Perhaps appropriately, Noam Chomsky was born on Dec. 7th, 1928. I say this because as you know, America was attacked by the Japanese on Dec. 7th, 1941, in Pearl Harbor. And in my not so humble opinion, Chomsky is like a force of nature & luckily for us & the rest of the world, he is a force for good & dedicated to trying to inform & wake the U.S. in particular, about the serious threats to humanity’s survival.
I don’t recall exactly when I first came across Chomsky’s writing but when I was bumming around Europe in the summer of 1976, his books took up the majority of the space allotted for books in English in bookstores across Europe. Paris, Madrid, Rome are just a few of the cities I’d look for something in English to read, and Chomsky dominated the bookshelves. 
I’m drawing an analogy between Chomsky & the impact of Pearl Harbor in an effort to emphasize the devastating affect this one man’s wisdom & insights can & often does have on the major issues of our day. I hope the tone of this essay doesn’t sound like I’m a simpering sychophant? But it’s hard not to sound like that the more I’ve learned about Chomsky over the years, especially when this world-famous genius, took the time for 16 years, to reply to my emails.
I’m probably getting carried away to some extent when I say I believe Chomsky was in the very first group of professors who began to publicly protest about America’s early intervention in the Vietnamese civil war. He’d often have a few students at his home, or theirs & they’d discuss & debate the issue. He’d give a talk to five or six people in a church, a store front, etc. including a few drunk bums off the street. Yep! This was in the very early 1960s & way before any national or huge crowds were protesting against the Vietnam War.
I trailed-off in my argument about Chomsky & the Vietnam civil war, Chomsky may have well been the spark that lit the Anti-Vietnam War movement in the 60s. I lived in L.A. at the time, and a lot of the anti-war movement seemed to center around Berkeley in the San Francisco area at Berkeley University.
So, wherever the movement began or exactly when doesn’t matter, what matters is that we have the knowledge & wisdom of truly the world’s greatest living author to inform us & empower ourselves against the corporate cockroaches that have infected nearly everything. Hopefully I’ll finish this essay before his birthday because everybody should know about this fine man’s life & dedication to his work & his love for all of humanity! 
It was the Spring of 2006 & I was living out of my old Ford Econoline van. I was trying to find work in Newport, my favorite town on the Oregon coast & I practically lived at the unemployment office. When I needed the Internet, I could use the computers in the unemployment office, they didn’t watch too closely. I got the idea one day to try to contact Noam Chomsky & it didn’t take long to get his email address at M.I.T.
The thing I perhaps love the most about the Internet is that if you have the nerve, you can contact an amazing number of well-respected scholars, journalists, authors, etc. and to my wonderful astonishment, I sent Noam an email & he replied either a couple hours later that same day, or the next day? And for the record, I have attempted to contact several lot less famous people & either received no reply or a rude, dismissive message. Here is Noam’s first reply to me & the rest as they say, is history.
“Quite a story. The best part is that “the bastards haven’t stopped me yet! I’m going to keep on fighting them until my dying days.” That’s the right attitude, and over time, it does make a difference.
Good luck.
Noam”
—– Original Message —–
From: Rob DeLoss (by way of Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu>)
To: Noam Chomsky
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: submission of an essay
I often wish that I was a heck of a lot more technology-savvy, especially re: computers & the Internet because I wanted to include the date & time stamp from each email to & from Noam to attest to their veracity. But several years back, I culled through a number of them & did save a few pages of the highlights of my correspondence with Noam over the years. So, if you doubt my word, I’m not going to lose sleep over it, my conscience is clear.
Again, for me the simple fact that this man who gives talks around the world, teaches, writes books, & from what I understand, spends several hours per day trying to answer his correspondence, has repeatedly honored me by replying, is a terribly generous gift. And I try to keep my emails to Noam short & succinct. His replies are rarely more than a couple of sentences, but they are precious.
