More Bitter Pills, Please

Have you seen Noam Chomsky’s film, “Manufacturing Consent”? I got it through Netflix and it sat unviewed for at least a month. Chomsky is one of our culture’s few intellectuals that are graced with, or suffer under, the public light. He’s a groundbreaking linguist, but more famous now as a political and sociological thinker and writer. He riles lot of people up because he seems to have little respect for authority, but what he says is wise, true, and worst of all, backed up by facts.

A list of his outrageous points of view here would do his work no service, but I will say that he gets the standard treatment that mainstream powers use on iconoclasts: name calling, dismissal, marginalization. “Manufacturing Consent”, a film that was made in 1992, based on the book of similar title he co-authored with Edward Herman in 1988, speaks to the methods and means by which the powers that be, corporate, political and cultural (including the media, of course) so tightly prune the trees of public discourse that they bear only the fruit that those in power want us to eat. The “propaganda model”.

It’s striking and somewhat paradoxical that those with power in a free and democratic society need to be more vigilant about public opinion than they do in a totalitarian regime because in a democracy it actually matters what the people think. One needs taller fences for horses than for rabbits.

Why did I let such an intriguing and well-produced film lie unviewed for so long? By the time I got into it, I was loving it, but it wasn’t as easy as the other titles in my Netflix cueue, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou,” and “Tideland,” to name the most recent. Chomsky is like the brussels sprouts on a child’s plate. But it’s not that I don’t like brussels sprouts, it’s just that their taste is so strong, they don’t go with the other tasty treats I’ve been eating. In fact, this particular morsel makes much of the other fare less appealing.

I’m going to use this as an opportunity to give some authority back to my inner critic. I’ve been beating him back for years, and now that I’m getting him to behave better, giving him some power might be a good idea. His new task -- to keep an eye out for the brussels sprouts in my life, because I actually love brussels sprouts.