ABSTRACT
If the university had its own version of the Hamurabi’s Code of Law, it is fairly certain that our clay tablets would say that truth must be whispered, if at all; that arguments must not be louder than a whisper. Politically speaking, of course, this does not make sense. But this is exactly where its smartness lies. Since this Hamurabi’s Code, unlike its ancient counterpart, is not about social justice or the protection of “orphans and widows,” but rather about the protection of vanguardism, it works beautifully. In the writings of Chomsky and Roy, writers of very different kind, the whisper can be gauged only by its absence. If what divides them is the style of their outspokenness, Roy’s style, built from emotion and Chom sky’s from analysis, Chomsky and Roy still have a good many things in common. The most obvious is, of course, their great political courage. Many other affi nities link these scholar activists and dissenters: the undoctrinal nature of their kind of political commentary, its sweep, its heft of information, and its depth of argument. What also links them is their insistence on linking current events-the war in Iraq, for example, to the larger pattern of US foreign policy and the still larger realities of historical precedent. Such a link marks a divergence from journalism as we know it; a divergence all the more disturbing because the interlocking connections that are revealed are unspeakable, especially in the noncombative regions of academic professional discourse.
