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audience to Zinn's brand of insights and conclusions. I still had a difficult
time picturing him on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Mainly I had trouble
picturing Zinn's brilliance compressing itself to the show's format. I also had
a difficult time thinking Stewart would do his guest justice within the usual
hammy effort to garner all the best lines of the evening.
Of course that wasn't destined to happen with Zinn sitting in the other chair.
My favorite quotes:
"Not only was Columbus more up-front [about his motivations for war, in
comparison to Mr. Bush], he was also right there with his troops."
"People who are on narcotics will believe anything."
context is, obviously, pretty much of everything in the case of the second
quotation. It was his initial answer to Stewart asking if Powers That Be
might not hold a fundamental belief in their stated visions of global reality
and what must be done about it. Once Stewart stopped laughing, he got
Zinn to clarify that the opiate could be power. Zinn then further clarified that
his intended meaning was that of war and the inability to stop acting out the
paradigm.
It Seems to Me by Howard Zinn
Harness That Anger
In the days after the election, it seemed that all my friends were either
depressed or angry, frustrated or indignant, or simply disgusted. Neighbors
who had never said more than hi to me stopped me on the street and
delivered passionate little speeches that made me think they had just
listened to a re-broadcast of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, in which
powerful creatures arrive on Earth to take it over.
But then I reconsidered: They had not been listening to H. G. Wells. There
really were strange and powerful creatures that had just occupied the United
States and now wanted to take over the rest of the world. Yes, Bush was
reelected President, and whether there was fraud in the voting process or
not, John Kerry, quickly threw in the towel. The minnow called for
reconciliation with the crocodile.
The reelected Bush triumphantly announced that he had the approval of the
nation to carry out his agenda. There came no sign of opposition from what
was supposed to be the opposition party. In short, the members of the club,
after a brief skirmish on the campaign trail (costing a total of a billion dollars
or so) were back having drinks at the same bar. When, in mid-November,
the Presidential library of Bill Clinton opened, former Presidents,
Democratic and Republican, along with the current President, sat side by
side and declared their fervent desire for unity.
But someone was left out of the celebration, this insistence that we were all
one happy family, accepting the President for another four years. The
American people were not quite in agreement.
Consider this: Bush won 51 percent of a voting population that was just 60
percent of the eligible voters. That means Bush won the approval of 31
percent of the eligible voters. Kerry won 28 percent of the eligible voters.
The 40 percent who did not cast a ballot seemed to be saying there was no
candidate they could approve of. I suspect that a large percentage of those
who voted had the same feeling, but voted anyway. Is this a decisive
victory? Has the will of the people been followed? (If we were truly
democratic, then maybe the 40 percent nonvoters who were the plurality
might have their wish: No President at all.)
The President may insist he has "a mandate," but it is up to the rest of us to
declare firmly that he doesn't. Sure, he had more votes than his Democratic
opponent, but to most of the electorate, that candidate did not represent a
real choice. More than half the public, in opinion polls over the past six
months, had declared their opposition to the war. Neither major party
candidate represented their view, so they were effectively disenfranchised.
What to do now? Harness those fierce emotions reacting to the election. In
that anger, disappointment, grieving frustration there is enormous
combustible energy, which, if mobilized, could reinvigorate an anti-war
movement that had been slowed by the all-consuming election campaign.
It is in the nature of election campaigns to siphon off the vitality of people
imbued with a heartfelt cause, dilute that cause, and pour it into the dubious
endeavor to propel one somewhat better candidate into office. But with the
election over, there is no more need to hold back, to do as too many
well-meaning people did, which was to follow uncritically in the footsteps of
a candidate who dodged and squirmed on almost every major issue.
Freed from the sordid confines of our undemocratic political process, we
can now turn all our energies to do what is discouraged by the voting
system--to speak boldly and clearly about what must be done to turn our
country around.
And let's not worry about offending that 22 percent of the country (we don't
know the exact number but it is certainly a minority) who are religious and
political fundamentalists, who invoke God in the service of mass murder and
imperial conquest, who ignore the Biblical injunctions to love one's
neighbor, to beat swords into plowshares, to care for the poor and
downtrodden.
