Here’s two of ’em. Thank God we still have the gent on the left — visually, not politically — among us.
Had an interesting experience the other day. The backstory is tedious, but suffice to say I was in a room with a couple of other echt West Siders, one of them a local liberal Democratic politician in a small way — let’s call him Aurelius — the other, Manutius, a guy in the publishing business.
Manutius and I were getting acquainted and I happened to mention the name of Noam Chomsky, entirely in passing, while telling some anecdote of my schooldays, a time when Chomsky bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus.
Aurelius, who had not thitherto been much involved in the conversation, snapped instantly to attention. “Chomsky? The guy who said we deserved Nineleven?!”
It was a context where contentiousness would have been out of place, so I contented myself with the mild reply, “He said that? Really?”(*)
I had the feeling Aurelius was ready to come right back at me, but Manutius saved the day. It turned out that he had been Chomsy’s editor, at some point and on some project, and he thought the world of old Noam. Since Manutius works for a large corporation, his imprimatur was sufficient to stifle Aurelius’ objections, and the awkward moment quickly passed.
Now you have to understand that Aurelius is not some mouth-breathing Fox News ignoramus; in spite of his unfortunate involvement in New York City politics, he’s a clever fella, well-schooled, well-read, and a liberal to the marrow of his bones. And he’s funny and amiable, with a very engaging fund of self-mocking humor.
So this was an odd moment. It was as if the restless ghost of Christopher Hitchens had suddenly taken over his vocal apparatus.
Of late I’ve started to reflect that the ancients’ belief in demonic possession wasn’t so dumb. We’re really very far from being unitary executives in our own heads. It’s a chaotic parliament in there, with no rules of order to speak of, and from time to time some particularly brazen-throated monomanic will take the floor and refuse to yield.
Ever known anybody suffering from anorexia? They’re like that: sensible, perceptive, subtle, humorous — on every subject but food. Once that topic comes up, they stop making sense, and contradict themselves three times in every sentence. The voice timbre changes, the body language changes. The impression is hard to resist that another personality has taken charge.
It was a little like that, just for a moment, with Aurelius the other day. One had the sense that Aurelius’ Community Board comperes had taken him over. They’re all staunch old Zionists and Cold War liberals, if not outright neocons — though Aurelius himself is none of these things.
This is one of the reasons why I hate the Democratic Party. Affiliating with it, identifying with it, even to the extent of rooting for its candidates, or even just voting for them, is to invite an incubus into your brain.
———-
(*) Of course as we all know he’s never said anything of the kind.
If you’re not going to name names, the stylebook demands that you use the generic “senior Democratic official”, etc.
he’s a clever fella, well-schooled, well-read
Those are the words used to describe Obie, Yglesias, and every other chowderhead known to humanity. I’m not sure why you need to be able to quote Chaucer when all you need to advance in the system is the knowledge that Chompers hates America.
This is fantastic:
Of late I’ve started to reflect that the ancients’ belief in demonic possession wasn’t so dumb. We’re really very far from being unitary executives in our own heads. It’s a chaotic parliament in there, with no rules of order to speak of, and from time to time some particularly brazen-throated monomanic will take the floor and refuse to yield.
Ever known anybody suffering from anorexia? They’re like that: sensible, perceptive, subtle, humorous — on every subject but food. Once that topic comes up, they stop making sense, and contradict themselves three times in every sentence. The voice timbre changes, the body language changes. The impression is hard to resist that another personality has taken charge.
It seems simpler than possession. Chomsky, like Hugo, is beyond the pale for good liberals. Condemning them shows how serious one is: hating actual leftists is part of a liberal’s cred. It’s prerequisite for living in Aurelius’s culture.
Like Happy Jack says, most of those chowderheads have the same traits as he does. They probably would be quite charming people if you met them in everyday life and somehow didn’t know what they believed and what they did for a living. Clever, amusing, amiable, well-schooled: it’s part of what made them feasible as politicians in the first place. That and a yawning moral abyss.
Aurelius is small-time enough that he doesn’t face any serious moral questions; nobody is asking him how to deploy the drones. And I don’t think he has anything like the moral abyss required for real success in politics. What interests me is the partial, but profound, stupefaction that comes merely from inner identification with the organization.
I’m sure he’s minor league, but he identifies with the majors, right? He’s a member of the Democratic Party. I think we’re agreeing here.
But what you also seem to be saying is that rather than just playing a role, he’s submersed this proscription of Chomsky into his inner being, and it emerges in an uncontrolled, parochial rage.
I was thinking it’s cultural, and you’re saying it’s something more, but you too seem to identify it as arising from his political associations.
What if that’s only part of it, though? What if what you saw really originated in him, to some degree?
On the one hand, the Democratic Party undoubtedly corrodes the soul. On the other, he got where he is for some reason. I’m not speculating he’s of woven from exactly the same fiber as a US president, but perhaps he has some of it. Maybe he has enough of whatever Obama has to whine about people hating America if Chomsky is mentioned, but not enough to run a torture camp and an assassination program for eight years.
… The guy who said we deserved Nineleven?!” …
What DID Chomsky say that led to this common misunderstanding, to be generous? My memory is that he rather took to task the tribe of those who allowed even so much as that the chickens were coming home to roost. (Pretty much my tribe. Showing, I guess, that someone who has read extensively in the Chomsky oeuvre can miss many fine points.)
