I’ve never experienced such danger as
when driving through freezing rain from Lansing to Detroit to see my
intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky. The windshield
wiper mounts were frozen over, so there was no fluid to de-ice the
windshield. The front defroster was as
high as it would go which would melt the ice on the windshield about six inches
from the bottom, but then as it traveled up, it would collect on the other
approximately two-thirds of the top portion of my windshield freezing into a blinding
mass. I pulled over four times on the
shoulder of the highway in that first hour to scrape my windshield. As I leaned all the way over the steering
wheel to see through the visible part of my windshield I kept thinking: Noam
Chomsky…Noam Chomsky…Noam Chomsky…
Somehow, I made it to Detroit. I had worked my way into an invitation to the
social event prior to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Annual Dinner later that
night. I knew it was going to be a small
setting and that I must have a few words with the greatest intellectual
alive. He arrived late, as his plane had
arrived late the previous night. He wore
jeans rolled up at the ankles, grey slip-on tennis shoes, a blue oxford shirt
covered with that blue sweater that I recognized from the last time I streamed
one of his public talks. He smiled at us
and walked into the front hall of the old house that now doubled as a law
office. People circled around him and
stared. He smiled some more and slowly
people began asking him questions about his flight and such. Eventually he made a plate, which prompted me
to make a plate as I hadn’t eaten anything all day. People gathered around him in chairs, some
kneeling to hear the soft-spoken man. He
could talk about anything on the drop of a dime. I spoke briefly with a guy about his
fascination with the Meyers-Briggs test, and then with a San Francisco couple
that were friends of one of the lawyer honorees at the NLG dinner. I briefly spoke with the lady honoree herself
and congratulated her for her lifetime achievement award. After the dinner, I wish I would’ve had more
time and background knowledge regarding the two honorees, but my mind was set
on one thing: Professor Noam Chomsky.
I moved my way towards the most
influential thinker in my life. When
the seat next to him opened up and I sat down.
“I’m going to be a high school English teacher, and I intend to bring your
essays into my classroom whenever I can.”
“Oh really! That’s going to be hard work.”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“Does Michigan have charter schools?”
“This is Betsy Devos’ home state, we are
ground zero –“
“Noam?
Noam. We’ve got to get going.”
“Would you sign my book quickly before you
leave?”
Noam takes my copy of Chomsky on Miseducation and signs it with a note. I say thank you.
“In high school, I remember a lot of
inspiring teachers in that rotten place.”
We shake hands, and I walk away knowing
what I have to do from there on out.
“To Brandon, Good luck in what lies ahead
– exciting, difficult, lots of promise! Noam Chomsky”
The rest of the day I recovered from my
encounter with Saint Chomsky. I headed
over to where the dinner was being held – a United Auto Workers (UAW) hall in
Dearborn – and found a Starbucks nearby for coffee and WiFi (I tried to find a
local coffee spot, but to no avail). As
the place filled up, a man approached me and asked to sit with me. We began talking. I told him I am a pre-service English teacher
and he informed me he’s teaching math at a local charter school. He’s a Yemen immigrant; his name was A---------. He’s frustrated with secondary
education. He said the language barrier
that many young immigrant children face causes the content to be neglected
which compounds as they continue up through grades so that when they reach him,
they are just coming into academic English but unable to handle the content of
their grade. He wanted to return to
teaching at a college as he had done in Yemen.
We get talking about Noam Chomsky obviously, and he said he is a
fan. We begin talking about world
affairs and this man gets it. He has
some family in Yemen and sends them money to buy food. I tell him everything I know about US foreign
policy I learned either from, or through the critical lenses, of Noam
Chomsky. We talked about how US fuel
planes are fueling Saudi Arabian fighters in the air which then in turn go
commit human rights abuses and acts of war in Yemen. The conversation is spoken in solemn, hushed
tones, and I realized just how important Professor Noam Chomsky’s criticism of
the United States empire really is, and how I must take on another mantle other
than being an inspiring teacher – I must be a radical and relentless social
critic.
