There is no doubt that Chomsky has a prodigious memory and many have equated this with intellect. In fact, Chomsky is the master of stripping away the context of events and presenting one-sided “dialogues” that nicely plug in to every buzz word and overarching theme within the ideology of political correctness.
Chomsky may have decided long ago that there is simply no money to be had in presenting a dry and dispassionate view of world politics. Americans are notoriously attracted to views that reflect their own rather than actually learning about a given situation and if, for example, Chomsky spoke about the Israel military incursion into Gaza in 2009 and actually mentioned the hundreds of rockets flying into Israel from Gaza that preceded the invasion, Chomsky’s fans would be disappointed as would be Norm Finkelstein’s fans.
Polemic’s sell as long as they are not enacted too often in the same locale by way of debate and one can only imagine the damage to our country in our colleges as one-sided “debates” are taught by politically correct teachers whose thought processes emanate from the same intellectual space as hate groups in that such thinking cannot exist without a foe to be defended against and identified by color and ethnicity in it’s millions of otherwise faceless people. We have the equivalent of “good” Nazis teaching our children.
The beauty of Chomsky’s tactics is that he presents himself, not as having a one-sided view point, but as the ultimate purveyor of “true” context and this is when Chomsky uses his impressive memory and readings as a flail but the kind of flail a stage magician might use. This supposed exposition of the “truth” has great traction among the young who view their own culture as endemically immoral and racist and so their world is one big basket of Trails of Tears, Tuskeegee Experiments and latent Jim Crow that “prove” how wretched America actually is. What is obvious never is and what isn’t is where the secret of life really lies – just ask Chomsky. The problem is that portraying America as only having done bad things denies history and reality but that thought process is a fun place to slum if you have a Che Guevarra t-shirt.
Other than that debate is only as fascinating as an actual view of it.