By-the-way, I have sent “snail-mail” to Noam a few times as well & he responded with letters that had M.I.T.’s letterhead. I have also made music CDs a few times for Noam though he doesn’t seem to have much interest in music. And I remember one St. Patrick’s Day when I sent him a You Tube video clip of Van Morrison’s “Contacting My Angel” and he responded immediately saying, “I’m just sitting here mesmerized by the visuals in this song,” (or something to that effect?) and we each took a shot of whiskey.
Speaking of which, I’m such a goof-ball that upon hearing that he used to get beat-up by Irish bullies in the neighborhood he grew up in Philadelphia, I sent him an email apologizing for my Irish relatives (tongue in cheek) & Noam wrote back that if for some reason he were ever forced to leave America, Ireland is where he’d like to retire.
One very special correspondence was not long after his beloved wife, Carol, had passed away. I had stumbled upon this imitation of a parchment scroll in the gift shop of Canterbury Cathedral after my mother had died, “Death is Nothing” by Henry Scott-Holland (1847-1918). It gave me more personal comfort than anything else I’d found after my mom’s passing, so I made a nice copy of it & snail-mailed it to Noam.
Noam told me that it had brought tears to his eyes & that he’d store it in a very special place. And he made a copy of it & returned the copy I sent him because he thought it was the original. The fact that I’d touched his heart warmed my heart more than I can express.
To return to our correspondence, I had a thick stack of notes I’d compiled many years ago for a book on Christian fundamentalists, but my inner critic told me, Who do you think you’re fooling? You’re not qualified to write a book. And I let the notes sit on my bookshelf for 17 years. But when I turned 50, I said to my “inner critic,” Shut the fuck up!
And I spread the notes (on 4”X 5” slips of paper) on the living room carpet & started categorizing them. They became the skeleton outline & I filled in the gaps, but I still left the project unfinished. One day I wrote to Noam about my project & he replied;
“You should think about publishing the book. Today the fundamentalists are really a dangerous force.”
So, I paid an editor $200 to professionally edit my book & it took him over a year (he works on several projects at a time) & a few years back, I discovered Amazon’s “Kindle publishing,” which claimed that it was very easy to format & publish your book using it. I spent hours & just became more & more frustrated & pissed-off. I hired a gal & she too had a hell of a lot of problems trying to format it.
I “published” it & told Noam I had. The original version was in paperback & Noam bought a copy, in fact, he received his copy before I got mine. It was so embarrassing & looked totally unprofessional, but Noam said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ve seen worse.”
I went to the local print shop & had a copy made in 8.5” X 11” & bound with that spiral plastic and sent it to Noam. And I switched it to only available in a Kindle format on Amazon. I may have sold half a dozen copies so far in about four years? Ha! Ha! But the fact that Noam Chomsky was perhaps the first to buy a copy is again such a badge of honor.
This reminds me of a humorous email I received from Noam several years back. I confessed to him that I was still insecure about my grammar even though I’d earned my B.A. in English literature. Noam chuckled so-to-speak & confided to me that the only class he’d ever failed was a class in Grammar in high school. And he often argues with editors who want to change something in the books he’s written. Isn’t that a hoot? Noam revolutionized the field of linguistics, yet editors argue with him about his grammar?
Switching gears & I hope this isn’t seen as morbid, but I want to share with you, my imaginary reader, just how real & compassionate this man is. A couple years ago, I was diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer. They don’t know which kind of cancer it is but assured me that it is manageable. I thought it over very thoroughly & decided that no, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life going through chemo & radiation as my savings gradually disappear.
You end up broke & homeless like so many other poor souls on our streets that our society has simply discarded & this isn’t me. I’d rather go out with a semblance of dignity & defiance. And like in so many other critical times in my life such as the passing of my dear wife, Jeri, in 2013, I often seek Noam’s counsel. He’s been like a surrogate father for me.