I was pleasantly surprised in my small
talk with other members of the National Lawyer Guild, how much this
organization does and has done for the anti-capitalist, pro-indigenous,
anti-State state violence, and pro-environmental causes. Looking through the event’s publication I saw
just how connected the NLG was to advocating and defending alternative social
orders in the US. The UAW hall in
Dearborn felt like a monumental space for labor resistance, and it all seemed
very fitting. The only thing that didn’t
fit was the jackets worn by the weight staff.
My heart goes out to them for I will always be one of them. I had a Pabst Blue Ribbon before dinner and
enjoyed a plate of greens, potatoes, chicken and cold cheeses. I had the fullest plate at my table and sort
of made it a point of pride to use my dinner roll as a napkin to clean my plate
entirely. The most wasteful way to serve
people is a buffet because people’s eyes are always bigger than their stomachs. I had not eaten all day so my plate wasn’t
big enough, but I was not going back for seconds because speeches were about to
begin.
A lawyer pleaded for us to donate more (I
had already paid the student price of $85 to get into the event) and I realized
in her speech just how far to the Left this event was. These were not the lawyers of lawyer jokes,
but the epitome of bleeding heart radicals, who although came from means or
acquired a great deal of student debt, had forgone the material promises of the
legal profession and gone to work to empower and defend the capital P-People. The artists showcased were a hip-hop
collective dedicated to indigenous, environmental and poor people’s causes –
all causes that are entirely connected to each other and marginalized by the
business-as-usual of both US governments and global capitalism. The student honorees were tireless defenders
of the People in the streets. From
Standing Rock to J20 (the Trump inauguration resistance) to the confrontation
that went down on March 5th at MSU against the Neo-Nazi Richard
Spencer, these young people often donned Day-Glo hats and worked as Street
Lawyers hand-in-hand with the anarchists, unionists, anti-fascists,
environmentalists and all the other schools of revolutionaries. The lifetime achievement recipients were a
husband and wife team. Those two had
done it all – from defending Black Panthers and the Weather Underground during the
sixties, to suing every level of the State apparatus. The woman noted that it was difficult at
first to defend a citizen’s rights to blow up bombs in their backyard, “but the
Constitution is the Constitution” and must be defended. I understood from their short speeches that
they knew their role in the struggle against power, inequality and State
violence – they were there to use the law to hold those in power in check. Of course they wanted another world, but they
recognized the need for the legal work to protect the individual lives that are
harmed by the criminal negligence of police, corporations and the State. The husband spoke passionately against the US
as an imperialist empire. “You can’t
have imperialism and democracy. You
can’t have both.” He urged against
insane defense spending and went so far as to voice support for the Vietnamese
during the American invasion of Vietnam.
“Vietnam beat the US,” he said.
That tiny country fought the US every step of the way and modeled a mode
of resistance against US wars of aggression.
He recognized his work as a lawyer by saying, “Sometimes, if ya can’t
kick their ass, you can bite them in the ankles.”
When it came time for Chomsky to speak, it
was ten minutes to the scheduled time for closing remarks, but no one was
leaving when the main event was the most cited intellectual alive. I had an inkling at what Chomsky would talk
about. He’s been giving the same speech
for awhile now, but it didn’t take away from the pain, irony and rage that it
churned up in my heart and mind. He
began asking the audience if we want organized human existence to continue in
the next one hundred years. He spoke of
the “terminal disaster” that the future is converging upon with insane nuclear
nation states posturing and politicking all over the globe and he reaffirmed
the newest research regarding the apocalyptic reality of global warming. He called the USA a “rogue state” and didn’t
let up.
In regards to the threat of nuclear war,
he cited declassified US and Soviet documents that showed just how close the
world came to terminal disaster due to the stupidity of the world’s leaders and
a little luck from a few soldiers. One
Soviet soldier was noted to not send a nuclear missile warning up the chain of
command because it just seemed too improbable.
At the time the US was testing the missile defense systems on the border
of the Soviet Union under Regan’s operation Able-Archer. Chomsky said every school child should know
that Russians name, because without him we wouldn’t be here today.
He quoted the science saying in the next
one hundred years the Earth’s climate is going up 4 degrees Celsius which is
twice as much as the previous suspected amount and will cause the sea levels to
rise fifty feet or so, which will undoubtedly cause a majority of the world’s
population to be in some deep water.
