"Hearing Noam Chomsky"

Mike Palecek

Being a product of the Nebraska educational system I
didn't hear of Noam Chomsky until I was in my 40s.

Maybe that's not Mr. Bruening's or Mr. Gibson's or
Mrs. Schmeichel's fault, totally. Probably it's mine,
along with the Norfolk Daily News, Omaha
World-Herald, as well as Isabel and Milosh Palecek's.In his speech at a benefit for the Massachusetts
Anti-Corporate Clearinghouse, not very close to
Nebraska, Chomsky talks about our "free press" and
mentions the relative risks activists encounter in the
United States and the rest of the world.

The main point I took away was that we have no idea,
just as the high school and college and adult "me" had
no idea who this accomplished American dissident was;
we Americans have no idea what is happening in our
country due to our own lack of initiative as well as
our own not-free press.

We also have no idea what others in the world go
through in order to get the truth, to tell the truth.

Perhaps there are pockets of "enlightened masses", in
places like North Andover, MA, that understand who
Noam Chomsky is and what our government is doing and
has done, but not where I live, where I have lived,
nor where I will likely live the rest of my days.

Here we push through the crowds at Hy-Vee to stock up
on Charmin an hour before the blizzard hits and call
it being in the middle of the action.

Here we honk at "idiots" driving too slow and flip the
bird at "maniacs" in our rearview mirror and call that
hardship.

We listen to Rush and read the Norfolk Daily News and
call that education.

We have no idea.

We have no idea, as Chomsky says, that Cointelpro was
so much more important in its effect on the American
public and its supposed democracy than Watergate was.

We have no idea that the Patriot Act endangers our
freedoms more than it protects them.

We have no idea of the sophisticated controls in place
which are keeping us underfoot, put in place by
government in part, by the advertising industry, by
marketing strategies.

We have no idea of the rogues gallery that our
government has supported and continues to support. We
don't care. As long as the roads get plowed and we
can get to work, we do not care.

Chomsky mentions that Woodrow Wilson put Eugene Debs
in prison for denouncing the war. Something like that
could happen around here and we would not understand.
We would say the president had every right: because
we
do not know about Eugene Debs. We watch "American
Idol" and "Survivor".

That's what we talk about out here.

My children do not know about Eugene Debs or Noam
Chomsky. I have placed books in strategic locations
around the house: "Manufacturing Consent" perched atop
the channel changer, Michael Moore's books and tapes
inside the refrigerator. I don't think it's done any
good.

Our family, the four of us, flew out to Washington
D.C. last January to be at one of the large anti-war
protests. The kids had never flown and my wife and I
only a couple of times. We thought it would be good
for Sam and Emily to see this, something different,
something with so much significance in their lives,
something they would not see or hear back in Sheldon,
Iowa by watching television or paying rapt attention
in their classrooms.

Well, we did it, paid the money, flew in the cold,
rented the car, navigated around the city, found our
way on the subway and followed the folks with the
signs.

And then my son wanted to go back to the hotel to
watch television, didn't want to be around all those
peaceniks. We argued out in front of the capitol,
with all those thousands and thousands of people on
the world stage as a backdrop. "Why did you bring me
out here? I won't act any different when I get home?
Why did you wait until I was 16?"

Hmm, maybe that's the thing. My wife and I tried to
bring our two children here to a small Iowa town after
years in the Omaha peace movement, jail and prison
experiences, terrible suffering, agony actually. I
went insane in jail. We almost split up. It was not
good.

So we came to Iowa to raise the kids in a nice place,
small town, away from all that.

And now we expect them to understand the world by
placing "Dude, Where's My Country" next to the skim
milk.

Now we expect them to want to know who in the hell is
Noam Chomsky.

Now we want them to know there is a real world out
there.

[Mike Palecek, 48, lives with Ruth, Sam, and Emily in
Sheldon, Iowa. He has spent time in several federal
prisons and county jails in the Midwest for resistance
to to the United States military. He is also a former
Catholic seminarian, small-town newspaper reporter,
and was the Iowa Democratic Party nominee for the U.S.
House of Representatives, 5th District, in the 2000
election. His books include THE TRUTH, KGB, JOE
COFFEE'S REVOLUTION, PROPHETS WITHOUT HONOR and TWINS. To this review of his speech at a benefit for the
Massachusetts Anti-Corporate Clearinghouse on
"Corporations and Terrorism: War is Terrorism for the
Rich and Terrorism is War for the Poor,"

Noam Chomsky responded with the
following comment: "Very moving letter, and very sad."]