Recent reading

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn

This is the third or fourth time I've read this, and with each rereading I see more of its shortcomings. This does not diminish its importance. But Zinn, like so many progressives and liberals, is far more optimistic than I am. To me, the historical record says that the most efficient way to political and social change is to assassinate the right people. If you don't want to play the game by these rules, then get out of it -- or figure out a way to change the rules.

This is why cultural historians like Morris Berman and Norman Brown interest me more than Zinn, observers who recognize a dead end when they see one and therefore look for alternative realities and new social constructions (including anti-social options).

All the same, Zinn's contribution is huge and this is required reading for any American wanting to understand our history.

We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. . . . Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children.

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 That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.

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 Would the various strands of protest and resistance, in politics, in the workplace, in the culture, come together in the next century, the next millennium, to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, of equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? No one could predict. All one could do was to act on the possibility, knowing that inaction would make any prediction a gloomy one. If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come—if history were any guide—from the top. It would come through citizens’ movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed.

Or from a new kind of reality.