Noam Chomsky urges Madison crowd to reach out to Tea Partiers
http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=28780
Joe Tarr
04/09/2010
Noam Chomsky made a connection with an unlikely radical in his speech
at the Orpheum Theatre last night: Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old
software engineer who flew a plane into an IRS building in Texas in February.
After quoting Stack's manifesto, Chomsky said Stack was "basically
right" in his critique of the American system of politics and capitalism.
But, Chomsky, the firebrand liberal who spent most of his life
critiquing and attacking US hegemony and foreign policy, said the
left is failing the country by not reaching out to those in the Tea
Party movement, who are frustrated and fed up with American government.
"They shouldn't be laughed at. It's not a joke," Chomsky told the
packed theater. "Ridiculing the Tea Party shenanigans is a terrible
mistake. Why are those voices of discontent being mobilized by the
extreme Right?"
An icon of the American Left, Chomsky can be a little boring to
listen to. There's coherence to his arguments, but it's almost as
though he has too much to say, as he meanders from one point to the
next. He drones on and then suddenly, says "thanks" and the talk is
over. He could probably benefit from some Glenn Beck-style theatrics.
Still, the packed theater was engrossed with Chomsky. He began the
talk referencing the first critical essay he wrote in 1939. "I'm just
old enough to have memories of Hilter's speeches on the radio," he
said. "I didn't grasp the meaning, but I couldn't help grasp the
significance, the menace."
During the speech, Chomsky touched on many of the political upheavals
of the 20th century, including the US wars in Southeast Asia, the
Russian and US wars in Afghanistan, the Depression, globalization,
Haiti, Rosa Luxemburg, and the labor, anti-war, environmental and
Civil Rights movements.
During the question-and-answer period afterwards, audience members
asked Chomsky for advice on how to wage political battles. But he had
no easy answer.
"I get this question a half dozen times a day, 'What can I do?' There
is no formula. There are a lot of things you can do. You can do
almost anything you want," he said. "You are the only one who can answer it."
But, he added, "If you're talking about tactics, you have to ask
yourself seriously 'What are the consequences of your actions?'"
--------
When did 'anti-government' become a bad thing?
March 1, 2010
J.D. Tuccille
You'd think that, after a couple of centuries of major American
figures describing government as, at most, something to be tolerated,
political pundits would have made their peace with the idea that
skepticism toward state power has a core place in American political
life. If your toes tingle at the thought of more coercive programs,
laws, politicians and bureaucrats, you're the (very) odd duck, not
the folks with anti-government views. And yet, we still get the likes
of Frank Rich throwing high-profile hissy fits because "the unhinged
and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have
vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback," as
heralded by ... Andrew Joseph Stack III's Kamikaze-style airborne
attack on the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas?
For those not in the know, Stack, like many people, had a bone to
pick with the I.R.S. and with the federal government. But the
manifesto he left behind also accused drug and insurance companies of
"murdering tens of thousands of people a year," charged that poor
people get to die for the mistakes of the wealthy, and quoted Karl
Marx. Anti-government Stack was, but his ideology, such as it was,
doesn't appear to have been coherently right-wing or left-wing so
much as ticked-off and populist.
Rich does appear to be aware that Stack isn't a very logical stick
with which to beat the Tea Party movement that has him and his
government-cheerleading chums so knicker-twisted. At least, he
concedes "it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a
card-carrying Tea Partier or a 'Tea Party terrorist.' But he did
leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax
rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner."
Nice how Rich works that gratuitious "Tea Party terrorist" bit in
there, eh? But even as he smears his political opponents as guilty by
distant and tortured association, he manages to overlook the fact
that the anti-government sentiment he so regrets is neither a wholly
owned subsidiary of the Tea Party movement and the Right, nor an
aberration coughed up every decade or two by by unenlightened
neanderthals briefly emerging from the philosophical swamps.
Frank Rich is a well-educated man with an Internet connection paid
for by a respected news organization that has a vast historical
archive of its own, so it's impossible to believe that the New York
Times scribbler is unaware that Thomas Paine wrote in one of the more
popular political tracts of the revolutionary period that
"government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its
worst state an intolerable one." Nor can we believe he's unaware that
James Madison hedged on Paine's sentiments only to the extent that he
wrote, "It has been said that all Government is an evil. It would be
more proper to say that the necessity of any Government is a
misfortune." And certainly he knows about Thomas Jefferson's warning
that "[t]he natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and
government to gain ground."
And Rich must surely be aware that he's skipping over a bit of
context when he drops the overworked Joe Stack connection to shriek
in shock that "[t]he Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government
agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on
entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of
No holding forth in Washington -- a party that, after all, is now
positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are
talking about here is the Party of No Government at All." Surely, if
only in high school, he read Henry David Thoreau's open hostility to
the power of the state:
"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs
least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and
systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I
believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"..."
The United States of America was founded on anti-government
sentiment. The shapers of its institutions and many of its major
thinkers have always clearly viewed the state as something like the
equivalent of a portable kerosene heater in a Wisconsin winter -- you
might need the damned thing, but be very careful.
True, the fact that the heart and soul of American political history
is thoroughly skeptical of government power doesn't mean that Madison
and Jefferson were right and that Rich is wrong. Maybe he and his
buddies are correct and we should stop worrying and learn to love
big, well-armed institutions that claim a monopoly on the use of
force and slaughtered 262,000,000 people over the course of the 20th
century alone. (It's for the children, don't you know?)
But history shows that anti-government sentiment is in the mainstream
of American political life, and Rich and his buddies are the
out-liers. No shrieking effort to paint skeptics of state power as
kamikaze terrorists -- shoe-horning Joe Stack in with Thomas Paine
and Henry David Thoreau -- can change that fact.
--
email J.D.: civilliberties (at) tuccille.com
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment