"Noam Chomsky, Superstar"

Derrick O'Keefe, Seven Oaks Magazine

The Noam Chomsky phenomenon swept Vancouver this weekend. Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor, prolific anti-establishment writer, and perhaps the closest thing there is to a living icon of the North American Left, spoke to a crowd of close to 20,000 at the March 20 anti-war rally at Sunset Beach, and then followed it up with two sold-out talks at the Orpheum theatre. It's worth looking at the lasting and massive appeal of Chomsky, to find out what it says about the man himself and the state of movements for social change.The degree of his fame should first be qualified, of course. A CBC radio host announced Saturday morning that the anti-war rally would feature Norm Chomsky, after all. It's still a fame confined primarily to those active on the Left of the political spectrum, or else a notoriety better defined as infamy amongst those closer to the Right.

I got an up-close look at people's reactions to Chomsky's fame as one of the stage marshals for the rally. It was a constant struggle to keep media and admirers away from the stage, and to explain that our 75-year-old keynote speaker needed some space while he awaited his turn to speak. And after the rally, it literally took a 10-person amateur security escort to get him from the rally to his ride.

A small minority, including those who felt obliged to thrust their small children into the dangerous scrum that formed on his way out, reacted to Chomsky as one is trained to respond to the sighting of a rock or movie star: “We love you Noam!” A larger minority looked on and stared like observers of a strange, rare animal, which in a sense he is -- as a prominent 60s radical still going strong and unchanged in his ideals and principles. The overwhelming majority, though, treated Chomsky with awe and reverence. During his 31-minute speech at the rally, you could hear keys jingling and seagulls squawking, the silence and attention was so complete. What other speaker in the world could get away with such a half-hour dissertation at the end of a long rally, almost without a soul moving or heading for home?

The first and most obvious reason for Chomsky's lasting appeal is his four decades of intensive writing, speaking, and activism against U.S. imperial ventures, from Vietnam right up to the recent coup d'etat in Haiti. Generations of activists got their start in politics after reading from the Chomsky canon, or from watching Manufacturing Consent . And his message hasn't changed. The overseas crimes of our governments are our responsibility to confront, to denounce, and to prevent. And in today's world of an open return to imperialism and direct colonial occupations, it's a message that retains its urgency.

There are other reasons for Chomsky's prominence and, alas, they reflect the current weakness of Left political movements, at least in North America. This lack of strength or broad impact is reflected, in part, by the fact that successive generations have failed to produce an intellectual of the same stature and influence. The 1980s and 90s, in the United States in particular, were decades of deep attacks on, and the retreat of, the labour movement, women's movement, and of radical politics in general. Today's anti-war movement and the energy of the loosely defined anti-globalization movement are among the first signs of dynamism on the left in North America since before the advent of Reaganomics.

The lack of insurgent radical movements in the “homeland” is linked to another likely reason for Chomsky's eclipsing of so many progressive voices. For all his thorough-going critique of what he terms “our crimes,” the crimes of U.S. and Western imperialism, Chomsky does not, almost as a rule, point to the resistance, by any means necessary, of the people taking the brunt of Uncle Sam's pounding as a force worthy of open endorsement. Brilliant and veteran anti-imperialist activists who explicitly highlight the resistance in those “dark corners of the world,” as the Bushites have called them, are fated to have less broad appeal.

The example of Tariq Ali, once the quintessential “star” activist, at least in Britain, should illustrate. His Autobiography of the 1960s reads like a movie star's memoir: corresponding with Mick Jagger and John Lennon, dining with Marlon Brando, and taking tea with Bertrand Russell. From the same generation of protest as Chomsky, Ali remains a prominent author, and -- notably more so than Chomsky -- a charismatic speaker. Chomsky, by his own self-deprecating admission, “tends to mumble.” A more key distinction than their speaking styles is Ali's consistent citing of indigenous resistance movements -- without being uncritical -- as a positive development, worthy of open support.

These somewhat more negative explanations for Chomsky's dwarfing of so many other figures on the Left are not meant to denigrate the remarkable life work of this intellectual and advocate of social justice. Indeed, the content of his talks this weekend speak to the urgency and scope of the issues, and serve to motivate action and organization: Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, the case of the Cuban 5 political prisoners in United States, the continued assault on the world's indigenous peoples, the historical continuity of the “war on terror” with previous justifications for wars of domination and control. These are the pressing political issues of our time. And Chomsky challenges us to take up our responsibility, and hopefully our destiny as a human species, to get to work in dismantling the systems that create war and injustice, and in building a just, decent, and sustainable world.