The Financial Times has long dined out on its reputation as an institution steeped in sound economic principles combined with dispassionate and admirably non-partisan reportage.
The truth is that, for the last few years, that reliable old standard of fiscal soundness has been an amplifier of third-way, interventionist euro-mummery and the kind of kumbaya hand-wringing that most of us more normally associate with the Guardian. Sad yes, but predictably concordant with the miasmic and corrosive spirit of our age.
However, I detect a change afoot and not for the good. If this preposterously fawnographic article on Noam Chomsky is anything to by, then maybe the FT is about to pack up its wagon and head on out into the wild, barren scrubland of drooling lefty-lunacy:
Noam Chomsky pokes fun at President George W. Bush’s “original vision” of a Palestinian state, and the audience chuckles. He talks of Ronald Reagan as “our cowboy leader” and they guffaw. He reminds them that the Reagan administration once described Nicaragua as a grave military threat and they practically roll in the aisles.”
The he tells them the one about two gay guys who go into a bar and they double-up in spasms of choking hysteria. Noam Chomsky: the comic’s comic.
The collective sniggering makes everyone feel at one, and the US’s dissident-in-chief is not above being clubbish.
Nor is he above being childish. In fact, he makes a handsome living out of it.
On this warm evening in a suburban Boston church, they are looking to their unofficial leader for a renewed sense of purpose.
They’ll be looking for a very long time.
A 74-year-old linguistics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chomsky may look an unlikely hero.
Very unlikely. In fact, so unlikely as to be statistically impossible.
But it isn’t so straightforward for this MIT intellectual, who has created a cult following by opposing all US administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. A self-described libertarian socialist, he would not be caught dead at a Democratic Party rally.
If he was, would anyone notice? Oh and another ‘libertarian socialist’ (chortle). Do these snake-oil salesmen never give up?
Chomsky sometimes loses his thread.
Wrong. His thread is trying frantically to get away from him.
He talks about the centuries-old abuse of the native Americans. He lambasts Democrats, criticising John Kennedy over the Cuban missile crisis, and Franklin Roosevelt over the second world war.
Yeah, fucking Roosevelt went and joined the wrong side. Bastard!
But if the Democrats are such a bad bunch, a woman in the audience asks, why bother pulling Bush out of office for their sake?
Said woman was immediately set upon, dragged out into the street, beaten, stripped and set on fire. This part was edited for reasons of taste and decency.
Chomsky doesn’t miss a beat.
Yeah man, that’s Chomsky all over. Old ‘chain blue lightning’. Sharp as a tack. Quick as a bullet. He’s the turbo-charged nail-gun of political dissent. He never misses a beat. Er, except when he’s losing his thread.
Widely known for his incendiary political writings…
And even more widely known for his utter gibberish.
His eloquence and large following – especially in Europe – have made him a painful thorn in the side of most administrations, including those of Kennedy and Johnson.
Some of us are rather wary of people who have a ‘large following’ in Europe. And with good reason.
And ‘painful thorn’? Is George Bush sitting at his desk facing a coterie of security chiefs saying “Damn it, guys, can’t any of you come up with effective strategy for dealing with Noam Chomsky”?
It was effectively disarmed by the UN… Nobody regarded [Saddam] as a threat except the US.”
Oh and except all those Iraqis whose clawed their relatives remains out of burial pits.
Even Chomsky’s more controversial statements pass unchallenged. He says the Republicans “don’t really want terrorism, but don’t really mind that much,” and dismisses fears of the radical Islamic Hizbollah group as largely unfounded.
Poor old Hizbullah. So misrepresented. So misunderstood. (sob)
Most Americans won’t notice this speech. And many who hear it later, when it is broadcast on radio, are likely to write off Chomsky and his followers as off-the-wall leftists.
Now what on earth would make them do a wicked thing like that?
The Financial Times ran a very successful marketing campaign with the slogan ‘No FT. No comment’ but maybe that has played out now. Better they replace it with ‘The Financial Times: we take Noam Chomsky seriously’.
Very funny! Great demolition on the old idiot – thanks.
I understand Trinity College Oxford turned him down for a Fellowship years ago, before anyone knew who he was. So we could have been stuck with him over here…
You’re right about the state of the Financial Times – I’m not sure what sort of reader they target these days but it’s a load of rubbish. They couldn’t even give this away to the economics students at my school (and they did try – plenty of free copies available, but they piled up – “Please take a Financial Times,” my economics teacher begged time after time).
Actually if you read the FT article it’s tone is mockingly skeptical of the old guy throughout.
The Financial Times has been an appalling newspaper at least since the mid 1980s. When I worked on the LIFFE futures floor then, all the Londoners preferred to read Wall Street Journal Europe or the Sun.
Whenever I have bought an FT copy it has contained more typos and spelling mistakes even than the ‘Grauniad’. It is also full of lazy unattributed reporting, as in “sources indicate…” “market sentiment increasingly believes…” “it has been known for some time….”
