Noah Cicero is the author of five novels — his most famous being The Human War and his most recent being The Insurgent — and numerous short stories and poems. Google him so I don’t have to write as much in this introductory part.
Author Noah Cicero
Noah Cicero is the author of five novels — his most famous being The Human War and his most recent being The Insurgent — and numerous short stories and poems. Google him so I don’t have to write as much in this introductory part.
I haven’t read any of Noah Cicero’s books. I came across him on the internet via Tao Lin’s blog a couple years back and read some reviews of his writing and interviews with him and stuff, and watched a couple YouTube videos of him reading poetry and excerpts of his fiction, which I dug a lot.
He seems like a thoughtful, intelligent dude concerned with trying to be “good” and the little bit of his writing I’ve encountered is simple, precise, emotionally moving. I was also really into a vlog he was doing at the time where he explained the history and principles of capitalism — I’m pretty sure while drunk. He’s taken those videos down since then.
I interviewed Noah via email on Christmas Day of 2009. And then I was too lazy to post it on this one blog, and then that blog wasn’t a blog anymore. And then dude was like, “Wait, don’t put the interview up until my book comes out.” And I was like, “OK.” And then his book came out and I still didn’t post the interview. And then the guys from this blog were like, “You got any more blog entries for us?” And I was like, “Yeah.”
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SBTVC: Why did you take down those vlogs about capitalism?
NOAH CICERO: I spent ’08 reading political philosophy. I started with the Cyropaedia of Xenophon and ended up with John Rawls. I read Hobbes, Locke, The Federalist Papers, Plato, books on Medieval history, books on plagues, and Jared Diamond books. After that my thoughts were more precise and I started to think new things about human nature, the construction of reality and politics. I haven’t finalized these thoughts. I’m getting a political science degree and still reading and learning. I feel the vlogs were premature ejaculation.
What do you think of 2012?
2012 is really funny to me. I don’t take it seriously. People are bored and it gives them something to talk about. It sounds sophisticated and that’s why laymen like it. I hear people talk about it at work, it makes them feel that they are talking about something ancient and to them, “something that would be on the history channel.” But they don’t really care. They don’t even care about looking up history on Mayan culture. They don’t even know where the Mayans were located.
Where do you work?
I work at Red Lobster. I don’t do anything there. I put cocktail sauces on plates and make salads. It isn’t really a job, no one bothers me and it doesn’t usually cause stress.
What are you working on now?
Finishing college.
What do you think is the best course of action in Iraq?
All the countries that have an interest in keeping the price of oil stable send troops there and maintain a level of power so that Iraq doesn’t become a shit hole again and the price of oil doesn’t get fucked up. What people don’t understand is that America NEEDS oil. And Iraq has it. And if they want to keep this dreamland we live in together, we have to be in oil producing countries to make sure things go right. At this second we’ve spent like $711 billion on the Iraq War [Ed: $743 billion as of the editing of this article]. In reality that is a small price if for some reason the price of oil goes up to $150 or $200 a barrel. I mean, this is a disaster, this is horrible shit, war for resources. But that is what the American people want, from the poorest person to the richest person, from black to Asian to white, they all want the oil. You have to give the people what they want. The other choice is a lot less oil, which means a lot less of everything.
People don’t comprehend how important oil is to their lives, people don’t understand the massive amount of problems America is facing right now with urban sprawl. Wherever you are in America go to a town hall or county meeting and talk to the members of the council about urban sprawl, how it causes problems with everything, not having enough to pay for the roads, to buy salt, where to put the storm water, how there are streets with 20 houses and only five people live on that street.
People have this problem of just watching CNN and MSNBC and discussing The Big News. Well, go to your local town hall meeting, talk to some local people working for nonprofits. The problems are endless. And a lot of them are tied to oil, which is linked to the bad economy, which is linked to banks. I mean, shit, this shit is endless. Reading a Ron Paul book or Marx will not help the town you live in buy salt for next winter. I mean, the real governmental question of this century is, “Should we pave, deliver mail, salt, and repair a street where twenty families used to live, but now only three live?”
Do you think that it’s just too late or otherwise not realistic for the country to convert to alternative/”green” energies so that we don’t have to rely
on war-mongering in oil-rich regions? Or are you just saying that corporate influence (lobbying, etc.) prevents the legislation necessary to make that possible?
To try to reduce America’s oil usage would be catastrophic to the lives of Americans. The last thing that happened that resembled it in America would be The Trail of Tears. We have a suburban sprawl problem. Imagine going up to thousands of neighborhoods in America and telling the citizens, “You can’t live here anymore because you are using too much oil driving to and from work.” Or, “You can’t live here anymore because the government can no longer afford to pave your streets, deliver you mail, provide you with sewage and stop signs.”
