My Chomsky story is quite old but worth re-telling. In 1974, my brother and I had just emerged from privacy to declare ourselves sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. WE were suing Louis Nizer, whose book, The Implosion Conspiracy, was a best seller. Nizer had used parts of our parents' prison correspondence without permission -- we owned the copyright to the published edition that he had quoted. In his defense of our lawsuit he claimed "Fair Use" --- using parts of copyrighted material as part of an historic exercise. Our response was to seek out historians (or well known students of history and the use of language) to argue that Nizer was making "unfair use" of the letters and that his book was not a serious work of history at all. I had the idea to approach Noam Chomsky (who I had never met) based on his reputation as a serious intellectual and his work as revealed in American Power and the New Mandarins.
I called him at home out of the blue and asked him if he would be willing to read THE IMPLOSION CONSPIRACY and give us the benefit of his thoughts as to whether it was a serious work of history or not. He said, well, "I'm flying to Washington tomorrow, I guess I can read it on the plane." (This is a 500 page book and the flight from Boston was probably no more than 2 hours at the most -- now it's an hour and a half.). Well, he read, it, thought about it -- and within days we had received a notarized affidavit with a detailed analysis of why the book was not a serious work of history (his cover letter said -- "What a load of garbage. Hope this helps.")---The affidavit included a detailed analysis about how Nizer (an experienced trial lawyer) used different linguistic devices to privilege the testimony of the prosecution witnesses and denigrate the testimony of the defense witnesses in his narrative description of the trial. Our lawyers were blown away and determined on the spot to have him as a witness at the trial of the lawsuit. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons we settled out of court --- I still wish we'd had a trial! But that's neither here nor there. My point is that Noam is incredibly generous with his time. Annie and I have gotten to know him and Carol over the years and have visited off and on --- He says that he often stays up very late catching up on e-mails, even from high school students who want to know about "his philosophy" for a paper (!!). Reading the negative comments on the Chronicle Website make me very sad --- the very people who should be reading his stuff are steered away by right wing talking points about him being a self-hating Jew (ridiculously disgusting and totally wrong) and/or holocaust denier (the Faurisson issue --- all that proves is that he's a first Amendment fundamentalist -- and totally opposed to any government criminalizing belief -- no matter how bizarre and disgusting) or someone who has nothing good to say about the US (wrong -- it's the US government he criticizes). (sorry to vent --- I didn't get to the Chronicle website before they shut down the comments). Thanks to whoever posted it. I don't read the Chronicle regularly and probably would have missed it. (You can bet Noam would never have mentioned it.) By the way --- Noam once had an interesting experience with the Harvard Economics department. He had been brought in by Juliet Schor to talk about the responsibility of intellectuals and at the end of his talk, he brought up a subject (I'm sure it was tongue in cheek) that he was wondering about. He noted that virtually the entire economics profession takes the David Ricardo view of comparative advantage and blows it up into the argument that free trade is the route to prosperity. He says that his reading of history is that there is not one example of any country who followed great Britain into "development" that followed the free trade model. From the American 19th century to the Japanese industrialization, these governments all interfered more or less with free trade. He ended by saying, I'm sure there's something wrong with this analysis but that's the way I see the actual historical experience. The way he reports it is all the economists there said his point was very interesting but no one took him up on the obvious invitation to correct the historical record as he had outlined it. He once had a talk with Paul Samuelson in which he said Samuelson's famous spectrum of economies from total free enterprise (laissez faire) to total state control (Stalinist central planning) in his textbook was misleading because in both the US and the Soviet Union, large institutions control the population -- IN the SU it was the central planners, in the US it was giant corporations --- Only an anarchist-libertarian society was capable of truly freeing people from centralized control. (My guess is Samuelson acted like he didn't understand!) Could go on but you can get the picture -- a mind totally alive and active and learning and sharing all the time!
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