Noam Chomsky was just named the world's
top public intellectual by the British magazine Prospect, which polled some 20,000 UK citizens on the subject. Other front-runners included author
Umberto Eco and Oxford University professor
Richard Dawkins.
The newsworthiness of this story is questionable, especially since Chomsky himself says "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls," but it did remind me that I've been thinking a lot about Chomsky and his political writings (notably "
Manufacturing Consent") for the last few years.
It used to be that I'd dismiss some of his musings on secret wars in Central America and the role of corporate power in America as "conspiracy talk," but the deeper we get into the
corrupt Bush administration's follies, the more evident it becomes that Noam Chomsky knows what he is talking about, and should not be dismissed in so facile a fashion.
If you haven't
read Chomsky, or better yet
listened to him, I strongly recommend you do so. What he has to say is important.
