The Daily Grasshopper

Another day, another short essay on the daily news. Hope you enjoy it.

===========================================================================

Football fans and newspaper junkies love Sunday. I went to the Kiki’s Quik Mart in Brighton yesterday and picked up the Sunday Globe, the Sunday Herald, and the Sunday New York Times. Ran me $7.50! I suppose I could save money and just read them online, but there’s nothing like a big pile of unread newspapers on the table to keep your mind off the fact that the Patriots didn’t make the playoffs and the Jets did.

Speaking of New York, I wrote yesterday that the Saturday Times’ business section alluded to the development of Iraqi oil fields being one outcome of the Bush administration’s proposed war. Lo and behold, in the Sunday Times Op-ed section, there was an opinion piece by columnist Thomas Friedman called “A War for Oil?” I’m not kidding. Read it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/opinion/05FRIE.html?8hpib

If you don’t have time to read it, here’s the basic gist (I’m quoting the article): “Any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be – in part – about oil. To deny that is laughable.”

Now, I’ve never liked Tom Friedman. He’s written some very unkind things about people like me – people who think that trade policy should include some protections for the environment and workers’ rights. To Friedman, I’m a “flat-earther” for thinking that the “free trade” agreements that our government negotiates (in secret) with other governments should include input from all sectors of society, not just large corporations. Insofar as trade policy has a direct effect on the price of what we buy, the price of what we sell, the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, I think I want to have some say in how it gets worked out. Call me old-fashioned. Friedman does.

And this piece doesn’t make me like him any more, despite the fact that it bolsters my argument that we are about to invade Iraq first and foremost because of our government’s desire to control that country’s oil reserves. Why? Check out this sentence: “I have no problem with a war for oil,” Friedman writes, qualifying that statement with “if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation.” Shocking, isn’t it? Friedman is OK with the Bush gang’s plan to send American soldiers to their deaths and bomb innocent Iraqi citizens as long as we all commit to getting serious about carpooling and put weather stripping on our windows. And this is the liberal press we’re talking about here.

The Boston Sunday Globe is noteworthy because its “Ideas” section gives some ink (and a nice photo) to MIT’s Noam Chomsky. Of course, the article is about linguistics, which is, technically speaking, Chomsky’s field of expertise. However, he’s been moonlighting for about four decades now as the world’s best-known American dissident, delivering speeches all over the world and researching and writing hundreds of books and articles on the projection of U.S. military and economic power around the globe. What’s funny is that the “Thinking Big” section of “Ideas” focuses on “Democratizing the Mideast,” a subject about which Chomsky is one of the world’s leading experts. Instead of Chomsky’s views on the Mideast, which are sharply critical of the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we get bromides (“Dos and don’ts for Mideast democracy” – really, I’m not kidding) from a senior associate from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Of course, you’d have to know who Chomsky is to understand what a sick joke this is, and most Globe readers probably don’t have a clue about him because it’s policy at the Globe and The New York Times (which owns the Globe) not to even publish his letters to the editor. He had one op-ed in the Globe during the Kosovo war, and that’s it. Punch his name into a google search and see what you come up with. The piece on linguistics includes the line “When Chomsky speaks, people listen.” Sure, just as long as we keep to a safe topic like linguistics. When Noam starts talking about overwhelming U.S. support to Turkey in the 1990s as that country waged virtual genocide against its Kurdish population, all of a sudden nobody wants to listen to Chomsky speak.

Here’s the article he wrote last month for International Human Rights Day (December 10):

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2805