I can’t say, exactly. I haven’t read every word the man has ever said or written, but it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing he *would* say — he tends to choose his words carefully — and he certainly has characterized the Nineleven attacks as an atrocity. I assume we mostly have that unlamented liar Christopher Hitchens to thank for this meme — see for example http://slate.me/17ykPGG.
Chomsky’s real sin, I think, was trying to give a serious answer to the (mostly rhetorical) question we kept hearing, always delivered in plangent whingeing tones, after the event: “Why do they hate us?” Chomsky was tactless enough to point out that in fact ‘we’ have given ‘them’ excellent reason to hate ‘us’.
Chomsky, of course, never said anything of the sort. He merely stated the obvious — or certainly what is obvious to anyone who knows anything about “blowback,” not least people in intel. In fact, to spooks, Noam’s insights would be such common sense as to be totally, to use one of Chom’s favorite terms, “uncontroversial.”
Hitchens really reduced himself to a bloody, drunken fool late in his life. Though he managed, post 9/11 and throughout the Iraq war, to publish millions of words (at a king’s ransom/word, no doubt) and draw disproportionate attention to himself. That is to say: he managed to do what he’d always done, even when he was a “leftist.”
See if you can find Finkelstein’s wonderful takedown of “apostates,” somewhere online. Priceless.
I’ll say this about Hitch, though: he was probably the most entertaining “intellectual” performance artist of our time. The show was always fun to watch. Though for all of his purported cleverness, he was routinely demolished in debates, by Galloway, Mark Danner, David Corn, to name three.
Finkel on apostates:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/10/hitchens-as-model-apostate/
Those two paragraphs about what goes on in our brains are great. This sort of thing is common, too, among left-wingers. If you have the temerity to say that the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is not true, even on its own terms, or that Marx, himself, had pretty much rejected it later in his writings, then the fanatics go into a rage and accuse you of all sorts of evil deeds. Or, if you say that the writer of the recent piece (on counterpunch) about Angelina Jolie’s radical mastectomies has some good points, the Party faithful speak as one, telling us that the writer is a purveyor of filth. You’d think that as we get older, we would be inclined to see the world as awfully complex and full of surprises, and that the monomaniac in our brain’s parliament would be much more willing to yield the floor. I once asked a drug-addled friend of mine, “Whatdya know.” “Less and less every day,” he said. That’s what I feel most days.
It’s interesting that evolutionary biologists have a much healthier relationship to Darwin — and for that matter, most Freudians to Freud — than most of us Marxists have to Marx. There’s something uncannily reminiscent of Biblical literalists in the way so many of us cite the holy scriptures at each other. It seems to me the right attitude toward Marx is the attitude we have toward all the great discoverers: they’re great, they’re illuminating, they’re indispensable, we owe them an immense debt, but nobody gets the last word (except, of course, the Last Man).
I dinnea kin, evolutionists are quite simple mined in their understanding of evolution and genetics. As Chomsky pointed out somewhere, Darwin himself admitted the modification of species wasn’t do exclusively to selective pressure–e.g., insects adapted to feed on flowering plaints preceded flowering plants (Cf. Evolution: A view from the 21st Century, James Shapiro). Evolution has been harnessed to a cause–ostensibly in the war against religion–and in so doing become a “mind killer” as well.
Are they worse than Marxistas? Perhaps not, discoveries in molecular biology and elsewhere can’t totally be ignored. Academic Marxism is eternally irrefutable.
Some are, some aren’t. But even the biggest knuckleheads don’t think that Darwin disposed of the matter once and for all. Ole Charlie never heard of ‘inclusive fitness’, a ludicrously contrived concept much beloved of the most knuckleheaded of the knuckleheaded.
no one gets rewarded as handsomely
for refuting chuck and siggy
as they do
for refuting the old moor
neither poses a mortal threat
to the profoundest bourgeois
holy of holies
so to not drown or be drowned
we Ms
cling to the great man’s words
like logs in world of white waters
i dare not gainsay his most casual phrase
for fear of losing my grip on the rest
good stuff mike y
i always refer to
the law of
“the declining rate of the declining rate of profit ”
that slows em up some
if the declining rate of the declining rate goes on long enough
it start inclining
of course no such smooth dynamics exist
at least not
at the surface of ….social production
in open market mediated systems
there its all
frogs on a
n leaps and n pauses to croak
Do people become like that because of the Democratic Party or do we have this Democratic Party because of people like that?
Much of the knowledge worker class (in a broad sense from rocket scientists to Madonna via spin meisters) is paid in part for what it manages to not know, for the unknowing that it models and disseminates. That is a major part of its role in the Neoliberal Performance Art that is society now.
“We’re really very far from being unitary executives in our own heads. It’s a chaotic parliament in there, with no rules of order to speak of, and from time to time some particularly brazen-throated monomanic will take the floor and refuse to yield. ”
Nice. This is very true and important. Almost all of us have parts like this. Especially if we try to pretend that they are not there. Then they really take off on their own.
Being more compassionate toward your friend, if he senses instinctively that even knowing what he is not supposed to know would make his life much more difficult, that is true. The boundaries of acceptable thought may be more subtle than they were in the Soviet Union, it may be more of a cognitive test to stay on the correct side of them, but that does not mean that enforcement is less sure.