I’ve never been good with other people’s birthdays, so don’t be surprised that I’m only now getting around to honouring Noam Chomsky’s 80th birthday which was in fact on December 7. When I was at college, our lecturer in sociolinguistics told us Chomsky’s ideas about deep grammar were so complex that we shouldn’t bother with them, but since the Eighties, Chomsky has obviously made his way into the mainstream, as quite a few musicians have name-checked the veteran intellectual and peace activist in recent months. In a conversation I had with British multi-instrumentalist and film composer Nitin Sawhney about his thought-provoking new album “London Undersound”, we soon got on to the subject of the ever-expanding surveillance state in England and Chomsky’s Orwellian conviction that governments encourages fear as a means of controlling the populace. Swiss rapper Gimma referenced Chomsky in a rhyme about potentially inspiring people on the album “Iisziit” by Bucher & Schmid, and German singer and song-writer extraordinaire Farin Urlaub also mentioned the great man when we met up to discuss his latest solo album “Die Wahrheit übers Lügen”.Urlaub, ever an avid reader and thinker, brought up Chomsky’s point that any Presidential candidate who makes it through to the campaign proper would have to have made so many promises and endured so many humiliations along the way as to be unable to pursue policies vastly different to those of his predecessors. I quipped that I was impressed that Urlaub could understand Chomsky’s prose and then felt rather silly, not having read any of it myself. Luckily for me, an essay by Chomsky appeared in the December 6 issue of the “Tages-Anzeiger”, one of the Swiss news-papers I write for, and through reading the text I found my old prejudices confirmed. Although I agreed with everything that I read in the interesting and well-researched article outlining Chomsky’s reservations about Obama and his choice of staff, I found his writing to be rather convoluted. If I wrote like that, my editor at the same paper would have a fit. So happy birthday, Noam, but please watch your syntax. More people would benefit from your deep and varied insights into the fabric of American politics if you’d only avoid the parentheses and sub-clauses.