Imagine that: We don’t have a resource problem, we have a human nature problem. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have green energies. I don’t think anyone is against that, but a lot of problems we have is because there are neighborhoods all over America that don’t have a right to exist. For example, the city of Youngstown has a lot of land and a lot of empty houses but since the ’60s people have been building pointless little neighborhoods in random spots where the citizens have to spend $10 in gas just to go to work and back a day.
What are your thoughts on a troop surge in Afghanistan?
I have to admit, I believe John McCain. John McCain in some television interview that if we leave the Taliban will take over. That is the only reason I think they would do that. If that is true, then we have to do it. Afghanistan is our problem. Afghanistan is our responsibility. We made the problem, we have to fix it. Just because Bush made a problem doesn’t mean the democrats don’t have to fix it. That is what people think. “Well, Bush made that problem, that isn’t a Democrat problem.” No, the problem in Afghanistan is an American problem.
I don’t understand, all day you hear liberals say, “We need to solve the problems of oppression and shittyness in the world.” Well, sometimes you have to go in with guns and make sure people behave properly. I don’t think I would mind if the most developed countries got together (France, Germany, Japan, China, etc.) and took over some African countries and helped them.
I think pacifists, anarchists and libertarians don’t comprehend how ugly and disgusting we can be to each other. Read Life and Fate to see how horrible we can be to each other.
In this interview, Noam Chomsky mentions Afghanistan’s peace movement, opportunities for diplomacy, the alleged 75% of Afghanis in favor of negotiations, etc. In your opinion, do these things not suggest the possibility of alternatives to a troop surge?
So this is Noah Cicero vs Noam Chomsky. Hmm, this is not the kind of fight I enjoy: a guy who works at Red Lobster getting a political science degree from a state university vs an MIT professor. Whatever, I don’t have anything else to do.
OK first, there is a difference between what Chomsky is doing and what I’m doing. Chomsky’s thing is that he wants the right thing to be done. He has that hippie outlook that the world can be a beautiful place if we can just talk it out. I think that is a good attitude, there is nothing wrong with that attitude. Chomsky is always talking about what SHOULD be done, I usually only talk about how people are crazy and do crazy things because they are emotional and irrational and they need food and resources. We are both talking about different things. I’m talking about how Americans don’t care if we’re at war as long as they get oil and can continue to live their lives of computers, highways and cars. Chomsky is indirectly saying that he doesn’t care if America has computers, highways and cars.
Chomsky is like libertarians in this fashion. Super liberals, like Chomsky and Amy Goodman, want there to be peace and justice and all kinds of nice things. But they never lay out what life would be like if these things were accomplished. Chomsky never states that if we had less oil and resources and if we didn’t put so much pressure on Iran and protect Saudi Arabia then oil prices would rise and war could break out there, and America and Europe could end up being third world countries with shitty roads and people riding horses in a few weeks. He doesn’t state that in interviews.
Libertarians do the same thing. Ron Paul and someone like Glenn Beck ramble on and on about taxes, but they never explain that their version of how they want the world to be is people riding horses and the majority of society not going past 8th grade in education.
Chomsky and Amy Goodman on the other hand want everyone to go to college and no one to actually work or build anything. As we are finding out, you can over-educate a society to the point that a society doesn’t require. A society only requires a certain amount of teachers or engineers or business men.
The difference between Chomsky and me is that Chomsky says, “Everyone should get educated and be free to make their lives.”
I respond, “You have to calculate how many jobs of that specific position that specific society requires and get that many people to do it and tell other people to find other things to do.”
When Chomsky started out in the ’60s there were only 3 billion people in the world and a lot of resources to go around and no threat of global warming. He is from a different world. The new politics mixed with economics will have to be based on the idea that we have a very large society and how to distribute goods to all those people and how to funnel them into positions of employment. There needs to be more calculation done by the government to get people to be trained properly to get into places of employment.
There are other facts Chomsky does not mention. Chomsky never lies, he just neglects to mention things with skill. Chomsky in the interview could have easily said, “We have been in South Korea for 60 years and never left.” America is currently in around 130 countries, why would we leave Afghanistan? Maybe I’m looking at it wrong. OK, maybe we have no right to be in Afghanistan. OK, new question: What are the rights of history? Chomsky has read history. I’m sure he has read the history of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe and Mongols and all the great empires. He knows that the greatest empire always tries to maintain order. Now think about it like this, go to a different planet with different countries. Say there is one country with all the guns and wealth, and they need a certain resource to keep that wealth. They not only need it but they need other countries to have it also, because their economies are intertwined. But their land doesn’t have that resource. It would be logical to assume that that country would be in the other countries making sure that resource was PROTECTED and could be kept flowing around their world.
