Linh Dinh takes issue with Ron Unz’s nonchalance concerning Covid-19 vaccines and their ever-rising death toll at unz.com:
I often write about ordinary people and the banal, because each situation is a complex allegory, if not an intriguing painting, and no one is uninteresting. Plus, normalcy calms.
When you smell smoke, however, it might be wise to stop waxing about fried chicken, say, and see where the flames are coming from. In case you haven’t noticed, our world is burning.
It all starts with Covid. Covid locks you in, freezes your economy, destroys your business, wrecks your mental health, strains your relationships, drains your savings, empties your stores, disfigures your society, conditions you to be unnatural and, now, if you don’t agree to be vaccinated, threatens to isolate you (even further) and starve you to death, as charmingly decreed by that Olympus of human rights, Noam Chomsky, plus a host of others.
Never a fan, I find Chomsky’s prose devoid of sparks, such as is routine in Orwell, but maybe I’m just thick. In a Guardian piece, “Conscience of a nation,” Maya Jaggi swoons, “Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities—and is the only writer among them still alive.”
In his 1967 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky succinctly declares, “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”
In his 2002 essay, “Reflections on 9-11,” Chomsky points out that “despite what must be the most intensive international intelligence investigation in history, evidence about the perpetrators of 9-11 has been hard to find.” And yet, “Nevertheless, despite the thin evidence, the initial conclusion about 9-11 is presumably correct.”