In the mid 90s I bought one FT copy which had the following errors in a single issue:
1) an eighty-word item on the front page top left column (so in fact the first story in the whole newspaper) about the silver price quoted the price correctly twice but then also incorrectly twice, both times by a factor of one hundred (so making silver around four hundred odd dollars an ounce literally half an inch away from the correct price of four point something dollars an ounce);
2) three articles about Hungary’s new central-bank president which all spelled his name differently, all three versions wrong;
3) two of these articles appeared on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, inside back and back page: on the inside back Suranyi and Bokros, Hungary’s new central-bank head and finance minister respectively, were described as “both in their late thirties”, while in the separate article on the other side of the same sheet of paper, the back page, the two men were described as “both in their early forties”.
So the two appointees aged several years in one page of the FT.
Perhaps the FT article was mocking Chomsky as JK suggests, that was my impression too.
What intrigues me is not Chomsky’s political views, but where his linguistics reputation comes from, since his theories about language look pretty false to anyone who speaks a couple of languages beyond English, Spanish and French. My hunch is that his academic success is (ironically) not unlike that of his image of the right-wing America he attacks.
Chomsky sells a linguistics theory which says you can study languages without actually studying languages very much. All his academic work draws heavily on the need to infer structure in “isolated” languages like English (meaning the words are isolated, meaning that there are not case-endings unambiguously binding words together in logical relations, not that English is an isolated culture), from which he generalises that the ur-language, or “deep grammar”, of human discourse can be discovered by analysing English sentences carefully enough. Doubtless a major relief to all those American students fearing that linguistics might mean they have to study some hard foreign languages.
So within his discipline, Chomsky tells students what they want to hear. In addition, he has a great name (exotic-sounding, but short enough for English speakers to remember easily), and has successfully bored his opponents in linguistics into submission. No-one intelligent can bear to read enough of his grindlingly dull papers to refute him point by point. The most-cited researcher ever is truly an academic for our era.
Great fisking of the FT article, wish it had been longer because I got a good laugh. Thanks!
One thing I find odd about Chomsky is his name rarely comes up about anything to do with local politics. I live right next to Cambridge (MIT is in Cambridge) and work in Cambridge. We’ve had some fiscal problems and a hotly contested governor’s race because of our fiscal problems. Can’t recall Chomsky chiming in with any words of wisdom for the voters. Perhaps he did and it just wasn’t covered by the local press?
Very strange that someone who is loved by many far and wide for his ‘political wisdom’ doesn’t make a dent at all in his own state. Perhaps state politics is too small for him to bother about?
When I see Chomsky in print I always think chimpsky. Smart but still a monkey.
“Chomsky chiming in” translates into “Chimpsky chimping in”.
I imagine it’s just that, Chris. Local politics is about water rates and trash collection and school books. It’s all so horribly…small and bourgeois and unChomsky.
Thanks, David, that was a pleasant read over coffee on a Sunday morning.
Anyone wanting an excellent anti-Chomsky resource should check out Oliver Kamm’s Amazon reviews. He seems to have torn apart every single book the man has written. It really should be a good link to point out to any Chomskyite capable of critical thinking.
To anyone who wants to see Chomsky’s linguistic theories get a good kicking, I recommend Bruce L Derwing’s Transformational Grammar as a Theory of Language Aquisition (Cambridge [England], 1973). One suspects if he’d been working in science, rather than shaking up sleepy old philology with scientistic ideas, he’d have got the same treatment as Sheldrake, whose “morphic resonance” offers the same sort of empty ubiquity as “deep structure”.
“Collective sniggering” said it all…
Chomsky? I like the local band well enough — I’ve seen them at least a dozen times.
Mark,
Your analysis on both the arrogant ageing FT & the pathetically overwanking Chomsky are excellent.
NB: I mean Chomsky’s views on linguistics, not on politics.
Thanks for the kind words, Kodiak – quite a few linguists think Chomsky has set the subject back decades.
Whatever you feel about Chomsky’s politics, much of his status as a political commentator comes from this public aura he has acquired of having done some incredibly tough, detailed work at some frontier of language which has cool diagrams and is beyond the rest of us to grasp or criticise.
Chomsky is proof that a person can make a living by being a professional asshole.
Good article, and good comments!
Their (male) columnists in the Weekend section are a wonder to behold – europhiles to a man, full of communalist zeal, and, yes, full of waggish fun at the expense of Uncle Sam. That’s alright, of course, Uncle Sam can take it. But their sense of humour is not so well developed when it comes to their own foibles, including the oxymoronic social libertarianism.
Their female columnists are in general a joy to read, and have their feet on the ground, and in the vineyard… Now if they could just bump one of those wet men and get Amity Schlaes into the Weekend section, that would make it more enjoyable, and certainly more realistic.
I could bore on for hours about the degeneration of the FT, and I have been one of the ‘boiled frogs’ that put up with their nonsense as it got worse and worse. But, no longer. They have New-York-Times disease, poor souls, and deserve to rot in some socialist utopia.
“have made him a painful thorn in the side of most administrations”
This was my favorite line. I have a group of friends who are left-liberal (they mostly work for economic development NGO’s), and reasonably politically aware.