Noam took a couple of days to respond & apologized saying he wasn’t quite sure how to respond? But he told me that my letter was one of the most moving letters he’d ever received. These brief responses from Noam have meant the world to me & Jeri knew how precious my friendship with Noam was to me which also touched my heart.
Well as usual with our fucked-up medical system, my medical provider i.e., P.A. (physician’s assistant) never bothered to tell me anything about what to expect from my cancer so for several months I thought that I could kick the bucket at any time. And call it ego or whatever you like but the thought of passing on with all the writing I’ve done over the years ending up in a trash-can bugs me. So, in the remote possibility of someone who gives a shit about my work, trying to publish it, I took the bold step of asking Noam if he’d write a short blurb that could possibly help someone to get my work published. This is what my friend had to say.
Rob DeLoss and I have been good friends for many years, through regular correspondence. During these years I have had the opportunity to read much of what he has written, with much appreciation. His work is penetrating, instructive, challenging, always appealing. It is very good to know that it is being edited and collected for publication. (Noam Chomsky)
I must also confess here, my imaginary reader, that if I come across as desperate & insecure, it’s because I am. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as a self-pity party but for the last forty years or better, I have practically pleaded with family & friends as well as strangers, to read my essays & tell me what they think. It’s been like pulling teeth & I’m so fed-up with it, I can scream!
In fact, I was so desperate for feedback that several years ago I joined Facebook even though my gut told me it was a fool’s errand. But the stubborn Irish mule that I am, kept on trying naively thinking I’d find some real people on Facebook. I should’ve listened to my gut instinct & I’m more pissed-off at myself than I am all those self-deluded people on “social media” platforms who believe that clicking on emojis is communicating.
Moreover, I wrote to Noam about my having written to a hundred of my former Facebook “friends,” whom I believed I actually had a friendship with, pleading with them that we morally support one another by writing to each other & reading each other’s work and not a single one of them replied.
Noam’s reply: “Confirms my commitment to keep away from Facebook and all social media.” Gee, I wonder why the Democrats & the liberals can’t get their shit together and we have so many willfully ignorant morons in Congress & the Republican party?
I could go on & on sharing my treasured correspondence with Noam but will end with one about an email I sent to him because I wanted to show him another part of me. Noam’s moral courage in standing up to the federal government in the early days of our participation in Vietnam’s civil war, his facing a possible lengthy stay in prison, etc. inspired me to share my experience in the infamous, Santa Rita Jail (more like a prison than a jail).
This “jail” is in Alameda County in California & the citizens of Oakland, make up the majority of its inmates. We were being held in a large cell about 25’ X 25’ & we were crammed together like sardines. There were about three or four Hispanics & two white guys, one of which was me & a young kid.
In the middle of the cell & face-down was a Black man & by the look of his clothes, he was probably homeless. A group of young, Black punks were standing near him & making all sorts of really ugly comments & thought they were so funny. I could see the shame in the older Black men around my age, I was 54 at the time. One young asshole was so pleased with himself & seemed to be the main instigator of all the vile shit coming out of their mouths.
I got so disgusted that I moved to the back wall of the cell & sat down. I was so tempted to tell them what I thought of them & kept telling myself, No Rob, don’t do it! But I couldn’t take any more so I stood up, walked back to the center & started to speak but was speaking in too low a voice so I raised my voice & looking at the young “leader of the pack,” I exclaimed; “There’s an old saying, People may just think you’re stupid, so why open your mouth and remove all doubt? The punk’s mouth opened but he was dumbfounded & struggled to find a response and just mumbled something.
I returned to the back wall & sat down with my back to the wall. The young, white kid came over & sat down beside me and simply offered his hand to shake mine & we didn’t speak.
Noam responded with; “That’s impressive. Took a lot of guts. No reason to keep it secret. Can’t think of much like it.”
Thanks for listening, my imaginary reader.
— Rob DeLoss Gold Beach, Oregon Dec. 4, 2022