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Wither ould Noam Chomsky, supposedly America's foaming mouthpiece of the radical left? A recent speech he gave at his patron-institution, MIT, on October 18th (http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm) revealed not a scary left-wing revolutionary ready to rock the corrupt foundations of Empire Amerikkka, but rather, a tweedy old dolt rattling off a tired, harmless list of grievances, a list so stale it would require a plenum of the Central Committee to alter. A pampered lefty who is a hundred times more embalmed than Lenin, Mao and Uncle Ho combined. It's the beginning of this speech that shows what a narrow-minded old dolt Chomsky has become. In his introduction, the scary left-wing radical makes a big show about how we should all agree that the attack on September 11th was bad. And anyone who doesn't agree is no friend of Chomsky's. What a concession that was! Watch out Vladimir Ilyich! In fact, it's a cheap Rhetoric 1A tactic, a lame way of saying, "Although what I will tell you is preposterous and stale, don't forget, there are even more preposterous people out there who make me look downright intelligent!" I've seen this kind of rhetorical trick used a zillion times. Usually it begins, "Slavery/The Holocaust was evil. It was bad and anyone who doesn't think so is wrong. Buuuuuut..." And from there the imbecile goes on to tell the pick-up truck faithful that everything bad is really the Jews'/Negro's fault... I am a fan of some of Chomsky's work, but have never been comfortable with his bland consistency and reified radicalism, the result of years of musty tenure in the bourgeois institutions that he'd been hired-for-life to "attack". You don't pick up a Chomsky article expecting to discover anything, or expecting to trace his discovery; instead, his explanation for everything evil comes first, the evidence or circumstances come second, like a rigged Easter egg hunt. It gives us all the false impression of diversity of opinion, even if it is state-sponsored.
It's incredible that after an event that even he admits is one of the most awful, paradigm-shaking events in history, all Chomsky can offer us is yet another account of how Reagan stomped on the Sandanistas. You can almost hear Chris Elliot angrily denouncing our actions in "Neeekaaarrrrrakuah!" in every line. If there's one lesson to be learned by all the evil America has committed on its Latin American neighbors, compared to our deferential treatment of Saudi Arabia and its pampered citizenry of spoiled, narrow-minded bigots, it's that it's better to slaughter than to pamper. After all, no Guatemalans or Nicaraguans ever flew a plane into an American skyscraper, in spite of the fact that we've been genociding them for decades now. Sometimes Chomsky exposes Western evil that others haven't -- but that doesn't make him a great thinker, just a good paralegal. In fact, this speech shows that Chomsky is little more than a glorified trained monkey. It's depressing, really, how successfully the American Left has been coapted by the bourgeois institutions which it was hired to "subvert". But that's not the purpose Chomsky serves any more. His purpose, it seems, is to give a certain market segment in the passive Left the feeling that just by listening to someone and getting momentarily angry or concerned, that they are already better human beings than, for example, the brutes who listen to Rush Limbaugh, who has used this event as an excuse to -- get this! -- bash the "liberal media" and the Democrats! I say, feed 'em all to the alligators. Going to this Chomsky speech would be like flipping on a classic rock radio station and -- whoa! -- hearing a "Get the Led out!" hour of Led Zeppelin. The lack of dynamism or discovery is why, in spite of appearing so "radical" to more dull-witted crackers, Chomsky comes off as flat, fake, ineffectual, especially now, when something new and interesting is required.
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