They’ve never heard of him.
This thorn is about the size of a microbe.
By the way, Roger Scruton, in a collection of essays, Thinkers of the New Left, published by Longman (I don’t know if this is still in print) does a brilliant demolition job on Chomsky, not to mention other much overratted frauds and fools like Galbraith, Perry Anderson, Lukacks, etc.
Good point about the FT. It has been on the skids for a while. A lot of its stories are not properly sourced as far as I can see, using expressions that “X is understood to be doing Y” or suchlike, which even if it turns out to be true, is sloppy journalism.
The Wall Street Journal Europe is usually better although often its stories are not as up to date. Lots of folk in the financial world read the Net instead anyway these days.
However, just to be fair, FT writers like Martin Wolff, Amity Schlaes and dear old Sam Brittain are always worth a read.
The man is an economic moron (hence the oxymoronic libertarian socialism). His views on the evils of capitalism and free trade would condemn the world to poverty and mass starvation.
Nevertheless, there is a danger of throwing out the baby etc …. Chomsky’s critisisms of the U.S. Federal Government and its aggressive, expensive and expansionist foreign policy may sometimes be exagerated, but there is a significant kernel of truth in what he says.
Re. his linguistic theories, I’m not qualified to comment, but Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” is an excellent book, and Pinker is basically a Chomskyan.
Cydonia
BTW
Has anyone else felt the Economist has gone downhill over the last several years. In chasing the Time / Newsweek reader, they appear to have compromised what were exceptionally high standards in political journalism.
“Chomsky’s critisisms of the U.S. Federal Government and its aggressive, expensive and expansionist foreign policy may sometimes be exagerated, but there is a significant kernel of truth in what he says.”
Chomsky suffers from the flaw of always comparing what the US government does against some idealistic standard, and not placing it in the context of real world tradeoffs and realities. In the real world, you can’t break a Communist empire without some collateral damage, you know. Noam Chomsky got himself on the wrong side of history in the war between the US and the Communist empires, and now has to play out the string by continuing to argue that the US is always and everywhere evil, rather than admit he was wrong.
Fortunately, he has been almost completely isolated into the tiny community of his true believers, and has no impact whatsoever on the world at large, as far as I can tell.
So Kodiak, I guess you like Chomsky’s politics then, do you? Are you, like good ol’ Noam, also going to write an apologia for the fine product of French education, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge?
Perry,
Glad to see you again with your usual sophisticated delicacy in wording worn-out supermarket labelling that makes your fugitive appearance nauseating like a tremendous fart disturbing a calm & gentle assembly of dining people.
Well, Chomsky is a charlatan. He would spend less time teaching chimpanzees how to use sign language than teaching us how to consider our languages. Even its legitimate criticising of US flaws is truffled with idiocies & overloaded with elaborate nonsense which is just a satisfaction for himself and his minuscule, yawning audience.
******
Edmund Burke,
Except the excellent questionnaire for Berlusconi (why not a mention in Samiz?), The Economist is at any rate a big joke during summer holidays (it’s boring & there’s nothing in it except laborious articles). The Charlemagne section of the 9-15 August issue (page 27) is about Europeans taking “too much” holidays versus “hard-working” US people. At the end of the text you can find a delicious small-typed comment reading: “Charlemagne will be on hilidayfor the next three weeks”. THREE WEEKS ???!!!… So unAnglo-Saxon!!!
Kodiak’s back! With an aggravated stuffed sphincter syndrome [expression courtesy of the dissident frogman]. The inimitable frogperson also suggests pruneaux galore to cure the affliction.
Bored at work, eh? Well, after all we are in the middle of the silly season…
Gabriel !
I’m missing words to express the immense joy of having you back with your typically unsurpassable Perryesque rare ability to uttering tons of inarticulate nonsense per minute.
Please keep posting drawings: you’ll avoid blowing the couple of neurones left…
Kodiak
I too got the irony, however by definition, Charlemagne is not Anglo-Saxon, so no great surprise there, except why only 3 weeks.
“Chomsky suffers from the flaw of always comparing what the US government does against some idealistic standard, and not placing it in the context of real world tradeoffs and realities.”
True. However, even once one does that, the US government’s foreign policy still looks pretty much like bombing hundreds of thousands of 3rd world villagers to death for no good reason. Training death squads and torturers how to rape Catholic nuns and bump off students probably didn’t worry the Kremlin too much either.
“In the real world, you can’t break a Communist empire without some collateral damage, you know.”
True. But we are not talking about unavoidable collateral damage, just plain old useless mass murder.
Perry, unless I was missing a point, I did not think that Kodiak was defending Chomsky. He may have written some dumb-ass stuff before, but on this occasion I thought he was fairly sane.
Maybe the hot weather has got some folk on edge.
Seriously, Chomsky – pace some commenters above – is not just in a minority, though he is. He is still taken seriously in large parts of academia in the US and over here. He is an extremely dangerous, nasty piece of work and like that other misanthrope and liar, Michael Moore, needs to be watched and attacked at every fair opportunity. He cannot, alas, just be dismissed as a joke.