Then he asked, exasperated, what the fuck
is the news media reporting on these days?
How is the world being so complicit as the trajectory for human
existence in one hundred years goes to shit at the hands of primarily US
Republican party politics, but also that capitalist motto of profit over
people. “Those in power know what
they’re doing, and yet they do nothing.”
Chomsky went on to say that he, the revolutionary figure in linguistics
is at a loss for the word to describe this race towards extinction. “It’s not insanity,” he said. It’s something more serious and sinister.
After the doom and gloom, he asked another
question: What would the world be like if countries followed their own
law? He cited a US law that says we
cannot provide military aid to human rights violators. Our two biggest recipients of bombs and
intelligence are Israel (the apartheid state) and Saudi Arabia (the oil rich
country causing famine and a cholera-epidemic in Yemen).
Then somehow, he turned to the US invasion
of the Middle East and how we’ve spent nearly $6 trillion dollars occupying the
region. He noted, oddly, that the
returns for the couple of hundred dollars that the terrorists spent to commit
9/11 had the best rate of return than any investment. He cited post-Soviet Union, US military
strategy where general and policy makers agreed that a “Mad Man” strategy would
be in the US’ best interest because it would make us seem unpredictable and therefore
dangerous. He gave the example that if a
person robs a store with a gun but doesn’t shoot anyone they still used the
gun. The same goes for US foreign
policy: if the US invades, or even bullies, a country then we are using nuclear
weapons.
He then turned to a short study of what a
“humanitarian intervention” really was and which past warlords had used the
term. He found that Mussolini, Japan and
Hitler had all claimed their pre-WWII invasions were humanitarian in
nature. Then he cited the NATO bombing
of Serbia and later the US bombing of Libya as other examples. For both acts of war, he quoted government
officials saying in more or less words that they dropped bombs because the
regions were unwelcoming to western business interests. He cited India invading West Pakistan and
Vietnam invading Cambodia as actual interventions because of a greater evil,
but that the US was on the wrong side of those conflicts as well.
He ended with an analysis of a 2008
Supreme Court case that he called the “Heller case.” The question at hand, said Chomsky, was, “is
it the Divine Right of citizens to be able to bring assault rifles into a
Starbucks?” He got truly originalist and
questioned the purpose of the 2nd Amendment. “Why did the founders think men should bear
arms?” he asked. “Two reasons really, to
kill Indians and keep down slaves.” He
cited Britain’s suggesting that slavery in the colonies should be abolished at
that expansion into the North American continent should at the Appalachian
Mountains. Thus, the Revolutionary
war. Let me repeat, Chomsky said that
the Revolutionary war was fought in order for the colonies to keep their slaves
and to continue western colonial expansion.
Then he said that the USA has been engaged in arm conflict ever since
our foundation.
I stopped taking notes at this point. He ended on the need to curb the US empire
and work for a better world, but I was just as exhausted then as I am now
writing this entire essay in a single, over-caffeinated sitting.
Chomsky was 89 when I met him. It was a blessing for me to see him, but from
what I can tell he’s got more years ahead of him. His mind keeps him alive. After all of this, I would ask him how he
remains so calm, positive, and agreeable (at least in person, maybe not in
ideas) when he exposes himself to so much pain and injustice in the world (apparently,
he reads four or five newspapers a day).
I owe a lot to Noam Chomsky. When I think of critical thinking or critical
lenses in my education class, I think of Noam Chomsky. I’m afraid no person can take up the mantle
of his genius or analysis. I’m afraid
he’s right in his doom and gloom. I’m
afraid I’m right in knowing that this murderous experiment in freedom in the US
is coming to a close, at least the ‘freedom’ part anyways. I’m afraid that the dehumanization of the
world’s population by war profiteers, global capitalists, and technocrats is
finally going to come to a head. One of
the speakers said, that all revolutionaries hope for the revolution to come in
their lifetime but it never does. My
fear is not that the revolution will come, but that the fall of an Empire is
going to be messy and idiotic.
I chose education because it’s sustainable
and the necessary precondition for creating another world, a new world in the
shell of the old, I just hope 1) there is a world to recreate, and 2) that I
can inspire future generations to take on the mantle of revolutionary ways of
living like Chomsky inspired in me.
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