In a rather flaky piece on Noam Chomsky, headlined ‘Chomsky: As flaky as the next man”, reprinted from the London Guardian in these pages last week, someone called Emma Brockes clearly sets out to take issue with the great Guru of the Left’s anointment as the w orld’s greatest public intellectual by an interesting British journal called Prospect. Even though Chomsky himself has no interest in receiving such abstract accolades, the flustered and flaky Brockes has great difficulty from the start in restraining her desire to pick a fight with him about his supposed left-wing politics, and everything that goes with it. Although, as is always the case with reactionaries struggling vainly to keep themselves well hidden in their reactionary closets, she dresses her attack in the clothes of concerned, mildly irritated, righteous liberalism.
It’s like those white liberals around these parts who you can hear heaving a veritable sigh of relief that, with the bugbear of apartheid now out of the way, they can at last openly express their irritation about black people without being called racists. Or so they hope. They go further by settling back into their well–upholstered comfort zones and smugly telling the few black people they know that they, these well-educated, high earning black people standing awkwardly around in their living room, are now the ones being racist for continuing to complain about racism.
‘Anyone can go anywhere, do anything, and say whatever they want to anyone nowadays. Why do you insist on continuing to make trouble?” they ask. ‘We all have so much to live for together,” they continue with a pitying smile — while Alice the maid trips over the edge of the imported Egyptian carpet and has to go all the way back to the bow-tied barman, specially imported from Bulawayo, behind his specially constructed bar, to replace a whole tray full of Black Sea caviar and cocktails.
There are two options. Alice has either tripped over the edge of the carpet because she is under-trained, clumsy, frightened and also from Bulawayo, like the barman, although she is trying to hide it.
The other option is that, however many times Alice has made the practice run over the carpet in the past, it grows thicker and more uneven by the day because of all the unfinished business that is being constantly swept under it. And believe me, apartheid, communism and liberalism have all bitten the dust and been swept under the carpet with such speed and consummate ease in a matter of a few years that there are veritable lumps of their decomposing remains under every carpet you care to step across.
Oh, and the spectre of old fashioned radicalism as well. Which is the stick with which the precocious Brockes chooses to beat a mild–mannered old man in thick glasses called Noam Chomsky, right there in his own backyard. Brockes is helpless to control the unexpected force of her own violence.
What bugs Brockes is Chomsky’s very denial of his perceived identity: the radical, revolutionary intellectualism with which he has been labelled for the past 35 years. It matters not that he explains to her in plain, methodical English that all he does is engage in a plodding, ‘unsexy” application to the facts and ‘using your intelligence to decide what’s right”.
‘Use your head,” would be his response to continually irritating questions about ‘Do you think it was right for us to use napalm in Vietnam?” or ‘Was US covert support for the Colntras against the democratically elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua hypocritical?” Use your head.
But people like Brockes don’t like being told to use their heads. So people like Chomsky have to write books and books giving methodically ‘unsexy” detail about this, that and the other, and still get beaten with sticks by reactionary liberals in their own backyards, effectively (though this goes unspoken) for being heretics against the New World Order (which is not so different from the old one).
It reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: a restless youngster comes across a complete stranger in the street and enters into the following dialogue:
‘I saw an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate. ‘Who are you, aged man,’ I said, ‘and how is it you live?’ His answer trickled through my head, like water through a sieve.
‘He said, ‘I look for butterflies that sleep among the wheat: I make them into mutton pies, and sell them in the street.’”
The young questioner thinks about this and finds the answer unsatisfactory — but doesn’t quite know why. And therefore grows incensed:
‘And so, having no answer to give to what the old man said, ‘Come, tell me how you live!’ I cried, and thumped him on the head.”
The old man keeps trying: ‘He said, ‘I hunt for haddock’s eyes among the heather bright, and work them into waistcoat buttons in the silent night …’”
Riddles, the young person decides. I am being fobbed off with riddles. Not stopping to question himself about why the old man shouldn’t give him riddles instead of wisdom, anyway, if he chooses to.
In the case of Brockes vs Chomsky, the old man has been doling out wisdom for almost half a century to no avail. What difference will it make if he starts talking in riddles?
Brockes tries to outsmart him to the bitter end: ‘[I] ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it.”
‘I’m certainly a beneficiary of this [market economy],” the wily old guru replies. ‘Does that mean I shouldn’t try to make it a better society?”
Brockes was getting ready to thump him on the head in earnest. The newspaper was beginning to smoulder at the edges, getting ready to catch fire in my hands. I threw it down and ran to the door.