>Teachout opens his biography on Dec. 7, 1934, with a fascinating
>incident. Every year in Washington there is a grisly evening known
>as the Gridiron Club dinner. It rivals other such soirees in raising
>the question: which is the more painful and degrading spectacle, to
>see the president fawning on the press or the press fawning on the
>president? But on this occasion one of the opening ''roasts'' was to
>be given by Mencken, and the reply delivered by Franklin Delano
>Roosevelt. Teachout supplies the sole published account of a
>Gridiron dinner that arouses in the reader an envious wish to have
>been present. Mencken began rather fatuously, as it reads to us now
>but would surely have seemed even then, by saying, ''Mr. President,
>Mr. Wright and fellow subjects of the Reich.'' He then delivered a
>fairly standard anti-New Deal diatribe, which not even his fans
>thought was up to his best. Taking his time to respond, F.D.R.
>offered some heavy and condescending flattery before describing the
>American journalistic profession, in sonorous sentences, as riddled
>with every kind of philistinism, ignorance and vulgarity. The entire
>passage was lifted directly from Mencken's own ''Prejudices.'' The
>trick brought down the house. And, where such a ruse would have
>caused Mark Twain to bellow with mirth at his own expense, it stung
>Mencken terribly. How and why was that?
Hitchens, writing in Grand Street in 1985 (in a piece that used to be on your site, Peter, didn't it? is it now inconvenient? and I see I'm no longer listed as one of Hitch's comrades either):
>The gravamen of the bill against Noam Chomsky is this. That, first,
>he did euphemize and minimize the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. That,
>second, he did "endorse" or otherwise recommend a pamphlet or paper
>that sought to prove the Nazi Holocaust a fiction. That, third, he
>is an enemy of the Jewish state and a friend to footpads and
>terrorists of every stripe. This is what "everybody" knows about the
>lonely, derided linguist who no doubt blames America first and is a
>self-hating Jew into the bargain. Never was an open society better
>insulated from dissent. In Britain, he would be dismissed as
>"brilliant but unsound; doesn't know when to stop." In the United
>States, it takes a little more than that to encompass the
>destruction of a reputation.
[...]
>The tactic is not to circulate a part-untruth so much as it is to
>associate the victim with an unpardonable out-group, against which
>preexisting revulsion and contempt can be mobilized.
[...]
>The contemporary United States expresses the greatest of all
>paradoxes. It is at one and the same time a democracy -- at any rate
>a pluralist open society -- and an empire. No other country has ever
>been, or had, both things at once. Or not for long. And there must
>be some question about the durability of this present coexistence,
>too. Already spokesmen of the Reagan Administration say plainly that
>their foreign and military policy is incompatible with the
>disloyalty and division that stem from a deliberative Congress and
>an inquisitive press. They laughably exaggerate the reflective
>capacity of the first and the adversary character of the second, but
>they have a point. If it is to have the least chance of success,
>their strategy calls for an imposed national unanimity, a
>well-cultivated awareness of "enemies within," and a strong draft of
>amnesia.
>
>The academy and the wealthy new batch of think tanks are awash with
>people who collude, at least passively, in the process. As C. Wright
>Mills once wrote:
>
>Their academic reputations rest, quite largely, upon their academic
>power: they are the members of the committee; they are on the
>directing board; they can get you the job, the trip, the research
>grant. They are a strange new kind of bureaucrat. They are
>executives of the mind... They could set up a research project or
>even a school, but I would be surprised, if, now after twenty years
>of research and teaching and observing and thinking, they could
>produce a book which told you what they thought was going on in the
>world, what they thought were the major problems for men of this
>historical epoch.
>
>Not even Mills, or Chomsky in his New Mandarins essay, could have
>anticipated the world of the Heritage Foundation, of "Kissinger
>Associates," of numberless power-worshipping, power-seeking
>magazines and institutes interlocking across the dissemination of
>culture, priority, information, and opinion. But Mills did write, in
>1942:
>
>
>When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them,
>something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat
>formulae; some men become reporters. To time observation with
>thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial
>happenings is a difficult problem.
>
>Noam Chomsky has attempted, as a volunteer, necessarily imperfectly,
>to shoulder this responsibility at a time of widespread betrayal of
>it. And it must be an awed attitude to the new style -- a
>willingness to demonstrate flexibility in the face of so much pelf
>and so much cant -- that allows so many people to join in ridiculing
>him for doing so. As a philosophical anarchist, Chomsky might
>dislike to have it said that he had "done the state some service,"
>but he a useful citizen in ways that his detractors are emphatically
>not.