Noam Chomsky during an appearance at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2014 (Uli Deck/Getty)


Published by the Irish Independent:


When we found a stray kitten under the bed, I named it Chomsky.

It was a tribute to the influence that Noam Chomsky, linguist and political commentator, had upon the course of my career in academia and journalism.

He wrote and spoke vividly about how US foreign policy had failed to live up to American values during and after the Cold War. As the Bush Administration, with the hubris of superpower, pursued the deadly shock and awe of Iraq 2003, his was an all-too-accurate warning.

But as my devotion to Chomsky the Cat grew, my attachment to Chomsky the polemicist waned. I came to realize that as he assailed the US system over Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Cuba, he showed little recognition of Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, and Cubans —- their experiences, their fears, their aspirations. They were merely the extras in his never-ending screenplay of American perfidy.

He continued to fulminate in print and on screen, passionate, angry, and frustrated, but a complex world beyond the US and its failed superpower had passed him by.

Chomsky, 95, is recovering in Brazil from a stroke. In what is likely to be his final book, The Myth of American Idealism, he departs with lines now exhausted of value.

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