Noam Chomsky Is 95 and Alive, Let’s Celebrate
Last week, some people mourned, and some people celebrated the death of Henry Kissinger. I saw his realpolitik as antidemocratic and fascist and often wondered how he could have been nominated for, let alone win, a Nobel Peace Prize, like he was some kind of Martin Luther King. I recalled his work to undermine the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which led to the extension of the Vietnam war and to thousands more casualties on all sides. In his must-read memoir, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg remembers that Kissinger and Nixon named him “the most dangerous man in America who needed to be stopped at any cost” and who may have wanted to have Ellsberg rubbed out — them fearing, writes Ellsberg, that he would release to the public their intentions to nuke North Vietnam into submission.
The wretched attempt to appoint Kissinger head of the 9/11 Commission, made some observers wonder whether there wasn’t some kind of Insider angle being protected. If Ike’s referenced Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) had wanted a CEO they could have done no better than sitting K at the head of the table to protect their interests. Kissinger was the “most dangerous man in America,” as far as many Lefties were concerned. Kissinger is dead, long live Death.
This week we have the opportunity to be grateful and to celebrate the life of Noam Chomsky, who turns 95 on the seventh of December, Pearl Harbor Day. Although he’s not been speaking publicly since the summer, his words and thoughts are still being freely distributed via interviews from as recently as June. All Noam Chomsky has ever done is ask us politely to think before we utter; to refuse to consent to manufactured lies and accounts passed down through chains of anonymous highly placed political sources, with private agendas often inimical to public interests. Many folks of my generation, which lived through the shock to the system that was the 60s, recall a counterculture fuelled by the political activism of Chomsky, his reasoned responses to the excesses of Empire — indeed, a rejection of Empire itself. We may have been wearing Che t-shirts, but we were filled with Chomsky outrage.
Chomsky, of course, is a famous linguist. Words matter. Words as byproducts of thought are unique to human beings. Our creativity and spontaneity are innate and to be revered and evolved as part of our species. Groupthink and massaged messages and opacity of purpose and all manner of obfuscation are to be avoided and deconstructed. A situation like Orwell’s 1984, where 2+2 will equal 5 (or else), is a return to herd thinking; backward and fascist; depriving the many of their natural gifts of speech in order to service the memes and slogans and unchallenged credos of elites. Most recently, Chomsky has asked us all to be concerned with three global issues that could lead to the demise of humans: Nukes, Climate Change, and the seeming end of Democracy.
It so happens that I have been taking a university course about the ancient philosophers, including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. I was reading Phaedo, Plato’s account of the last hours of Socrates before he died, wherein he sought to console his acolytes and fellow philosophers with his take on death and — new to them — the immortality of the soul. I see Noam Chomsky as the closest we will get to having a Socrates in our midst. Like those at his bedside, I will miss Noam Chomsky when he’s gone. Chomsky doesn’t believe in the immortality of the soul. He’s a one-and-doner: Let us savor his presence a bit longer.
Several months ago, I spoke with Bev Boisseau Stohl, Chomsky’s longtime office manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky and Me, her memoir of her years with the professor, had just been released. I read it and interviewed Stohl about it. It was a fun book to read, lots of unusual little details about Chomsky as a person, the world he shared with his late wife, Carol, and relationship with Daniel Ellsberg and Howard Zinn, and meetings with Tim Berners Lee; actors Catherine Keener and Wallace Shawn; and the writer Norman Mailer, among many other names and types. The book is full of unusual details, quirks and humor.
Despite all of this liveliness amongst the intellectual hoi polloi, Chomsky had always struck me as rather unapproachable and maybe even (gulp) aloof. Stohl, when I spoke to her a couple of days ago in follow-up, disabused me of my shallow illusion. He’s anything but aloof, she says. Seemingly, like Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), Chomsky is a friend to Everyman. In Chomsky and Me she writes, “Noam met with presidents, activists, prime ministers, and ambassadors. He had discussions with mathematicians, mill workers, priests, physicists, teachers, and performers.” But also, she wrote in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the hordes included: “the amazing, the unexpected, the scary: students, activists, authors, at least one Sufi, political prisoners, movie directors, political hopefuls, international leaders, Cirque du Soleil clowns, brilliant thinkers, lost souls.” These were his people.
Cool, I thought, but owned that Noam struck me as dour and rigid and even (gulp) humorless. Not unlike Socrates in his gadfly prime. But Stohl replied, “It’s a misconception and might have something to do with people’s self-consciousness when they first meet him,” she said. “I mean, if you’re going to be taken seriously, you have to be serious. But he has his humorous side.”
In her Chronicle piece she even provides a nifty anecdote to back her allegation of office hijinks afoot: “‘I have no idea how Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character sneaked through my gate to ask Noam outrageous things like, “How many words does you know?” and “What is some of them?” I do remember that Noam came to me afterward looking dazed. “No more men in gold suits,” he said, sighing.’”
Turning serious, Stohl raises the horrific doings in the Israel-Hamas war. “We miss his voice right now. This is one of his main topics of discussion, she says. “He’s tried to meet with both sides. He met with Hamas. And of course, when he did, many Israelis were angry. He just wanted Peace.” Stohl explains that Chomsky has been mostly unavailable since Ellsberg’s death in June.
I enjoyed reading about the comings and goings at Chomsky’s office. (I could even see the development of an HBO comedy series coming out of it.) I waxed particularly chortlesome over Stohl’s account of the Chomsky office moving from his longtime home in the nearly decrepit Building 20 to new crazy digs designed by Frank Gehry. The building Chomsky newly occupied looked like some demigod from the right had punched it in the mouth. Stohl went on to relate how Chomsky got lost at first and had to call for her assistance to guide him to his office amidst the disorienting interior features. Chomsky didn’t even know where to put his bookshelves, what with the walls coming down at angles. Abbie Hoffman had once Yippie-yowled, “Revolution for the Hell of it.” But this Gehry stuff was ridiculous. I’m only going to assume that his move to the University of Arizona was related to this madcap unreason.
Chomsky and Kissinger disliked each other enormously. Chomsky’s prominent position as a public intellectual and critic of US policy posed a challenge to Kissinger’s power and influence. Chomsky’s effective communication and ability to articulate critiques of Kissinger’s actions likely threatened Kissinger and his legacy. Who knows, but maybe Chomsky was on the same hit list Ellsberg was allegedly on. Back in 1973, when Kissinger ruled, Watergate “plumber” G. Gordan Liddy had offered to kidnap select hippies, Yippies, and dissidents and bring them to a black site in Mexico to liquidate them. So, let us celebrate Chomsky’s continuation as a luminescent biological entity on a planet engulfed by infinite darkness.
I highly recommend Bev Stohl’s Chomsky and Me and urge you to buy it.
Captain Fantastic: https://youtu.be/G7HC_Lv9fnM
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Bev Stohl’s blogsite: Bev Stohl’s Stata Confusion
Michel Gondry, animated documentary on Chomsky, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
