What's a "better buzz than rock and roll?"
According to Playboy magazine, it's Noam Chomsky's latest tape produced by Roger Leisner of Augusta for Radio Free Maine. Playboy's five reviewers gave the tape, called "The Role of the Media in Manufacturing Consent," three 8s and two 10s for ratings. Playboy, also becoming enlightened by a message scratched into a toilet stall with the words, "Chomsky knows," called the tape a "bracing analysis of the recent elections and the propaganda offensive of the American ruling class in the past 25 years."
That it is, and much more.
Chomsky, the linguistic lion in sheep's clothing, quietly presents a devastating picture of an American politics dominated by a sharply increased inequality of class.
Chomsky, the linguistic lion in sheep's clothing, quietly presents a devastating picture of an American politics dominated by a sharply increased inequality of class. He calls the last election a "political earthquake" waged by corporations, aided and abetted by a "Gingrich arm," and sold to a public deliberately kept ignorant and apathetic by the consenting role of the media.
I first met Chomsky in Boston during the Vietnam War when he agreed to come to my conservative suburban town to talk about the war. Armed with a brain no computer could ever match, Chomsky carefully convinced nearly 200 skeptics that the information we were fed about Vietnam was inaccurate and dangerous to democratic decision-making.
When I approached Chomsky 25 years later about support for a Green Party campaign, he not only remembered me but rattled off the directions to the high school he had lectured at back then in the late 60s.
Chomsky is often called the most quoted living human being. Listening to a Chomsky lecture, or watching or listening to a tape like this one, is a lesson in the potential of the human brain, a craftily documented history for the future, and the sure knowledge that you have just been given a new direction for your life.
Chomsky labels the new Clinton Democrats as "less extreme Republicans" and documents three so-called conservative landslides, the 1980 elections, the 1984 elections, and the 1994 elections, for the frauds they really were. He believes the political system doesn't reflect people; that voting in the US is an elite affair; and that poor people don't bother to vote. His well-documented research reflects a politics that contributes to, rather than tries to correct, the dismantling of civil society.
For the political junkie, for the weekend dabbler, for the youthful yuppies and the socially secured, catch the Chomsky buzz, give this tape a look or listen and watch your life change.
Available in both audio ($10.50 each) & video/VHS ($19 each). Send check/money order to Roger Leisner, P.O. Box 2705, Augusta ME 04338. 207-622-6629 tel/fax.