Is there anything more soothing that a fine Sunday evening of good old fashioned American cognitive dissidence? I topped off the "X-Files" season premiere with an hour lecture by Professor Noam Chomsky delivered on December 10, 1993, brought to you by the good people at AK Press (the publisher of most of Chomsky's political writings) and Epitaph Records (the people who brought you Bad Religion and Rich Kids on LSD). Chomsky, who still currently holds a faculty position at MIT, made his intellectual bones as a linguist but achieved international fame as a political thinker of great subtlety and penetrating insight. The basics of Chomsky's political thought have so permeated postmodern liberalism that many take their obviousness for granted: the biases of media, the immutability of bureaucratic government, racist and elitist implications of American international economic policy, to name a prominent few.

Recapitulating in a record review the intricacy of Chomsky's argument in The Clinton Vision would not be possible. The lecture takes the international implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement as its subject, highlighting particularly NAFTA's manifestations of an ideology that Professor Chomsky traces back to-- although he refrains from using the term-- an international military- industrial complex. Specifically, Chomksy details the polarizing effects of NAFTA, which he claims exacerbates the already sharp divisions between the "wealthy privileged sector" and the "superfluous sector who are useless for wealth production or profit production." Chomsky ominously adds that "wealth production" is "the only human value" acknowledged in the United States.

The fact that the lecture is already six years old does little to blunt the efficacy of Chomsky's political insights. If anything, the public has had more exposure to President Clinton's liberal rhetoric and conservative pro- business policy, along with the generally unwholesome scuminess of his character. For those of you kids whose exposure to Chomsky has not yet extended past the liner notes of Radiohead's Airbag EP, this disc is a solid introduction to his political thought.

Like the Chomsky video, Manufacturing Consent, the three Epitaph releases of Chomsky lectures will satisfy the dilettante and leave the truly interested hungry for much much more. Neither the video nor the discs serve as viable substitutes for knuckling down and reading Chomsky's writings, but for those of you who take your intellectual shots while on the go (and have already exhausted the Campbell and Feynman lecture collections), this will brace you well enough. And for those of you who simply love indulging in the kinds of paranoid speculations which abound in "The X-Files," Pynchon, DeLillo and Phillp K. Dick novels, I assure you: Chomsky is considerably more disturbing.

-Brent S. Sirota