[Vision2020] Re: Noam Chomsky and other concerns

Sun Feb 13 09:09:48 PST 2005

As much as this interaction almost intrigues me . . . . 

<DELETE>  *click*

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are
dull, some have weird names, and all are different colors....but they all
exist very nicely in the same box. 

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From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
On Behalf Of David M. Budge
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2005 2:02 AM
To: Joan Opyr
Cc: Vision2020 Moscow
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Re: Noam Chomsky and other concerns

Joan, it's unfair of you to stuff words in my mouth (as in Horowitz) as I've
hardly room for my feet as it is.  Secondly. I agree with Horowitz about as
much as I agree with Hitchens (not so much),  but as I've said, even a
broken clock is right twice a day.  Hitchens, however, can turn a rhetorical
phrase almost as well as Churchill (that's Winston, not Ward) and I read him
for his style more than his substance.  Do you think it's possible I could
agree with his positions on economics after listening to several days of my
hun-like narratives on libertarianism? He does drink too much though
(scotch, not bourbon), and I'm with you on Yugoslavia.  

I'm a bit skeptical on the Lancet's "100,000 dead" statistic you quote as
even Human Rights Watch thinks that number is quite exaggerated, and the
leading source of tracking such numbers, iragbodycount.net, puts the high
side at just under 20,000. Not that that's insignificant, but one must needs
to be careful when spouting statistics that may be incendiary.  Keep in mind
that Human Rights Watch estimated that Saddam murdered an average of about
30,000 a year for ten years. Personally, I was extremely conflicted over the
Iraq initiative and never endorsed military action, but there are very smart
people on both sides of the argument and I've not just yet made up my mind
as the rationale of the arguments are most often based on a yet inconclusive
outcome. (how's that for a chicken-sh_t answer.)  I will, however, stand on
my position that pulling out now would be immoral, but I'm sure you have
much to say about that.

Last but not least, my suffering from a chronic case of over-zealous
optimism, makes me stick to my guns in hope for you having some sort of
political epiphany.  And, as apparently went unnoticed, I'm much more
interested in you leaving the Democratic party than I am recruiting you into
any other.  I'm just hoping for greater pluralism in our politics,
especially among the learned.  I'm sure that now that Howard (my barbaric
yaup) Dean has become Chair of the DNC, you've great hope for the revival of
the New Deal.  But perhaps I'm discounting your last (incredibly insightful)
paragraph as glibness.

Dave Budge

Joan Opyr wrote:

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.

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