Hide the Shame!

 The revelations that have emerged from the massive data trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails released last week have obviously been pretty distasteful. But—for the most part—I haven't found them particularly destabilizing to my worldview or to my understanding of human nature. 

After all: most of the people who have been further discredited—as we've learned the extent of their friendship with Epstein over the years—already seemed like jerks or creeps to start with: Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, etc. And that's not even to mention Steve Bannon or Trump—about whom no revelation, however dark, could possibly surprise me at this point. 

I have to say, though, that there was one name included in that batch of emails that landed differently: Noam Chomsky. This one actually hurts. Chomsky was, undoubtedly, a genuine hero of my left-wing youth; as he was for so many teenage self-declared radicals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, of every description. 

To be sure, as early as college I had started to sour on Chomsky. I got pretty bored with his one-dimensional view of the world. An early post on this blog—from ten years ago—critiqued the "Chomsky Method" of political analysis—which, by my twenties, I had come to regard as all too stale and predictable; and I basically stand by the argument in that piece. 

Still, Chomsky was a kind of grandfather figure to everyone on the American Left. And no one wants to catch their grandfather with his pants down—or in any other position of indignity or disgrace. 

To be sure, there's nothing in the emails to indicate Chomsky participated in any of Epstein's sex crimes. But they do reveal that the two men had a much closer relationship than previously known. 

Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chomsky had received a major transaction from Epstein that he said was made up of his own funds and related to a request for financial advice from Epstein. Chomsky said at the time that he had turned to Epstein merely to address a "technical matter" about his finances, and that the extent of their relationship was "none of [the reporter's] business." Though he further acknowledged: "I knew him and we met occasionally." 

What Chomsky didn't acknowledge in that email is what the latest Epstein data dump now reveals: namely, that they were in close correspondence for years—well after Epstein's 2008 conviction; and even after the 2018 Miami Herald story that first blew the lid off the Epstein scandal in a big way. 

Indeed, the Miami Herald reports today—drawing upon the trove of emails—that Epstein even appears to have helped to enlist Chomsky in a documentary project in 2019 to rehabilitate his image. 

Of course, Epstein was also in regular contact with Steve Bannon at this point—and the documentary seemed to be intended to align with the agenda of the populist right. Which would—one might think—make it a poor fit for Chomsky's politics. 

But—in a particular troubling touch—Epstein at one point reportedly says in the emails (in the Herald's summary): the (unnamed) right-wing filmmaker and Chomsky "had 'more in common' than he thought."

This suggests what I long suspected: that Chomsky has actually been moving toward the populist right for a number of years (which perhaps shouldn't surprise us: this is a guy—after all—who was already willing to appear on Alex Jones's show decades ago). 

In another passage from the emails, Epstein corresponds with Chomsky's second wife Valeria. She jokes in 2016—shortly after correctly predicting the outcome of the election—about seeking a job as a political analyst in the Trump administration. She also says that Trump should listen to Chomsky and that Epstein should arrange a meeting between the two of them. As the Herald story puts it, "It is not clear whether she sent that message in jest."

I suspect it was sent "in jest"—but only half-heartedly so. It obviously contains an element of truth. Chomsky's one-note, quasi-conspiratorial political worldview was always just a few shades removed from certain strands of the populist right. Swap a few key phrases—or merely letters—change "global elite" to "globalist," for instance—and you could find Chomsky and Bannon pretty much on the same page on most issues. 

(It is of course darkly ironic that two of the men who contributed most to our modern mythology of the corrupt, conspiratorial global elite—by the way—have now been outed—in this email dump—as the close associates of a sexual predator who himself embodies that very elite corruption in the worst way—a sex trafficker who maintained personal and financial ties to seemingly the entire social, political, scientific, and academic upper echelon.)

In this progression from populist left to populist right, Chomsky is of course doing nothing more than following other erstwhile leftists from the pre-Trump era—Glenn Greenwald stands out as another good example—in finding themselves more and more frequently on the side of the isolationist, America First right. (I'm glad Gore Vidal didn't live long enough to potentially follow them.)

It turns out that, if you are the sort of person who is capable of "only one idea" at a time—as William Hazlitt would put it—and that idea is that the national security state and the global elite are evil—then you are at the mercy of anyone else who claims to hate these same things; even if they hate them for entirely the wrong reasons; and protest against them in wholly inconsistent and disingenuous ways. 

I'm not sure Chomsky or Greenwald mind having become the tools, in the Trump era, of cynical neo-fascists and xenophobic right-wing populists. But I mind it on their behalf. These are two men, after all, whom—in some sense—I once admired. 

"One loss is mine / Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore [...]"—as Shelley once wrote of Wordsworth—reflecting on the latter's ignominious political turn to the right—"In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— / Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."

That is all I could feel, too, as I read that Herald article about Chomsky's friendship with Epstein. Here was somebody who did once write books and march in protests that were consecrate to truth and liberty. He even shows up in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night—where he shares a jail cell with the author because of their mutual opposition to the Vietnam War. 

Mailer describes him—in an image that fits my own mental impression of him perfectly—as having "an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity." 

Here was a person who was capable of real moral heroism in his day. And let us never forget it.

But look at him now! This is what has become of him!

Truly, he "leavest me to grieve," that having been otherwise—having been the left-wing idol of my youth and that virtuous, "ascetic" protester of the 1960s—now, he must "cease to be." I grieve indeed to see him reduced to this, the person that emerges from those Epstein emails.

"Walk backward with averted gaze/ And hide the shame!" as John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote of Daniel Webster—in reflecting on the latter's political betrayal and disgrace, after he endorsed the Fugitive Slave Act.

Oh well; Chomsky belongs in many ways to a former world and a former generation. We already knew this—even before the Epstein revelations. His analysis of hegemony and the control of information may have explained the 20th century, but it didn't apply so well to the anarchic world of social media and right-wing populism we have entered in the 21st. It was time for the left to move on anyway from people like Chomsky, and even from his Obama-era epigoni like Greenwald. 

A new generation always comes. A new generation of poets took their ranks in the liberal movement—people like Shelley and Byron—even after Wordsworth and Coleridge turned their backs on progress and retreated into reactionary conservatism. 

We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; as Browning once wrote of Wordsworth, whom he dubbed the "Lost Leader." 

So too, a new generation of leftist commentators has emerged to take the place of people like Chomsky and Greenwald—commentators who are not so easily fooled by the mere outward trappings of populist rhetoric. So, we will fight on, even without the aid of the passing generation. We will "march prospering," even without their presence. 

But still—one could have wished the transition between generations could be a bit less wrenching! One could have wished that Chomsky could go quietly into that good night, with his name and reputation intact—without this disgraceful episode as a capstone to his long career. 

To go from that sacred jail cell with Norman Mailer—with that look of "absolute moral integrity" on his face—which even in my age of disillusionment with the "Chomsky Method," I never once questioned; his "integrity" of all things was one I never doubted—to come at last to this!

"One loss is mine," which "I alone deplore." That "Thus having been, [...] thou shouldst cease to be."