One feels a perfect sense of schadenfreude, as if one were reading Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic about the revolutionaries of Central Park West dining on Roquefort and champagne while talking about class struggle.
This is what I felt looking at Noam Chomsky in the private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
Despite the political monstrosities he has embraced, Chomsky turned out to be a very likable man when I interviewed him.
The great MIT linguist and one of the main architects of the modern postcolonial pro-Palestinian Arab movement, turns out to be a champion of ideology and hypocrisy.
Chomsky was pictured at Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, where he met Hassan Nasrallah on a visit that makes his meetings with Fidel Castro pale by comparison. But seeing him with Epstein is even more impressive.
Chomsky has led the life of a pleasure-loving capitalist (with houses in the wealthy wooded suburb of Lexington and a vacation home in Wellfleet).
There is nothing scandalous in itself about this for a world-famous academic; everything, however, clashes with the narrative of the “man of the people" intellectual who denounces America’s top 1 percent while occupying a privileged position within or close to it.
But the beauty of those who live off dissent in a democracy is that they are rarely called to account for their skewed idea of truth.
Chomsky reminds me of Bertolt Brecht, who moved to East Berlin but had himself paid funds into a Swiss bank account under the name “Lars Schmidt," where the rubles he received for the Stalin Prize ended up: “Union Bank of Switzerland, Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich." Instead of the publishing cooperatives of the German Communist Party, the red poet preferred capitalist companies that paid royalties.
And then there is Jean-Paul Sartre- rich and communist-who knew about the Soviet Gulags but kept silent so as “not to despair Billancourt" (the Renault workers). Sartre at a café table with his ever-present cigarette, Sartre strolling through Paris and the world’s capitals with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre the playwright surrounded by famous actors, Sartre besieged by reporters at the time of the refused Nobel Prize, Sartre at assemblies at the Sorbonne, Sartre at Vietnam protests, Sartre hawking newspapers, Sartre outside the Renault gates…
This is the legend, carefully constructed-like Chomsky’s.
The reality was written by the renowned Sartre scholar Ingrid Galster in “Sartre sous l’Occupation et après. Nouvelles mises au point", published by L’Harmattan. It seems the writer benefited in many ways from the Nazi occupation of Paris and Vichy rule, when he took over the post of a Jewish professor dismissed by Vichy. In 1943, the year Sartre became “Sartre," he staged The Flies at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre-except that the theatre had been “Aryanized," and the Jewish name removed from the façade in favor of the plainer Théâtre de la Cité.
All this makes Chomsky’s complacent presence on the light leather seat of Epstein’s private jet all the more hilarious.
The New York Times reported:
“Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen) and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky)".
From Castro to cashmere?
As far as I know, Epstein never pretended to be an equality theorist. He was simply an accumulator of capital and bodies.
Chomsky, by contrast, devoted every breath to proclaiming his own moral purity. For a man who dedicated his intellectual life to destroying the very possibility of private jets, appearing so damn comfortable on one with a man like that is simply too perfect.
Chomsky liked Epstein. But he liked Epstein's private plane even more.
One is left to wonder whether, on those flights, the linguist ever looked out the window and recognized, even for an instant, the abyss between his words and his life. Or whether, like most of left-wing intellectuals before him, Chomsky simply closed his eyes, enjoying the view from thirty thousand feet and the privilege of never having to justify it.