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• Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:28 AM

  bucky1 : three cynical and sinister liars, one buffoon, and two nonentities

  Remember, I said previously, I always start by assuming that everyone is a rational actor, even though I know that this is not true. I do this because it's a good rhetorical strategy, in that the next approximation is always even more interesting. In this case, the next approximation is that they are either brainwashed by others, or self-brainwashed - a difficult concept to ground objectively, in that, how does the observer decide which is the self-brainwashed, himself or the observed? Anyway, to your examples.

  (1) Orwell : absolutely cynical and sinister, and self-brainwashed, and brainwashed by others, and, to make it worse, he knew it. This is as good a description of living in hell as any, psychologically speaking, but then again, some of us choose this life. I mean, you are aware, aren't you, that he worked for british wartime broadcasting, and I shall leave that phrase a little vague.

  (2) Chomsky, absolutely definitely, the man is a fraud. That isn't to say that anything in his political books is untrue, rather, that the US system protects him because of his selectivity, which is only in recent years starting to show visible cracks, which attract the attention of different observers according to their own interests, but currently include such diverse topics as Israel and 9-11. Also, in my humble opinion, his 'language organ' theory is rubbish, but I am not expert enough to be able to say either why it is rubbish, or why it is never exposed as such.

  (3) Bakunin was an out and out gangster. I don't think this is even in dispute.

  (4) Vonnegut, well, look, the man is a comic novelist, a buffoon. His highly public spasms of disgust at mansinhumanitytoman are just spasms. US novelists nowadays do not inspire respect, generally, for intellectual rigor, integrity, or anything else - at last not the ones who get lionised. What that says about US pop lit is obvious, and it is not intended to imply anything about novelists outside th epop lionised circuits, since I don't claim to know about them, or to have much time to find out.

  (5) Lucy Parsons, sorry, I have no idea about, or interest in.

  (6) Nor do I know who Nicholas Walter was, or care much.

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
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