I think I was too harsh on Noam Chomsky yesterday. Oh well, I said it. Anyway, here’s Peter Voskamp, editor of the Block Island Times, offering a better picture of the great man:
I saw him a few years ago in Austin and he was up there for what
seemed like hours– a true marathon. He spoke in one theater, and it
was pumped into another sold-out theater on a screen. He had his
sleeves rolled up and kept going and going, a real
inspiration. So I wonder what happened in NY yesterday. Maybe
he’s tired; maybe there was a mix up in communications.The analogy of his that I always pull out is that of the sports fan:
the common man, as illustrated in the stats-steeped sports fan, can
handle complex issues if they are presented truthfully. He or she can
get involved in the debate equally well-informed, and their takes
have just as much credibility as the so-called experts.This would certainly be the case in regard to the Iraq situation.
What joys the best and brightest with their endless credentials have
brought to the region.
Nice.
As if you could be harsh on Chomsky – you were only harsh on yourself, exposing a level of ignorance and hypocrisy generally reserved for Whitehouse spokes and a majority of mainstream journalists. Like the article which preceded it, a truly pathetic apology. Just as people demanding freedom or common sense "emboldens the terrorists", your facade of insight "enfeebles the reader". I hope that you waste but a minute recognizing how the mirror mocks you when you finally wake from your ego-led slumber.
From the announcements for the event online, it seems that the Chomsky event was billed quite accurately: "Professor Chomsky will comment on and respond to Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech…Professor Chomsky's lecture will be preceeded by a screening of Pinter's speech. Professor Chomsky will take questions from the audience on US foreign policy following the screening."
As well, he gave a free lecture on linguistics just two hours before the Miller Theater event.
So what was the problem?
I may be intellectually challenged but I have never been able to endure chomsky in person, on video or in print. He is too plodding or something. He doesn't hold my attention. I'm almost 60 years old so I doubt it is ADD-I watch long foreign movies and spend hours with Dostoyevski's novels without a hint of boredom-and I must admit, not a few tears when appropriate. I watched that Kurosawa movie that takes place in a major snowstorm-and for the life of me I can't remember the name of it, and laughed all the way through it-I must admit I was with someone I had helped to remove from exactly that sort of dire depression.
I never met anyone who said "ohy veh!" I never met anybody who was fixated on "blood libel" I never met anyone who wanted to go to Israel except southern baptists and a spanish (catholic) nun, who wept loudly when she saw anything that looked like blood because it remided her of the passion of the christ. I laughed at her, which she evidently did not understand as she did, on that occasion, whack me with a common classroom object which may not now be part of classroom equipment-a four foot long "pointer" that looked like a pool stick. She also called me "an athiest" a "communist" and "a heretic". I immediately embraced all three. But it was too much work. It's hard for me to be stupid on three fronts at the same time.
When you say "zionism" the first thing that pops into my mind is "first word response". It may help you to know that when someone says anti-anything the first thing that pops into my feeble mind is Joe McCarthy. I was just a boy when I saw joe on television. I thought he was soomes ort of new version of Groucho Marx. when I saw one witness ask him to define communism and he fumbled,mumbled, and stumbled and faltered I thought the duck had forgotten to drop down. I later learned that Mr. McCarthy had no idea of what communism was-indeed, he couldn't define anything that didn't come from a bottle whose contents was laced with alcohol. Actually Karl Marx and Freddie Ingalls gave 10 or so benchmarks for commusists in their manifesto.
Because of his blurred vision Joe McCarthy probably couldn't read it but was too proud to admit so. His love child, ann coulter seems to have inherited his looks as well as his propensity to alcoholic level babbling.
Who am I to disagree.
One of my sister's friends did go to Israel to spend the summer on a kibbutz-she wasn't really jewish but she was adpoted and so had little freedom of choice (much the same as russian orphans adopted in russia to be cannon fodder for the IDF these days are morally culpable in some sense, and yet not because of the circumstances.
Things are overly simple and you cut through them-thank you1