[Vision2020] Re: Noam Chomsky and other concerns

[Joan Opyr]

David, I certainly apologize for putting words in your mouth -- that was not my intention.  As you can no doubt tell, the name "David Horowitz" has a less than salubrious effect on me.  In fact, it's downright Pavlovian  He makes me want to bite someone.  This time, I guess it was you.

I am not as suspicious of The Lancet's figures as you are because The Lancet is tracking the body count via Iraqi hospital reports.  Not coincidentally, we began our bombing campaign -- our shock and awe -- with targeted hospital bombings.  This suggests to me that we (meaning the US) didn't want an accurate civilian body count.  But why quibble?  Shall we split the difference between 30,000 and 100,000 and call it 50,000?  I don't know about you (except that you are hardly hunlike in any of your arguments) but 50,000 doesn't make me feel any better.  And I don't think it's correct.  It is possible that The Lancet is counting the victims of car bombings.  Those aren't directly our fault -- though I suppose that, too, is arguable.  (Ted?  Tom?  Feel free to jump in here.)

Now, speaking of putting words in mouths, I don't support pulling out of Iraq now.  In fact, I support the Colin Powell position: we broke it; we bought it.  It is now our moral obligation to see this thing through.  But it will cost us, and it will cost us dearly.  People on this list have recalled our "democratization" of Japan and tried to use that as a justification and a projection of what we might do in Iraq.  I think we can both agree that that is a poor analogy: first, we completely and utterly defeated Japan.  We razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the ground, atomically.  Then, we occupied the country with 300,000 troops for ten years.  That doesn't seem to be our plan for Iraq.  I can't tell that we have a plan for Iraq.  What I fear is a quick and dirty pull-out, something akin to our departure from Saigon.  We'll leave a lot of "collaborators" behind to be massacred by their own, and we'll find that the Middle East is more unstable than when we began this misadventure.  But then we can't let that happen, can we?  So how will we get more troops to Iraq?  No, wait -- how will we get more troops, period?  We're not meeting our recruiting quotas, so, well, you do the math.  I'm only on my first cup of coffee.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment

PS: I can't leave the Democratic Party.  I never leave any party until all the booze is gone, and I'm wearing the lamp shade on my head.  And you can gawp all you like; I think Howard Dean is da bomb.  He was a great governor of Vermont; he speaks his mind; and the Party establishment hates him.  That, at the moment, is good enough for me.

----- Original Message -----
From: David M. Budge
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2005 8:53 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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