The Daily Grasshopper

On Friday, January 31, 2003, a new movie called "Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times" opened in Boston. It's not showing at the local megaplex, mind you, but you can still read about it in the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald - in the Arts section. You see, despite the fact that the Herald review of the documentary hails Chomsky as a "dynamo of knowledge and opinion" who adds "needed historical perspective and humanism to the debate on world affairs" and the Globe review credits him with "an encyclopedic grasp of the disenfranchised histories that few encyclopedias track," you'll never see his writings appear in the Opinion section (or "Ideas" section, as the Sunday Globe so presumptuously calls it). You can read the reviews here, and you can actually go see the movie at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/031/living/_Ghetto_tours_little_known_Holocaust_haven+.shtml (scroll down to see the review - it doesn't even rate it's own separate piece!)

http://www2.bostonherald.com/entertainment/movies/chom01312003.htm

Those of you who have been getting these e-mails for the last month know Chomsky's name. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems we face in today's world is that the ratio of people who know recognize Nomar Garciaparra's name to the people who recognize Noam Chomsky's is roughly a million to one. In my essay about Thomas Friedman's New York Times column "A War for Oil?" I linked to an article Chomsky had written for Human Rights Day in 2002, after which I asked "Now do you see why he doesn’t get published in the Globe?" (Read the original essay here: http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/010503warforoilok.html.)

The review in the Herald actually gives people a better idea of what Chomsky thinks than the Globe review does. It's as if the Globe can't even bring itself to give the guy's views an airing in a review of a movie about him (Chomsky has written dozens of books on U.S. foreign and economic policy, virtually none of which ever gets reviewed in the New York Times or Globe). In fact, the Globe review doesn't offer one specific example of what it calls Chomsky's "leftist writings that matter-of-factly seek to influence public opinion and policy makers around the world." They probably just wanted to save room for the more expansive pieces they ran on "Biker Boyz" and "Final Destination 2."

By contrast, the Herald offers a fair amount of depth. Here's the meat of the Herald review:

"Although some views Chomsky espouses during ``Power and Terror'' are frustratingly vague, such as when he says the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East has been U.S. policy, it's difficult to refute his take on Sept. 11, 2001.

Chomsky rails against the double standard he saw in much of the reaction to Sept. 11: Yes, the terrorist attacks were atrocious and inexcusable, but hasn't the U.S. government inflicted similar actions on other countries?

Perhaps his most stinging words come when he tells his fellow Americans how we can stop terrorism: ``Stop participating in it.'' He cites our government's sponsorship of violent regimes in Israel and Turkey, and our support of dictators such as Saddam Hussein when it suits our purpose."

I've seen Chomsky, who teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lecture on a few occasions, and he has profoundly influenced my thinking on a whole range of topics. I'm sure he would get a kick out of the Herald reviewer dismissing his claim that "the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East has been U.S. policy" as being "frustratingly vague." What's so "frustratingly vague" about that assertion? It's crystal clear - "the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East has been U.S. policy." Unless, of course, you've been subjected to the U.S. corporate media's teachings on the subject of the Middle East your entire life, and led to believe that all our government - whether Democrats or Republicans - wants in the region is peace and stability. Then, when faced with a completely opposite assessment of the situation, a person is left to grapple with the fact that two sets of facts are at odds. Rather than conclude that one is right and the other is wrong, the person instead attacks Chomsky's dissident view as being "vague," even "frustratingly" so because Chomsky has the nerve to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy - backed by "an encyclopedic grasp" of the subject matter, and characteristic precision.

Anyone who wants to understand what's happening in the world today should read as much of Chomsky's work as possible. You'll find many of his articles and speeches on the ZNet site, and I've linked to his latest one, published today, here (caveat emptor - it can be dense with factual information and requires some time to completely get through):

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2938

Chomsky has also written extensively on the media's role in shaping public opinion, and has inspired many (yours truly included) to cast a critical eye on the propaganda function served by large media conglomerates. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorite of his writings, "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?" (published in 1997):

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers—the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

You can read the whole essay here:

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chomoct97.htm

My favorite part of the review in the Herald is the very last sentence which explains that the film is unrated because there are "no objectionable elements." Again, I think Chomsky would have to laugh. His entire life's work (outside of his groundbreaking theories of linguistic development) is considered more or less taboo - extremely objectionable - by the political mainstream. On most of Chomsky's books, you'll find a blurb from the New York Times about him being "arguably the world's most important intellectual." Here's his response:

"Perhaps I ought to begin by reporting something that's never read - the line about the "arguably the most important intellectual" in the world and so on comes from a publisher's blurb. And you always got to watch those things (audience laughs) because if you go back to the original you'll find that that sentence is actually there -- this is in The New York Times -- but the next sentence is: "Since that's the case, how can he write such terrible things about American foreign policy?" And they never quote that part. But in fact if it wasn't for that second sentence I would begin to think that I'm doing something wrong. And I'm not joking about that. It's true that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but the emperor doesn't like to be told it, and the emperor's lapdogs like The New York Times are not going to enjoy the experience if you do."

One of the most important achievements of the right-wing conservative movement that seems to grow more dominant by the day in this country is the claim that the New York Times somehow represents a "liberal" point of view. Of course, when you compare its editorial positions to those of Fox News, this is accurate. But read some of Professor Chomsky's critiques of media bias in the U.S., and you'll start to see how quickly that claim falls apart. Just don't expect to read it in the newspaper - even in the Arts section.