and the Middle East. The political establishment/ media has held out against the news for as long as they could, now Hugo Chavez is putting it on the front page.

(Is this analysis self-serving? Well, yeah. Is it correct? We shall see...)

Yesterday on Cspan, you could watch Naval Postgraduate School professor Vali Nasr talking about Sunnis and Shi'ites, at a book store, and Noam Chomsky speaking at West Point last spring. Both messages were leftwing, Nasr's about the importance of understanding Arab hearts and minds, Chomsky's about imperial ambitions. The appearances underscore one of my favorite themes: that the military is supplying the backbone to the new realist/antiwar braintrust. As brave generals are showing us again and again by speaking out, the military knows that the neocons' ideas are crazy. Chomsky got a rousing ovation from the West Point cadets. Say that again: Noam Chomsky got a rousing ovation from the West Point cadets. What a great country we could still be...

Noam Chomsky has, on Znet (at zmag.org), now joined the chorus criticizing the Walt-Mearsheimer article in LRB on the power of the Israel lobby. Chomsky gives the authors credit for debating a verboten subject, but says, It's the oil and corporate interests, stupid (that have dictated policy in the Mideast). It's typical of Chomsky, as a materialist, to say this. He has always missed the sociological component of this issue, and he's doing so now. Hitchens does the same thing on Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2138741/) when he shrugs off the pro-Israel advisers in the Administration's war party as just a bunch of passionate Jewish neocons who happened to end up at Bush's elbow. What both men are missing is the transformation of the establishment in the last generation, the growing strength of Jews in our leadership class. I am part of this transformation, and it has largely been a great thing: reflection of diversity, openness and growing sophistication in educational and cultural values. The problem of the Jewish arrival in the leadership class is that we deny we've arrived. To say so goes against Jewish identity, as persecuted outsiders. Or it seems to echo anti-Semitic arguments the Nazis used about conspiratorial Jewish influence. But the result is that we completely fail to recognize our power, and fail, in certain respects, to exercise it responsibly. That failure is evident in the most questionable aspect of U.S. policy in the Middle East: the refusal by anyone in the Establishment to condemn Israel's near-40 year occupation of Arab lands. To his credit, Hitchens, a fellow traveler of the neocons, says as much in his Slate article.

Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass.

But such statements are rarely heard in the mainstream. Congressmen can't make them, at the risk of their careers. Artists can't make them--witness the censorship of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at a progressive New York theater. I know where it comes from. The refusal to condemn the occupation grows out of Jewish existential fears: the sense, born of the Holocaust, that at any minute we're going to be wiped off the map. Hey, we are powerless victims. But (at a time of the fifth largest army in the world and Ivy League presidents who stand up for it) this is an unrealistic fear, and meantime the effect of that fear, the refusal to acknowledge the occupation (the "so-called occupation," Congressman Elliot Engel said on BBC yesterday) means ignoring what most other states see plainly as an ongoing disaster. It's all well and good to condemn radical Islam and suicide bombers. As I do. But what about the religious/nationalist zealots who are colonizing the west bank? Mum's the word. It's like the Catholic hierarchy refusing to admit the church has a pedophilia problem. That is the real strength of the Israel lobby: taking this issue off the table in American public life, whether it's the Congress, The New York Times or the Washington thinktanks. It's not a conspiracy, it's simply the reflection of the fact that people who grew up loving Israel are now an important part of the establishment, and they are inflexible when it comes to this issue. And that is the "stranglehold" Mearsheimer and Walt identified in the paper that couldn't be published in America.

Fear the left, the center says."The middle part of the country-the great red zone that voted for Bus  read more »