Peter Dale Scott, a Colleague of Noam Chomsky

Emeritus Prof. of English at Berkeley, Scott seems like a good foil for Chomsky acolytes. Rather: in an effort to broaden the (political) Chomskyan's view, read Peter Dale Scott. Just a suggestion. Let me elaborate.

As I write, Scott is still writing poetry and (probably) fat non-fiction books on what he calls "deep politics," a term I unpack as something akin to the conspiriology of the academic. Scott appeared alongside Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at very many anti-war rallies and talks and teach-ins against Unistat state power, sit-ins and consciousness raisers. And in Scott's poetry he doesn't hesitate to reveal his differences with his highbrow colleagues on the Left, whether neo-Marxist or non-Marxist Left, or anarchistic Left.

In Minding The Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000, we read:

          In his important book

    A People's History
                  (for the 99 percent
        whose commonality


    the Founding Fathers 
                  tried their best to prevent
          sharers of leftovers


     in a battle for resources
                   made scarce by elite control)     Zinn '80 571
          Zinn writes of the Indian Removal

[Scott cites his sources in his poetry and always includes a bibliography at the end of his books. - O.G.]

Scott says that other prominent American historians skipped over the Indian Removal, and names names, but then, a few lines down:

   but by depicting Jackson
               as slaveholder speculator
        exterminator of Indians


   Zinn lost sight of the Bank War
                in much talk of tariffs
       banking political parties


   political rhetoric                                   Zinn '80 129
                 along with Jefferson's warnings
         about an aristocracy


   founded on banking institutions
                   and monied incorporations   Sellers 106
        and Adams' Every bank of discount


   is downright corruption
                  taxing the public
        for private individuals' gain               Adams '62 9.638


   (which Pound made his slogan            Cantos 71/416, 74/437, etc
                      as the problem of issue           Cantos 87/569
          drew him step by step


   into singing perpetual war)                   Cantos 86/568; cf. Williams 180


-pp. 167-169, and if anyone wants the titles cited, ask in the comments...

Here Scott reveals a sympathy with Ezra Pound over banking, where Zinn and Chomsky won't touch Mad Ez. This has always seemed to me an honorable mode of intellectual conservatism: if someone's political action or stance or even character was seen as mostly distasteful, we know that political and social reality  are far more complex than choosing who is One of Us or...not. So sure: Andrew Jackson is not exactly a hero of progressive 21st century leftish thought, but his stance on banks is noteworthy. Let us give Jackson his due for this. Similarly, as vile and abhorrent I found the George W. Bush administration, there seems something laudable in their effort to combat AIDS in Africa...

"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Einstein

Scott's poetry is deeply cerebral but I think quite beautiful also. He's always grappling with his privilege as an academic/intellectual, his Buddhism, his personal flaws. But he writes evocatively of love and the deep riches of the natural world too.

For me, the most distinctive feature of his poetry is his Stephen Dedalus-like problem of how to escape the nightmare of history. Can we right our wrongs? Can we make amends for untold atrocities and assaults on the human spirit, conducted in our names? Once we are have knowledge of this darkness, what to do with it, morally? These nightmares! And Peter Dale Scott's reading of history is filled with nightmares. Garishly footnoted nightmares of imperial power's abuses of humans. I would think the bright Young Person deeply committed to Chomsky's readings would want to challenge themselves with the works of Peter Dale Scott. Here, check this out; Scott seems to echo Noam's criticisms of the social sciences:

   behind the Soviet philanthropy
                which sought to eradicate faith
         by use of an Inquisition

   and also that of the West
                and its priesthoods of social science
         who after decades of pressing

   unwanted dams and military
                torturers on the Third World
       have helped liberate the Soviet Union

   for a new world order
                of Schumpeterian destructiveness
         whose outcome is not yet
-p.14

And then later in the long poem, Scott is having a bad day and recalls a cutting remark made by Chomsky that must have felt directed at himself, and Scott's willingness to delve extremely deep into CIA drug running, JFK's assassination, assassinations of Third World figures, mind control operations, etc:

   Once again! Insight
                beckons down the long corridors
        of my insomnia

   as to why I have been depressed
                since flying back from Europe
       the sense of impotence

   not just from losing my glasses
               or even a week ago
         tripping over a sprinkler head

   to fall flat on the pavement
                and fracture my zygomatic arch
        not even Noam's crack

   about those who do microanalysis
                about things that don't matter               Chomsky '94 163
        No! I have learned from my inability

   last night to explain to Fred                               Frederick Crews
                what the unstoppable flow of drugs
        across the Mexican border

   has to do with the Kennedy assassination
               a world where what matters
         are not just the structural patterns

   but the patterns in chaos
                such as the DFS lies                               Direcion Federal de Seguridad, Mexican Secret Police
       about Oswald and Silvia Duran                      P.D. Scott '95 118-27
-pp.134-135
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[Note: Frederick Crews was a Berkeley professor and friend of Scott's. Crews is mostly known for his ongoing attempts to dismantle Sigmund Freud.]

Peter Dale Scott is one of my favorite living poets. His non-fiction books are harrowing, dossier-like researches into what almost all Unistatian citizens would rather not know, or because of existing neural circuitry, are probably incapable of knowing, much less understanding. And yet he's always somehow poetic; it's this odd courageousness that I find so compelling in his writings.

The book from which I've quoted in this blog entry was the third of his Seculum trilogy of poetry. The first two volumes were Coming To Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, followed by Listening To The Candle: A Poem on Impulse. I read the trilogy and a few other of his books within a two month period a couple of years ago, and it proved a major hack into the deeps of my consciousness.

Here's a less-than 3 minute talk by Scott about JFK, and he disagrees with Chomsky about the assassination: