Thursday, January 11, 2007

Hey NPR, why not chat with Noam about why you make him wanna hurl?

Highlited below (3rd paragraph down) in bold is Noam Chomsky's dig at NPR. Yes, NPR does have enough dignity left to occasionally broadcast some Chomsky via their Alternative Radio show. But wouldn't it be sweet if they had the balls to do an actual reportage/interview with some NPR journalists about just WHY NPR makes him want to toss his cookies?


From a talk by Noam Chomsky available at

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/01/155215


World-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky recently spoke an event titled, "What's Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation." It was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston and sponsored by sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. Chomsky, who is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, returned from Latin America in October. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist, governments to power that are challenging U.S foreign policy. Chomsky also spoke about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America. [includes rush transcript]

(...)In fact, the attitude of the public here towards the political system is very dramatic. I mean, about a third of the population in the United States, according to recent polls, believes that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11. But they don't think it's a problem, like they don’t think that’s anything to worry about it. Yeah, of course, they’re all crooks and gangsters and murderers, tell us something new, you know. It doesn't have much to do with us. That's a shocking commentary on the state of American democracy.

There's a lot of talk here about, you know, we have a divided country. We have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back together. Red and blue, and so on. That's pretty marginal. It is a divided country. It's divided between public opinion and public policy. A very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the United States.

Just to give one last illustration, I was driving home from work the other day and torturing myself by listening to NPR, and -- I have kind of a masochistic streak I can’t get over. Actually, some day I’m going to sue them. Sometime -- once they got me so angry that I started speeding. I lost control of what I was doing, and I was stopped by a cop, and I was going like 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. Maybe a basis for a civil suit, if there are any lawyers around here. But they had a section on Barack Obama, the great new hope. And it was very exuberant: what a fantastic personality he is and a great candidate, thousands of people coming out. And it went on for about 15 minutes of excited rhetoric. There's only one thing missing. They didn’t say a word about what his policies were on anything. It’s kind of not -- doesn't matter, you know. He’s a unifier. He looks at you when he talks to you. He’s a really decent guy. Great background. OK, that's an election. Bolivia was radically different, and that's a very striking comparison, and it in fact generalizes(...)

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