The Roaming Noam

I just watched the Noam Chomsky documentary Manufacturing Consent and enjoyed it very much. Chomsky comes across as unassuming and humble, a man enduring what he has to both in labor and in reprisals, for pursuing the course he believes destiny has assigned him. Very likeable. And admirable.

Yet I can't help thinking he is seeing a conspiracy where none exists. He is an anarcho-syndicalist and therefore despises any form of government (and all give plenty of reasons to do so!), and this is inevitably going to mean he is going to barrage them with criticism no matter what they do, for existing at all. He aims his thunderbolts from an empty heaven of pure theory that is never sullied by no-win situations and lesser evils. He does not propose an alternative type of government, but merely wishes there were a vacuum, and he would try to prevent human nature from filling it, as it did in the beginning and would do again. It is not a conspiracy for there to be government, though a relatively small number of people are in charge. That is theoretically no more than specialization, though in fact an oligarchy/plutocracy may develop (I think of Leonid Brezhvev, man of the people, with his collection of luxury cars). But somebody would rule, and we would want somebody to, to protect us. Even if the best candidate were Tony Soprano.

I found it remarkable that Chomsky admitted both that this is the freest society in the world and that it had been necessary to sacrifice that freedom temporarily to survive during WW2. Doesn't that tell him anything? Like maybe that government isn't necessarily so bad? And that occasional control over human behavior (which is what any government is, after all) isn't necessary only when Hitler looms?

I loved what Chomsky said about the Superbowl and other popular idiotic entertainments, how they are mere distractions to give the cows some cud to chew on instead of thinking about anything important. And yet I think Dostoyevsky rings truer: people want such bread and circuses, because they shun the burden of real thought, responsibility, and decision. There is not some secret cabal that keeps them hypnotized. No such thing is necessary (alas!).

I've read enough of the Utne Reader to know that certain news stories are never allowed coverage, but it is not necessarily a result of corporate interest. When it is, it may be an exception, as when everyone knew CBS killed a story on Big Tobacco because they wouldn't be able to afford the lawsuit they were threatened with. People despised and derided CBS for this. Which implies it doesn't happen all the time as a matter of policy. My guess is rather that the choice of news has more to do with the Family Feud model–what do the average viewers want to hear about? Surely that is the reason there is time wasted with sports "news" daily. In other words, I suspect a lot of what Chomsky attacks comes from the ground up, from the grassroots, not from the top down. And that is far more depressing.

Conspiracy theories are the most optimistic theories around! They centralize and simplify our problems. They are demythologized versions of the Christian belief in Satan. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but shortly after the 1978 Jonestown suicide I was talking with a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and he asked me (rhetorically) if I didn't think these events were not a compelling demonstration of Satan's power. I replied that I didn't think so at all. Instead I took the whole terrible business as more evidence of the awful capabilities of human nature. If you think you need a devil to account for the Holocaust, you are a cock-eyed optimist! "Everything would be fine if we could just get rid of that horned, hoofed terrorist!" Don't kid yourself. The problem is much more complex than that, and so is any possible solution. Same thing with secular conspiracy theories. They are imaginative schemes to find a scapegoat with a single face. They tend to absolve us of collective guilt and the complicity of our institutions as a whole. If you blame the Ku Klux Klan for our race problems, you are avoiding the much, much larger problems of institutional racism. (Not that the KKK deserves any mercy or even patience!)

You might wonder what Noam Chomsky thinks about 9/11. Surprisingly, he does not believe there is anything to the conspiracy theories. But this turns out to be the exception that proves the rule, since he suspects the Bush administration purposely fueled such conspiracy theories in order to distract the public from other nefarious actions the administration was performing! Nevertheless, the "Truther" movement seems Chomsky-esque to me. And it reveals the peculiar perversity of hate-America conspiracy theories. This is one of those rare instances where we do have an actual sinister conspiracy: Al Qaida—and it isn't good enough for paranoids like theologian David Griffin. No, the World Trade Center demolition had to be the work of an even more sinister conspiracy, one worthy of an espionage novel: our own government took down the towers and killed 3, 000 of its own citizens, and this for no particular reason. (There were certainly better excuses, true or false, to attack Iraq.)

I was interested to hear from Chomsky, in answer to a simple question, that he gets his information about what is really going on in the world, not from the sold-out propaganda mills of the American news media, but rather from newspapers in other countries—which, presumably, are as objective as the day is long. Somehow, though working within societies that are anything but free, whose newspapers are not just de facto but de jure propaganda arms of the controlling juntas, these papers and broadcasts tell the unvarnished truth.

It reminds me of the college freshman who learns just enough anthropology to become convinced of Cultural Relativism, which he construes to mean: everybody is right except for the United States. "My country, wrong or wrong."

Don't get me wrong: I am far from trying to pretend everything is right with America, especially with her government and her policies. Far from it! I am by now pretty cynical. But nobody (e.g., Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan) is going to get me to believe that theocratic, nuke-toting Iran is harmless and that America ought to be spelled with a "k."

So says Zarathustra.