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Meanwhile, in an alternative galaxy

Tuesday, 4th September 2007

I once had an H.M. Bateman moment at a media dinner party when I made the mistake of saying that I didn't think much of Chomsky's politics. Silence all round. I'd completely forgotten that lots of otherwise sane people still worship him. Jonathan Rauch isn't one of them:

When I picked up the new Chomsky collection, my first reaction was to be glad that City Lights Books -- "published at the City Lights Bookstore," in San Francisco -- had brought out what promised to be a refreshing, if sometimes infuriating, challenge to conventional smugness. No such luck...
To be sure, Chomsky's trademark barbs and provocations are here, but so are his flights to a separate reality. In Chomsky's universe, the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan's Taliban "was undertaken with the expectation that it might drive several million people over the edge of starvation." And North Korea's counterfeiting racket may actually be a CIA operation. And the Clinton administration intervened militarily in Kosovo not in order to prevent ethnic cleansing but to impose Washington's neo-liberal economic agenda. And President Bush -- the first and only U.S. president to declare formal American support for a Palestinian state -- is the obstacle to a two-state solution that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are all prepared to accept. (I am not making that up.)

All the same, it's possible to feel sorry for the professor from time to time. Here he is politely trying to explain linguistics to an intellectually challenged wide-boy from Staines. I hadn't seen this before.