I was surprised to see a link on Facebook to a
review of a new book by Noam Chomsky in the
New York Review of Books. Chomsky used to write regularly for the
NYRB in the Sixties and early Seventies, but at some point he faded from their pages, and even his most serious political writings are rarely reviewed there, so this review is a nice gesture. It's not even the kind of transparent hatchet job that's typical of liberal media like the
Guardian, the
New York Times, or the
Nation (which, I admit, has improved somewhat). The reviewer catches Chomsky in a minor error or two but on the whole concedes the validity of his "case against America." Still, I had to chuckle at this passage:
Yet Who Rules the World? is also an infuriating book because it is so partisan that it leaves the reader convinced not of his insights but of the need to hear the other side.
I know, right? Where could most American readers
possibly "hear the other side"? If only a newspaper, or perhaps a TV network, or a politician or two would take up the defense of America's supreme goodness, so citizens could get get a fair and balanced view!
