Fiction

Test Your Cultural I.Q.: I Love Lucy Episode or Noam Chomsky Theorem?

(answers below)

1. When Ricky brings home a rented mink for his act, Lucy assumes it’s a surprise gift for her.
   
   
2. The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you can control all the people.
   
   
3. Lucy’s scheme to convince Ricky to shave off his mustache backfires when she finds herself unable to remove a set of false whiskers.
   
   
4. Lucy and Ethel stage a phony séance for the benefit of an eccentric producer.
   
   
5. All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
   
   
6. To some degree, it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.
   
   
7. Ricky and Fred try to impose a rigid household schedule on Lucy and Ethel.
   
   
8. If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
   
   
9. Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. Ricky finds himself handcuffed to Lucy on the eve of his appearance on a gala television special.
   
   
10. Lucy attempts to make Ricky jealous when she pays a visit to an old boyfriend who’s gone into the fur trade.
    
    
11. You never need an argument against the use of violence; you need an argument for it.
    
    
12. States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
    
    
13. To win a fifty-dollar bet, Lucy has to force Ricky to blow his top within 24 hours.
    
    
14. The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control— “indoctrination” we might say—exercised through the media.
    
    

Do you control language or does language control you? Answers below …

1. Lucy
2. Chomsky. Yes, that Chomsky.
3. Lucy
4. Pure Lucy, America’s most loveable redhead
5. Chomsky
6. Chomsky
7. Lucy
8. Chomsky—but believe me, brother, Lucy would wholeheartedly agree
9. Chomsky AND Lucy
10. Lucy, but what’s the deal with her and minks??!!
11. Chomsky (unless it’s about Lucy doing something really, really naughty)
12. Chomsky (but, according to Wikipedia, this one is attributed to “Norm” Chomsky; I guess that’s his brother)
13. Lucy, but in a classic Chomskian scenario
14. I’m pretty sure this is Lucy too. But don’t quote me on that.