Two more points: The population they ask about peace is 75% illiterate. If you asked Chomsky to survey 1,000 Americans and said of those 1,000, 750 would be illiterate Chomsky would say, “No, could we find some literate Americans?” Because the thing Chomsky knows and the thing anybody knows who knows illiterate, extremely uneducated people is that they run purely off of emotion. Literacy provides a more complex thought process which provides for more reasoning ability and less choices based purely off of emotion.
I looked up surveys of the Afghan people, they are simple like, “Is it good?” “Is it bad?” Then they answer and there is no explanation of their reasoning.
Listen: If America leaves maybe nothing bad will happen to the American people. Probably our lives will go on, maybe in five years the oil prices might get all fucked up. I don’t know that, I work at Red Lobster. But my point is: There are reasons for the troop surge and it doesn’t seem like America is going to leave.
I’m pretty much asking you these questions to gauge how much you think we’re all “totally fucked” vs how much you think there are ways we could be less fucked. Or if it’s even worth trying to get less fucked.
Do you think humans have the potential/ability to eventually (even if it takes generations and generations) create a world in which the everyone is more or less engaged in meaningful labor that actually maintains a sustainable system in which gross injustices to humanity are not occurring daily, or will we all destroy ourselves before that happens?
“Gross injustices to humanity” are natural. People like to ask, “Why would God let evil in the world?” I ask, “God, why would you let goodness in the world?” If you don’t want to deal with the fact that you are human, an animal, on some planet, in some universe that is indifferent to you, that some people will always grow up to be narcissistic fucktards that are consumed with gaining power, that humanity depends on natural resources to survive, then you should kill yourself because you don’t like the game you are fated to play. The game is mostly about suffering and hard work. It doesn’t matter if you are an executive of an oil company or a peasant in West Africa, the meaning of life is that you have to get up every morning, go to work and deal with a lot of shit you don’t want to be dealing with for the sake of your survival.
Have you seen this YouTube video before? Do you like it?
It was all right.
Have you ever tried salvia? If so, what was it like?
No.
Are you generally happy?
Today I’m OK. It is Christmas.
What do you think are the best steps to take to be happy?
Stay busy. Always be really busy and have goals.
What can a single person do to help make other people’s lives better?
Don’t pass judgment.
What’s the best book you ever read?
Life and Fate. Well, that’s my favorite book. But I’ve probably read On the Road more than any other book. I’ve read it like 20 times. It is in my bathroom right now. Objectively, probably Growth of the Soil. I think Bukowski and Hemingway also agreed that was the best book ever written, concerning timing, clarity of lines, structure, character development. When I read that I thought it was the best book I ever read, objectively. Then I found out later Hemingway and Bukowski considered it great. Also Revolutionary Road, the clarity, the character development. Oh god, how did he even do that? The Old Man and the Sea, that book also so clear and precise, full of so much emotion, not one line wasted. But then there’s Kerouac, Kafka and Proust who just had paragraphs of messy shit that had nothing to do with anything, conversations that had nothing to do with the plot, and I found that beautiful. People don’t understand and have tried to do it, writing messy is a skill. You have know how long a paragraph can be, how much the audience will stand listening to characters just ramble about shit. How much the audience can stand of an author just ruminating about some shit.
Top five favorite authors?
Jack Kerouac, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Richard Wright, Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Richard Yates, Knut Hamsun, Erskine Caldwell, Sartre.
Top five favorite rappers?
Tupac, Jay-Z, 50 Cent.
If you could/had to kill anyone on earth right now, who would you kill?
Glenn Beck. If he had the chance, he could be the next Hitler.
If you could have sex with anyone, living or dead, at the point in their lives at which they were/are most attractive to you, who would have sex with?
Shannyn Sossamon.
Noah Cicero’s heartthrob, Shannyn Sossamon
2012!!! Come o n ta bar nac!!!
People can’t move back to the cities from the “burbs” because they will robbed and attacked by blacks.
gotta luv how his argument about chomsky’s outlook on society completely contradicts his (noah’s) views on the “evils of the suburbs” and fossil fuel consumption
sounds just like a college student…y’all should interview my little brother next
Not interested.
Unfunny, boring, pompous, cliched…
Really not interested.
