Peter Collier Reports:
“Every so often we experience what Jung called synchronicity—the sudden perception of a possibly meaningful pattern in apparently unrelated events. I had one of these moments myself last week.
The first element was the passing of Howard Zinn. I believe as much as the next guy that every man’s death diminishes me, but to be honest, in this case I was hard pressed to feel a sense of loss. Matt Damon might regard him as Parkman’s equal, but in truth Zinn was a savage parody of a historian, one of those radical hacks whose every word subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.The best and worst that can be said of his People’s History of the United States is that it has benumbed the faculties of many young people over the last couple of decades. It is perhaps the best example in recent years of the way in which some of the fecal matter thrown onto the wall of our intellectual culture not only sticks but becomes a lasting act of defacement….
…
But back to the rush of synchronicity I alluded to above. It came a day after the Goodman interview, when Osama bin Laden spoke up from whatever dreary cave in which he is presently immured. After attacking the Great Satan for causing climate change in a diatribe that called up a possible Jon Stewart monologue (“…the arch terrorist provided a kiss of death for global warming theory today by offering his unqualified support for it just as the East Anglia Climategate was calling the whole deal into question…”), bin Laden got down to the business of blackguarding America as a global terror state. And who did he cite as proof for this theorem? None other than Chomsky himself. Bin Laden had praised him two years earlier for showing how public opinion is “manufactured” by decadent democracies; now he gave it up again for his hero: “Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. polices to those of the Mafia.”
Bin Laden, Zinn, and Chomsky. How synchronous their harmonies. How collaborative the ideas in their weave. How much they deserve each other.”
