Jacob Houser: "What I realized is that with most people there is a cognitive distance established between authority figures and their own lives."
I am most certainly guilty as charged:
But then in in reflecting upon your other thought that "it actually upsets their notions of these celebrities/authorities existing in the same plane of reality as us every day folk," I believe that this would not be true for myself, and has not been in my few interactions with celebrities in the past. My own motivation for not speaking to power is something more akin to "when I am ready, then I will contribute."...which of course will never happen. Which is why I am posting this haphazard spontaneous email on my own neglected blog right now.Marianne Williamson's quote, "Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure" comes to mind.
...though I've also written to a few famous folks in my time and not received replies, so Jacob, you must be doing something right besides just having the will to communicate.
Jacob Houser: "...elevating certain authorities into places of god-like inaccessibility is incredibly convenient for authorities and incredibly destructive for everyone else."
You are definitely on to something. But notice that you didn't use opposites of "convenient-inconvenient" or "creative-destructive" in characterizing these authority-subservient relationships. While it might, on the surface, be convenient for Chomsky to be on an intellectual pedestal, in the long run his work likely suffers from lack of whole-world rigor. You made him better, and it appears from his willingness to engage you that he understands his own predicament.
Obama didn't invent the presidency, and it certainly doesn't look like he's going to reinvent it. So while it might be true that he has greater access to power, it doesn't appear that he has the "power" to convince us to attempt to influence him, which he desperately needs us to do in order to make his presidency worthwhile.
