Chomsky, Bloody Chomsky: A Profile in Complexity

As famed M.I.T. linguist and political dissident Avram Noam Chomsky, arguably the most important intellectual alive approaches his eighth decade on earth, and perhaps his fifth as the chief fly in the ointment of American political culture, he shows little indication of modifying any of his hardline and absolutist beliefs. He certainly did not seem phased by the terrorist slaughter of September 11, brushing it out of the way to get on with business as usual - indeed, rushing out yet another screed in his favored medium of late, a pamphlet of interviews titled 9-11 conducted by a kneeling acolyte asking predigested questions.

The contemporary hero of the campus left, known to grace the covers of punk zines and vinyl B-sides, Chomsky is prominent among a small cabal of leftists (he used to call himself an anarcho-syndicalist) who have become convenient punching bags for both irate neoconservatives and liberals out to prove their war mettle in the aftermath of 9/11. The distinguished list includes Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver and Gore Vidal, eminences of a literary culture that had been in fair decline long before Osama Bin Laden first started to show up in the morning papers. I say distinguished without irony. All of the above listed, not least of all Chomsky, are great minds in every sense of that term, and one hopes they will be remembered for their intellectual and literary achievements rather than their intellectual abdication in the face of an outright attack on the civilization that facilitated those achievements in the first place.

I have faith, as Chomsky has often professed to, in the awesome infinity and wonder of human creative potential. He came to it as the greatest linguist of the 20th century. I arrive from a humbler vantage point, a mere appreciator of great literature and great thought. I can only pray Norman Mailer will enter history as the best American prose writer after Faulkner, the mythic pen behind Armies of the Night and Ancient Evenings, and not as the bitter old coot who said that the World Trade Center was ugly anyway, so what’s the big deal? Ditto Gore Vidal for his monumental series of America novels, and not his suggestion that the Bush administration facilitated the 9/11 attacks to line the pockets of their business friends. Jean-Paul Sartre, I’m sure, will go down as the mind behind the most important philosophy of his century, and not as an apologist for the Soviet abattoir.
But of all these figures, Chomsky seems the most bent on shadowing his original and very real achievements with a relentless assault on liberal democracy, to the point one must assume that in his case, old Noam himself would like the above criteria reversed.