Chomsky, the son of a teacher, majored in linguistics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remembers as models the language professor Zelig Harris and philosopher Nelson Goodman. The Spanish Civil War and Zionist connections were the first influences on his political philosophy. After Penn, he took a year off at Harvard to work on his dissertation, which was accepted in 1955, “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”. In 1957 he published the seminal work,”Syntactic Structures”, which earned him international fame--as well as an assistant professorship at MIT. His subsidiary career of political agitation began in 1964 with his intense objections to the Vietnam War. His website lists a prolific outpouring of polemic,the latest concerning the possibility of war in Iran.
My hunch is that the MSM pointedly ignores Chomsky’s analyses because he’s usually way above their heads. Which, alas, are characteristically empty. Take so close a neighbor as Canada. Edward Wasserman, Washington and Lee professor of journalism, recently complained in Poynter.org (April 16, 2007) that there were no longer any American bureaus in Canada. None! He insists that our newspapers “should poke and prod and demand that we pay attention to people abroad even when they are neither disaster victims nor terrorists.” On the contrary, Wasserman alleges, “by their inattention, the media perpetuate the dangerous belief that our divine right is to speak and be heeded, never to listen.” I was astonished to read recently that in the notorious Green Zone there was only one American fluent in Arabic! Talk about fighting in the dark.
Notoriously monglottish America is thus paradoxically incapable of running an Empire. John Kerry was alleged to have stumbled when he casually observed that if you didn’t study hard, you’d end up in Iraq. He actually stumbled upon an embarassing contradiction in our Armed Forces. As we have seen so brutally in Abu Graib and Haditha, our fighters are schizophrenic, the GI Joes and Josephines have tended in the post Nixon Volunteer Army to be small town “losers” by metropolitan standards, officered by upwardly middle class winners. In a more and more mindless war run by two Vietnam Era AWOLS. (I consider V.P. Cheney’s “other priorities” as deferring to his preference to stay home.)
And infected by American Exceptionalist rhetoric, most Americans, with unusual exceptions like Noam Chomsky and former New York foreign correspondent Steven Kinzer, really still believe that America has never been interested in Empire. Even Christopher Hitchens was astonished to find researching his biography of Thomas Jefferson that we were fighting for our Mediterranean “rights” against the Barbary Pirates even before 1800! As a president, he had the difficult task and retrieving the Navy cruiser. U.S.S. Philadelphia and its sailors. Kinzer’s seminal book, “Invasions”, on the other hand, shows how beginning with the takeover of the Hawaii Islands, we have been an imperial force unstabilizing the world in our own strategic interests. Only a handful of fully informed critics like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky know about this history, chapter and verse, and how that complicates our current struggles against Islamic foes.We are literally flying blind into these whirlwinds.
Take the current crisis over Iran. Failing miserably in Iraq our war mongers fantasize about taking on Iran, just as their failure to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan had moved them to invade Iraq. Compare this adolescent fantasizing with Chomsky on the perils of war with Iran, which he believes will inevitably lead to World War III. On his website
Chomsky’s newest book, “Interventions” (Open Media Series, City Lights Books, $12.95) is actually Old Hat, forty- four 1,000 word op ed pieces written between 2002 and 2007. Never knew he was writing op eds? Yup, the New York Times syndicate! Published widely abroad, and in a few unknown local U.S.papers. But never once in the New York Times itself! Is that not an intellectual scandal? We must be content with Maureen Dowd’s increasingly cute political psycho dramas and Thomas Friedman’s more and more boring pep talks about improving U.S.education and greening business. Wonder what you’ve been missing. I did. Here are some swatches:
Take John Bolton, recently if briefly, our Ambassador to the United Nations (p.126), “Last November (2004) the UN Committee on Disarmament voted in favor of the treaty by 147 to 1. The unilateral U.S. vote is, in effect, a veto. It provides some further insight into the ranking of survival of the species on the list of priorities of government planners. Earlier the Bush administration sent point man John Bolton to inform Europe that lengthy negotiations on enforcing bioweapons were over, because they were not 'in the best interests of the United States,' thereby increasing the threat of bioterror. That is consistent with Bolton’s forthright stand: "When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interests to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests, we will not. It is only natural that he should be nomiated to be America’s ambassador to the United Nations, in a calculated insult to Europe and to the world.”
Chomsky also has an historical memory to shame our median op edifiers. He knows that “democracy promoting” Paul Wolfowitz was one of the most important supporters of Indonesia’s Suharto both as Reagan’s ambassador there and later( pp.52-53) and that John Negroponte practiced his democracy spreading skills as our Ambassador to Honduras, legitimizing the CIA’s Contra scheme to subvert Nicaragua.(p.90). And there was more to the CITGO story of Hugo Chavez’s offering cheaper heating oil to the poor of Boston and the South Bronx. “The deal developed after a group of U.S. senators sent a letter to nine major oil companies asking them to donate a portion of their recent record profits to help poor residents cover heating bills. The only response came from CITGO.” (p.155.) He explains how Washington trained El Salvador military assassinated six Jesuit priests and Archbishop Oscar Romero, his country’s “voice for the voiceless”. (p.122).
But more signifcantly, he chides the economic establishment for ignoring the real traditions of democracy in America. “In the United States,” he explains, "we enjoy a legacy of great privilege and freedom, remarkable by comparative and historical standards. We can abandon that legacy and take the easy way of pessimism: Everything is hopeles, so I’ll quit. Or we can make use of that legacy to further a democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in politics but also in the crucial economic arena. These are hardly radical ideas. They were articulated clearly, for example, by John Dewey, the leading twentieth century U.S. social philospher, who pointed out that until ‘industrial feudalism’ is replaced by ‘industrial democracy,’ politics will remain “the shadow cast by big business over society.” You have only to taste the current hubris of the corporados who have successfully financed Bush’s disabling of the trade union movement as well as hard-won traditions of corporate surveillance to know how disastrous these changes have been.
And Chomsky is ignored because he mocks so successfully. Take the attempted privatization of Social Security, a battle fought out against the background of croney incompetence in the Katrina Affair.” Opinion and official policy are once again in conflict. As in the past, most Americans favor national health insurance. To cite just one of many illustrations, in a 2003 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 80 percent regarded universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’. Quite apart from these considerations, Social Security is based on an extremely dangerous principle: that you should care whether the disabled widow across town has food to eat. The Social Security ‘reformers’ would rather have you concentrate on maximizing your own consumption of goods and subordinating yourself to power. Caring for other people, and taking community responsibility for things like health and retirement—that's deeply subversive.” (p.132.)
And he can sneer sharply when called for. “There’s a good reason why the United States cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. The issue can scarcely be raised because it conflicts with firmly established doctrine: We’re supposed to believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq if it were an island in the Indian Ocean and its man export were pickles, not petroleum.” (p.162).
And, yes, the City Lights Books cited as publisher is the same one that brought out Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl!” in 1956! Indeed, the book’s cover is from the painting “Unfinished Flag of the United States” (1988) by one Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Old poets never die, they just take up painting. Unfinished is the key word. Chomsky wants us to live up to our ideals, not matter how hard the prospect. It is a disgrace that the New York Times Syndicate publishes his op eds, but won’t publish them in America’s “newspaper of record”. Sulzberger, Jr. should stop spouting bromides and start publishing the world’s most respected public intellectuals.
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