Penny Pille interviews Noam Chomsky

[ED: Patty decided she didn't want to finish the interview so the Pille family is kind of tag-teaming it with young Penny getting the next shot in]

• PP: You're really really old, aren't you?
• NC: .... excuse me?
• PP: Do you get out much or do you just sit around this dumpy office full of smelly old books all the time?
• NC: Well, I teach, and I give lectures and...
• PP: Yeah, but it's always with dopey people that already agree with you pretty much, isn't it?
• NC: Um, no...I... plenty of people don't agree with...
• PP: Do you ever talk to real people? I mean people who aren't mostly white and privileged and can't afford to go to snooty elitist places like MIT?
• NC: But...uh....
• PP: I mean you write a lot and you read a lot and you know a lot about language...can you actually do anything real, like the brakes on your car or something? Can you juggle? Carpentry? You sure don't look like you get much sun or exercise.
• NC: ...ah...
• PP: So really, all this political stuff you talk about is just words and things that go on inside your head, aren't they? Kind of a big game where you move all these words and "facts" around until you find a pleasing arrangement, a nice coherent model of the world that just doesn't necessarily have to map onto any reality as long as it fits your political agenda and, well, sounds good, right, and sells books? I mean you pretty much made up your mind about things a long time ago, back in the 60's I read. It's like what Robert Anton Wilson says: what the "believer" believes, the "prover" proves.
• NC: ...uh, who?
• PP: If I psychically bent some spoons for you, do you think that might help free you from this annoying language dependence and awful paranoid reality tunnel you're stuck in? I mean language facility just simulates intelligence, it isn't the real deal, in fact it's kind of a trap. Maybe you've been too close to the issue to even see that, forest-for-trees kind of thing...
• NC: ...but!...
• PP: It's like with most of your followers, you can't distinguish words from reality. That's why the Political Correct movement was so freaking obsessed with changing words and images because for them, in their little minds, words and images are reality and what's worse is you can't imagine anyone being above all that, treating words as maps and not the territories. Political Correctness and the whole Leftist thingie are the ultimate manifestation of brain-dead American knee-jerk consumerism. You're all the very worst of what you hate and I think deep down you kind of know this and have no idea how to escape it. That's probably the real source of your inner rage. And you're mostly detached from real feeling which is why you all spend so much time trying to get "natural" and you talk way too much about being sensitive and stuff. I mean you being a linguist and a dreary old professor and all, you're about the last person I'd go to for a sensible appraisal of how this silly world of yours actually works, you probably spend very little time in it. I'd rather talk to people who get around and meet all sorts of other people and do things. That's what my sister does when she goes undercover for my dad, she gets out there and works the crowd and gets dirty and comes back with just one Gestalt of potentially many that's treated by people at my dad's institute with a lot of care. When they get enough Gestalts only then can they create a vague Ghost Map that operates roughly within the center of a probability bell-curve, a kind of flattened multi-dimensional super-sphere of kind of overlapping realities...sorry, I'm studying this at school right now...
• NC ... world of mine?...
• PP: ...and what's really ironic is that while you all mouth off endlessly about relativism and not making value judgements and stupid meaningless arbitrary French philosophy and critical methods--basically crap that removes you guys from any personal responsibility, turns you guys into one-upping, hyper-critical assholes, and enables you guys to endlessly modify your ideals to suit your personal needs, which is just self-serving toddler-think covered in a super-sophisticated gloss--in fact, your simple-minded outwardly imposed world-view is as absolutist, demon-ridden, and judgemental as that of the worst religious fundamentalists. DICK CHENEY!
• NC: ...WHAAAA!!!...
• PP: Yeh, you write these elegant books where you rattle off endless "facts" but nobody buys them except perpetually pissed-off and astonishingly ill-informed students who'll never figure out that they've confused their home troubles with the world's troubles, and old hippies who've also already made up their minds about everything and they treat you like some sort of oracle for telling them what they already believe, that is if they even read your damned things instead of just stacking them in plain sight. Don't you find that just weird? You never really get critiqued intelligently by anyone. Do you ever critique yourself--admit you may have made an error--question your basic assumptions?
• NC: .....
• PP: Ever consider the fact that some information might be fed to you? You'll admit to one sort of vast conspiracy but you don't seem to see the potential for others. The American Left flatters itself that it's some sort of "force," that it's real smart and on top of things, but you all go running like puppies straight to whatever new bone confirms your pre-existing beliefs. You're about the easiest bunch of people to manipulate and keep out of the way and a lot of smarter people know that. The people who do lead you around count on the fact that every last one of you is totally convinced that no one else is smarter than you, unless you allow them to be, which is why you're so popular with the Left--you're real smart because you tell them what they want to hear in what they see as a smart-sounding way. Anyway, this was all learned back in the 60's when it quickly became apparent that the bulk of you scary "revolutionaries" were just pathetic upper middle class bourgeois white-bread hung-up college jerks throwing temper tantrums. Look! Look! Over there! Dick Cheney's signing a secret deal with the Saudis to destroy the Constitution in exchange for higher oil profits!!
• NC: WHERE?!
• PP: See, you didn't even see me pocket your platinum fountain pen, did you? So what's really sad is that while the world is moving forward in many ways, you guys are the ones who want to turn the clock back, to the Neolithic it sounds like. Hippies and Leftists are the true progress-and-civilization-hating Conservatives who want to head back to some mythical all-natural-fabric Garden of Eden full of romanticized, grossly stereotyped, happy, singing, dancing "people of color" which is just a dopey metaphor for your juvenile "upbeat" racist fantasies--a bizarre update on the awful "noble savage" and "tap-dancing nigra" crap. You long for your comfy bourgeois childhood crib where you could poop in your pants whenever you wanted. Bad daddy government! Oh, your time is up and I have to get going. I'm sorry but there's absolutely nothing I can do to help you and honestly I do want to help you see the "truth," it's the only way anyone can effect real change. You do know your civilization is juvenilizing and in danger of collapsing, that you're losing important skills and knowledge at an alarming rate, and you're on the verge of a new and very nasty Dark Age, don't you? HALLIBURTON!
• NC: ...WHAT?!!...

• [Coming up next: Tony Pille and even Professor Pille himself take the serum to Noam]