I always wondered what would happen if Harvey Pekar fucked Michael Cera and 9 months later a boring chunk of bullshitting sludge dropped from Cera’s asshole. Now I know. Thank YOU streetcarnage!
I’ll bet anyone a million dollars that this fake is not from Youngstown, Ohio proper and/or any of the cess-pools that he wishes people would move to. Vane$$a, on the other hand, is the real deal.
This is like going back in time and peering into my mind as a 14 year old who’s just taken 10 hits off a 3 foot bong.
This is why most people shouldn’t go public with their “art” or “thoughts” until they’re dead.
Im just a comment poster who works at red lobster, so take this with a grain of garlic butter, but you are a red lobster who eats red lobster at red lobster.
God put him here to compassionately tell illiterate people how retarded they are.
hold the f*ck up…….. I just read……
Where do you work?
I work at Red Lobster. I don’t do anything there. I put cocktail sauces on plates and make salads. It isn’t really a job, no one bothers me and it doesn’t usually cause stress.
What are you working on now?
Finishing college.
What do you think is the best course of action in Iraq?
All the countries that have an interest in keeping the price of oil stable send troops there and maintain a level of power so………
ARE THESE QUESTIONS IN THE CORRECT ORDER????? OR IS IT ONLY ME WHO THINKS THIS SHOULD HAVE ENDED AT ‘RED LOBSTER’ LOL
Yeah, the people I work with at Red Lobster are laymen too. Laymen?
Just think, he’s “only” 30 years old.
This guy is awesome!
He lost me at, “The difference between Chomsky and me is that Chomsky says…”
Jesus Fucking bawlz this guy is a nigger.
Uh this guy is pretty badass.
He’s right about illiterate people operating purely on emotion as these comments perfectly exemplify.
He states that Super Libs like Chomsky “never lay out what life would be like if these things were accomplished”. Ummmm, but as you can tell your way obviously isn’t working, hence the shithole of a world we live in. I would imagine it would be the opposite of this, which sounds pretty fucking rad.
did anyone read this whole thing?
This interview is like a portrait of a man-boy caught mid-stream in that philosophical worm-hole between neo-liberal (neo-cons with an empty closet) cluelessness and moderate sanity or Glenn Beck land if he doesn’t jump off at the moderate station.
“What can a single person do to help make other people’s lives better?”
Don’t pass gas on the subway.
I need to get to the point in life that this guy’s at where you have such a surplus of goodness that you can actually go public and embrace its demise. Please “God.” No more young pussy or great drugs or bloody filets or top-shelf booze or dank bud or money or any of that boring old “narcissistic fucker” blahblahblah…let’s keep it real with more and more cancer and bad jobs and shit.
In 2012 the water beings will emerge and mankind will become as the Great Old Ones. Cthulhu waits.
what a bloated, pretentious sack of shit loser
Only in Obama’s universe would we be forced to listen to what 30 year-old Red Lobster workers have to say.
You should ask him what he likes to beat off to. That is very insightful.
People don’t like Glen Beck for the same reasons I don’t like this guy: a mostly schlubby person with an irritating delivery. But if you can get past that (I can’t) they make valid points at times, at least more than Joy Behar and Keith Olberholbanmansteinenborg do. Oh, and RED LOBSTER!
Someone needs to inform Knut Hemingostoevsky up there of what it says on Bukowski’s gravestone. Fuck it. Click my name.
tl;dr, but i totes agree on the Shannyn Sossamon thing.
I bet this guy thinks he might be Jesus and then imagines what a great movie he could make about Jesus working at Red Lobster and the job being like his cross where he’s crucified by laypersons talking about stupid shit but then he rises from his Jesusness when he meets a really hot chick with a wet pussy that understands but instead of looking like Sossymon she looks like a young and sassy Fairuza Balk. At the end, they ride off together in his 99 Neon (candy apple red) and instead of having a Jesus statue on his dashboard he now has the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.
this interviewer asked noah stupid questions. there is no way someone could have answered those stupid fucking questions in a way that made the person seem likable.
no way.
Ah-oh, he brought his mom.
Don’t ever talk about a place like you know what’s up when you don’t know what’s up. You are not our “bard.”
Awful Awful terrible boring. Dickhead! I will even take Das Racist down a peg because of their tangential involvement in this piece. Really. I will not go see them again.
I’m into bullshit, but this was one of the more abstract, rambling geopolitical discourses I’ve seen in quite some time.
Incidentally, I’m not looking forward to grad school
I never truly understood the meaning of the word “hubris” until I read this interview.
The difference between Chomsky and you is like 2000 IQ points, and I don’t even like Chomsky.