[Vision2020] Re: Noam Chomsky and other concerns

[Joan Opyr]

Dave writes:

"It is difficult to find rhetorical balance as a student of political philosophy.  In that effort I read regularly:  The Nation, The New Republic, Reason Magazine, and The National Review (don't choke Joan.) I also make sure I catch every Hitchens' piece in either Slate or Vanity Fair.  Given the progression of my leanings it's probably not difficult to figure out which I find to be more credible."


I am choking, David, not because you read The National Review but because you cite David Horowitz with apparent approval.  He, more than any of the other right-wing ideologues you mention, is frequently guilty of selective quotation and grotesque distortion.  I find his work shoddy in terms of research and his political analyses cheap and shallow.  I'm afraid Horowitz is the Right's answer to Camille Paglia -- another shallow thinker who disguises her lack of genuine depth with deft allusions to her "reading for tonnage" and a clever sleight of vocabulary:   

"Presto, change-o; I'm Susan Sontag!  No, really!  What do you mean what I just said makes no sense?  I used the word chthonic, didn't I?  Go on, define that!  Hah!  You can't.  Asshole."

(I hate Camille Paglia.  Can you tell?)

Though my affinity for the Democrats is, as I say, largely vestigial, you're wrong to think there's any hope for me.  I will stay in the party and fight for its salvation until the last dog (meaning that frothing old fool, Zell Miller) is hung.  I might have been a Rockefeller Republican -- I like Rockefeller Republicans -- but the words turn to ashes in my mouth  I . . . can't . . . do . . . it.

Ted -- I've read a good deal of Chomsky.  Not the complete works, of course, because that wouldn't leave me any time for Miss Marple, but of what I have read, I find myself more in sympathy with his politics than with his linguistic theory.  I began my academic career in linguistics (before I got tired of transcribing my accent into International Phonetic Alphabet form) and, even then, 1988-1993, Chomsky's linguistic work was widely considered outdated.  He was not/is not interested in language acquisition  He simply declares that the brain is "hardwired" for language and leaves it at that.  And so, except for a few die-hard students, linguistics professors tend to leave Chomsky alone.  His importance as an American intellectual, a free thinker, and a radical cannot be denied.  Agree or disagree, what he has to say on political subjects is fascinating.  He certainly can't be ignored or sidelined.

About Chomsky's statements in the 1970s re: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge -- Chomsky's positions, like the US government's, have obviously changed with new information and new political realities.  Who would have guessed that Pol Pot would murder a million of his own countrymen?  Who could have known that Khmer Rouge massacres would kill as many or more Cambodians than the illegal US bombing campaign?  What's important, I think, is to recognize that Pol Pot's crimes don't absolve us of our own.  Saddam Hussein's brutality doesn't make our disregard for Iraqi civilians (100,000 dead and counting) in the current war okay.  Dead is dead, and when you're standing at the graveside of a lost friend or relative, I doubt very much if you care about the political how and why.  It doesn't matter if that death was the consequence of the machinations of your own homegrown dictator or a faraway government.  You are enraged; you are bereaved; you're filled with grief and despair.  The question, then, is what do you do about it?  Take the philosophical approach?  Go home and keep your head down?  Join a resistance group or build a car-bomb or flee to Iran or Syria?

Right now, the only pot I'm interested in is the pot we're stirring -- and I don't make this pun for laughs.  There's nothing funny about the situation in Iraq, just as there was nothing funny about the destruction of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.  Would there have been a Pol Pot without our mass destruction of Cambodia's rice paddies, forests, and (however crude by our standards) government and infrastructure?  Would we be fighting a second Iraq War if George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan hadn't propped up and armed Saddam Hussein in the 1980s?  American actions have international consequences, but the vast majority of the population fails to recognize that.  America has big, big feet, but most of us vote and talk and behave as if we were a nation of toe-dancers.  This is where the (corporate) media lets us down.  This is where our two-party system lets us down.  This is where Republicans and Democrats are in perfect agreement: politics is about mouthing empty rhetoric and rallying just enough of the Rah-Rah crowd to push through an agenda that benefits the existing hegemony, i.e., the ruling class.

Oh, hell -- I'm not a Democrat, am I?  I'm an anarcho-syndicalist.  It was bound to happen someday . . .

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment

PS: Christopher Hitchens drinks too much.  He's a once-fine writer who has boiled too many brain cells in bourbon.  He lost me around about the time he advocated bombing seven kinds of hell out of Belgrade.  And what did we get for that?  The eternal enmity of the Serbs and a radical Islamist government in Kosovo.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
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