And You Thought It Was Safe(?)

In the summer of The Year 2000, my parents and I embarked upon a European Vacation. After two nights in Paris, circumstances found us in the quiet little town of Bois (pronounced just like it’s spelled…as long as you’re speaking through a mouthful of yogurt). With a few hours to kill before the restaurant’s opened, I flipped on the TV. And found Manufacturing Consent. The almost-three hour long documentary profile of MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky. Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick followed the man around for almost four years, taping talk after talk in a variety of countries. They also managed to dig up hours of archival interviews from as far back as the 1960s. All of which is cut-n’-pasted into a one hundred sixty-seven minute primer for anyone two lazy to pick up one of the man’s many (many, many) books.

For those who don’t know (I was once one myself), Professor Chomsky is one of the most respected linguists in the world. When my mother went back to get her Masters in English, or her certificate to teach English-as-a-Second Language, her professors told her to pour over Chomsky’s work. The Professor teaches at MIT, writes shelf-fulls of books, and has appeared on numerous TV shows, mostly in other countries. Thanks to his old-school, anarcho-syndicalist views on the ideal society, and his scalding, unrepentant criticisms of America’s most-imperial foreign policy decisions, he remains largely unknown to the general public. {More}