Chomsky is one of the most eloquent people that I've ever come across. Manufacturing consent and Understanding power are indeed life changing books. They are in the sense that after reading them you will look at the media and politics in a new way and that that way will never leave you. It's like putting on glasses when you didn't know you needed them.
Your glasses analogy is interesting but I think is misleading, in that it assumes there's a correct way to view things. This approach is one of the major problems I have with Chomsky and other writers like him, i.e. "you have been duped by the (mostly US) media, the military-industrial complex, by the secret powers that may be; here is the real truth about matters". Rather than being presented as the truth, these opi…
I think this is a concept inserted by a lot of Chomsky nay-sayers. I don't recall that being part of the worldview. My limited reading and viewing has left me with the impression, perhaps more disturbing, that there is no secret power. This really is just how people behave, and to really understand what's happening in real time, so that better interventions can be made, is going to take whole new fields of study.
I think the solutions of anarchism or communism that some Chomskyites put forward are mainly bold attempts to add those vectors into the other much larger vectors that are already present in the public debate and tend to make the space appear very inhospitable to alternative view points. Much like Aaron described, the world seems very lonely afterwards, and hearing a shout in the distance is very welcome to the man alone in the desert.