>As usual, he's right on the money. As usual, liberals and other shady
>characters will dismiss him. Another day in the dreadful "discourse" of the
>U.S. left ...
Well, I don't know about this. Chomsky has a very strange status in the public discourse. He barely appears in the mainstream press at all, but he's massively popular.
I just did a Nexis search on his name in the New York Times, and got 20 hits for the last year (since April 2001, not since the beginning of 2002). Of those 20, 4 were obits of linguists, and several more were articles on linguistics. He was also cited in several book reviews (though of course his books weren't reviewed). About the closest the paper came to an engagement with the substance of his ideas was in two pieces that barely qualify as engagements.
The first was Frank Rich's op-ed column, October 13, 2001:
>Even so, America's New War, as CNN has branded it, is already
>whipping up one of the cold war's most self-destructive national
>maladies -- a will to stifle dissent. Such has been the
>disproportionate avalanche of invective about Susan Sontag, Bill
>Maher and Noam Chomsky that you'd hardly guess they were a writer, a
>late-late-night comic and a linguistics professor -- Americans with
>less clout and popular standing than a substitute weatherman on the
>"Today" show. Listening to all the similar overheated rage about
>pacifists on and off college campuses, you'd think as well that
>there was a large and serious antiwar movement afoot to rival that
>of the Vietnam 60's. Reality check: polls show that 94 percent of
>Americans support the war effort, with even a supposed bastion of
>leftism like the Harvard student body proving pro-war by more than
>two to one.
Second, an Arts & Ideas piece on October 6 by Richard Bernstein from a week earlier:
>"The novelist Alice Walker argued that the best way to punish Osama
>bin Laden for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 would be not to
>strike militarily: "The only punishment that works is love." Noam
>Chomsky, the perennial dissenter from the Massachusetts Institute of
>Technology, argued that American actions around the world had caused
>more death and destruction than took place in New York, Washington
>and Pennsylvania. Chalmers Johnson, a political science professor,
>in an article in The Los Angeles Times, wrote that a military
>"overreaction" by the United States would turn the country into a
>"rogue state" that would be subject to more terrorist attacks.
...then Bernstein invokes Hitchens for "balance" in a passage almost three tiems as long as the Chomsky mention:
>His most visible critic from the left was the writer Christopher
>Hitchens, whose columns over the years in The Nation have not
>generally shown him to be an uncritical admirer of the American role
>in the world. Mr. Hitchens, beginning several public exchanges with
>Mr. Chomsky published in The Nation, excoriated what he called "the
>liberal-left tendency to 'rationalize' the aggression of Sept. 11,"
>which, he added, was "a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict
>maximum horror upon the innocent."
But, according to the jacket copy for the new Chomsky reader I just got from the New Press, he's among the ten most cited authors ever, and the only one of the top ten who's still alive. He has a huge following, and appears on RATM CDs. David Barsamian's done like, what, 408 interviews with him that all eventually see their way into print. His 9/11 book is a best-seller, and I even saw a copy of it for sale in bookstore at LaGuardia Airport. Clearly he's a scary symbol of something for the likes of Rich and Bernstein, too. So here's a guy totally ignored by the mainstream, yet he's got a very strong influence nonetheless. And to imply that he's ignored by the U.S. left is pretty weird, since his works are all over the place, and almost every leftish publishing house (South End, Seven Stories, Verso, New Press, Pantheon) have published his books (and Amazon returns 229 hits on "Chomsky, Noam"). He's everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Just goes to show you can be ignored by the NYT and still develop a mass following.
Doug