I want to see CHOMSKY in letters four feet tall

It’s been a week of dissent, very busy dissent, which is why I’ve been ignoring my loyal readership (11 readers, 8 of them looking for porn) for so long.

First was this column, which ran on Tuesday and which I consider one of my best. It got two positive letters to the editor on the next day, which has only happened once before — when I wrote about what it meant to be “indie.” Jesus.

Last night Bryan, Nathan, Marta, and I (and others) went to see Noam Chomsky lecture and answer questions at Meany Hall. The line stretched all around Red Square an hour before the talk was scheduled to begin — two weeks earlier the UW Bookstore gave away 1,000 tickets to the event in under 10 minutes. Although the sold-out crowd was a little overzealous (“do you we have to clap every time he says something?“), I was thoroughly provoked. Most of it I had heard before, as Chomsky’s main points really aren’t that myriad, but he manages to cast the same material in a different light each time. He is an inspiration to many, many people, as well as the preeminent intellectual in the country. The same day, the Daily ran a guest column by an English professor condemning Chomsky, which proves that you can take anything out of context and make it sound evil. Chomsky himself actually raised this point during the Q&A portion of the evening and got laughs. I was going to write into the paper in Chomsky’s defense, but someone beat me to the punch.

The quote of the night: “The 20th century has seen three principal forms of tyranny: Bolshevism, Fascism, and corporations.”

It’s important that people understand that Noam Chomsky doesn’t hate America. Last night, he specifically addressed the fact that, when it comes to things like freedom of expression and basic civil rights, we have no peer in the world, or in history. For the most part, he’s pretty satisfied with domestic policy — it’s the international stance that he criticizes most harshly. We’re very nice to our own citizens, but the rest of the world is disposable where the ruling elite are concerned. Maybe people are OK with that, but I’m not. I’m tired of my country being known as the bully of the world.

Bryan brought his copy of Hegemony or Survival to get signed. I saw him in the foyer after the lecture (we had to split up inside because we couldn’t find enough seats together), and he informed me he was going to go meet Noam. “You can’t just go meet Noam. You’re not meeting anybody,” I assured him. Most of the rest of us were starving, so we made an emergency Aladdin’s run. While there, I got a call from Bryan, who told me that he was in the VIP room having dinner with Noam Chomsky. That. Bastard. I should have known this would happen — when Bryan says he’s going to go meet someone famous, he usually succeeds. Bryan, Roman, and Austin got some pictures with the Great Man, and Bryan got him to sign his book, as well as a Set Theory book he had with him. Unbelievable. Roman got staggering drunk on the free booze, in front of Noam Chomsky, and really, how many people can claim to have done that?

Also, I turned in 18 pages for my short story, which will come under the fire of peer review on Monday, instead of the max of 12. I wrote the entire thing in emacs, a no-nonsense text editor for Linux — to avoid Word’s annoying habits like squiggly lines and curly quotes, and to make it so difficult for me to scroll around (no mouse) that I would have to keep writing rather than continually nitpicking my previous three sentences — so I didn’t know until I was done how long it was. When I transferred it to Word, there were — get this — less than a dozen spelling errors. In 18 pages! And those were typos. Basically, I rule pretty hard.