Wikipedia describes Noam Chomsky as a "... linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist."

Some have suggested that he might have done the world a favor by sticking to linguistics and not veering off, pinball fashion, into all those other areas. But to paraphrase the immortal words of the movie "Airplane!", that's not important right now.

A quick skim of Chomsky's published books reveals only one entirely devoted to the subject of linguistics, all the rest being about other things. We can hardly blame him: linguistics, important though it is, lacks the sex appeal of some of those others disciplines, and the sheer, raucous fun of activism.

What follows here is not a hit piece on Chomsky or the content of his documentary jeremiad. Some of what he brings up is thoughtful and interesting. The fact that the editors stuffed nearly an hour of pregnant pauses and overwrought graphics into what could easily have been a thirty minute threnody is a minor issue.

Chomsky’s primary shortcoming—here and elsewhere—is that he always seems to come to the same conclusion: whichever of America’s defects he’s detailing, it’s those rich and powerful corporate bastards that have caused it. He barely acknowledges the government corruption and political self-dealing that makes the predations of those he calls the “masters” of the private sector not only possible, but absolutely inevitable.

Chomsky is comfortable in the “big business is evil” wheelhouse. Perhaps because he is congenitally a man of the Left, he tends to view government as either the solution to all of society's ills, or—when it goes wrong—an innocent dupe of corporate interests. As an intelligent observer he should know better.

There's another tendency on display in this film: to look upon the past more favorably than the recent, and the recent more favorably than today. It’s a common predisposition, which human beings are often heir to: we tend to remember things more fondly the further they recede into the mists. Call it the “in my day” syndrome.

Chomsky opens with it: "In my day, there was a Depression on, and sure, we had it tough. Nickels cost fifty cents, and there was nothing to eat but dirt and bugs. But we kind of liked it, because in those days we had hope! Not like today.“ (That's not a direct quote, but it's close.)

Then for a while Chomsky skips a couple of decades, wanders into the sixties, and gets high on activism.

In the same way that Chomsky and others of a certain age prefer to recall the hardscrabble times of Roosevelt's Great Depression with a wistful romanticism, some of those same people like to remember the 1960's as flower power and peace marches and women's liberation and calls for racial harmony and really good dope (it was all those things), reserving scant memory cells for bloody race riots every time the sun went down, stoner anti-war terrorists accidentally blowing themselves up, and a political assassination every few months just to make the decade more interesting (it was all those things, too).

What delights Chomsky most about the 60's is all that splendid DEMOCRACY! I present the word here in all caps, because he pronounces it in all caps—not loudly, but with reverence. It is his watchword, his byword, his mantra, his darling. He esteems DEMOCRACY the way a Hindu esteems Ganesha.

Democracy is grand, and an antithesis to all he abhors. And further... to Chomsky, activism is just democracy on the hoof; since democracy is always and everywhere a fine thing, so activism must by definition be groovy, too, man. Activism is democracy once it gets its pants on in the morning.

He's right, of course, that the 1960’s-era clouds of weed smoke and bra-burning and buy-the-world-a-Coke harmonizing were democracy in action. But race riots and looting and domestic terrorism and assassinations were, too.

MLK, Jr. was an activist; but so was the stupid redneck who shot him. There was an undeniable sense of community and a whole lot of free love among the members of the Manson family, but it turned out they had their faults. And the peaceful, righteous demonstrations of the Black Panthers gave way to the murderous crypto-Marxist/Leninist rampage of the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose primary liberationist impulse was liberating cash from banks and killing a few people before dying off in a final explosive shootout with police.

Chomsky's rose-color reminiscences about the good old days of Power to the People take a wide detour around an awful lot of awful things that awful people did with whatever awful power they were able to muster.

Chomsky is afflicted with a very common ailment: a longing for a fondly remembered past that never really happened. He contrasts what he regards as the rapacious individualism and brutal self-interested grubbing of today with an idyllic sense of community and brotherhood that obtained long ago: he has an ersatz fondness for the 1950's, for example, which apparently were swell, even though he doesn't waste a lot of time explaining why or how things were so much better then.

We get it that he particularly misses the sixties—misses them fondly, in much the same way that Obama pal Bill Ayers must miss them. Back then they had action. They had purpose. They had naïveté. And perhaps most importantly, they had youth. It's hard to hang onto naïveté, but possible to cling to youth, at least in the memories of septuagenarian former activists.

"In my day, we took to the streets, see, and we GOT THINGS DONE! We HATED NIXON, and OPPOSED THE WAR, and MADE A DIFFERENCE!" Again, not a direct quote, but close enough.

I would like to see Chomsky turn at least some of his considerable observational skills away from big, nasty business and in the direction of big, nasty government.

It is undeniably true that, as Adam Smith wrote, big businesses will do what they can to stay big, once they get that way. (Chomsky quotes Smith briefly—and accurately—but not on that subject.) What Chomsky seems to miss is that big business goes to big government for regulations to keep small competitors out.

That is but one of a sordid variety of ways in which business and government corrupt one another.

Chomsky appears to believe that there's nothing wrong with America that an overhaul of human nature won't fix. He even wrote a whole book about it: "Profits Over People."

Fixing human nature so that everyone puts the other fellow first sounds sweet in theory, but always ends with the New Soviet Man, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and other murderous tyrannies. Also, it doesn't work: human nature can't be reengineered.

What might work is some reengineering of the corrosive nexus of government and business. Where to start? How about turning Washington's K street into a nice park?