Szplug's Reviews > Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Chomsky is one of the critical deans of American political history: ironic and pessimistic; forever probing and analyzing the decrepitude, deceit, and delusion rife within the ready presentation and understanding of the United States as an exceptional force of good in the world, and a constant decrier of the various means and manipulations the government and media undertake to stoke this view; content in generally limiting himself to pointing out the flaws in the system, the hypocrisy and moral failures and falsehoods, in order to heighten the reader's awareness in lieu of offering any realistic or practical solutions, while displaying a certain naïveté of functioning politics, a somewhat idealistic (or at least selective) view of the world, though whether as a cause or an effect is not clear to me. His analysis of the problems is acute and convincing; his conclusions never seem of the real world in which we are all forced to live. I respect Chomsky and his unwavering commitment to presenting what he believes to be an unvarnished and necessary antidote to a rampant American Exceptionalism; but I find that I am often left feeling immensely helpless in the wake of his endless detailing and criticism, bereft of any workable solutions and suspecting that, in his pursuit of the darkness inherent in the American Dream (as filtered through the Military-Industrial Complex), he has become quite blind to the sides and shapes of it that are positive and bright, as well as increasingly morally obtuse whenever the perpetrator(s) of the policies, actions, and propaganda that he abhors is(are) not of the first world. Perhaps a case of a prolonged peering into the Nietzschean abyss, with all of its attendant perils.