Most Americans do not want war.
Most want the wealth of this country to be used for human needs-health,
work, schools, children, decent housing, a clean environment--rather than for
billion dollar nuclear submarines and four billion dollar aircraft carriers.
They can be deflected from their most human beliefs by a barrage of
government propaganda, dutifully repeated by television and talk radio and
the major newspapers. But this is a temporary phenomenon, and as people
begin to sense what is happening, their natural instinct for empathy with
other human beings emerges.
We saw this in the Vietnam years, when at first two-thirds of the nation,
trusting the government and given no reason for skepticism by a subservient
press, supported the war. A few years later, when the reality of what we
were doing in Vietnam began to show itself--when the body bags piled up
here, and the images of napalmed children in Vietnam appeared on TV
screens, and the horror of the My Lai massacre, at first ignored, finally
surfaced--the nation turned against the war.
The reality of what is going on Iraq is more and more coming through the
smoke of government propaganda and media timidity. It cannot help but
touch the hearts of the people of this country, as they see our soldiers going
innocently into Iraq, but becoming brutalized by the war, practicing torture on
helpless prisoners, shooting the wounded, bombing houses and mosques,
turning cities into rubble, and driving families out of their homes into the
countryside.
As I write this, the city of Fallujah has been turned into rubble by a ferocious
bombing campaign. Photos are beginning to appear (though not yet in the
major media, so cowardly are they) of children with limbs gone, an infant
lying on a cot, one leg missing. It is the classic story of a military power
possessing the latest, most deadly of weapons, trying to subdue the hostile
population of a small, weak country by sheer cruelty, which only increases
the resistance. The war in Fallujah cannot be won. It should not be won.
The movement here against the war must confront the horror of the situation
by a variety of bold actions.
We will take up the classic instruments of citizens in the history of social
movements: demonstrations (there will be a big one in Washington on
Inauguration Day), vigils, picket lines, parades, occupations, acts of civil
disobedience.
We will be appealing to the good conscience of the American people.
We will be asking questions: What kind of country do we want to live in?
Do we want to be reviled by the rest of the world?
Do we have a right to invade and bomb other countries, pretending we are
saving them from tyranny and in the process killing them in huge numbers?
(What is the death toll so far in Iraq? 30,000? 100,000?)
Do we have a right to occupy a country when the people of that country
obviously do not want us there?
Election results deceive us by registering the half-hearted, diluted beliefs of
a population forced to reduce its true desires to the narrow dimensions of a
voting booth. But we are not alone, not in this country, certainly not in the
world (Let's not forget that 96 percent of the Earth's population resides
outside our borders).
We do not have to do the job alone. Social movements have always had a
powerful ally: the inexorable reality that operates in the world impervious to
the aims of those who rule their countries. That reality is operating now. The
"war on terror" is turning into a nightmare. Whistleblowers from the
Administration itself are beginning to reveal secrets. (A high CIA official
writes of "imperial hubris" and then leaves the agency.) Soldiers are
questioning their mission. The corruption attending the war--the billion dollar
contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel--is coming into the open.
The Bush administration, riding high and arrogant, adhering to the rule of the
fanatic, which is to double your speed when you are going in the wrong
direction, will find itself going over a cliff, too late to stop.
If the leaders of the Democratic Party do not understand this reality, do not
squarely address the desires of people in every part of the country (forget
the red, the blue, the nonsensical generalizations that ignore the
complexities of human thought), they will find themselves tailgating the Bush
vehicle as it heads for disaster.
Will the Democratic Party, so craven and unreliable, face a revolt from
below which will transform it?
Or will it give way (four years from now? eight years from now?) to a new
political movement that honestly declares its adherence to peace and
justice?
Sooner or later, profound change will come to this nation tired of war, tired
of seeing its wealth squandered, while the basic needs of families are not
met. These needs are not hard to describe. Some are very practical, some
are requirements of the soul: health care, work, living wages, a sense of
dignity, a feeling of being at one with our fellow human beings on this Earth.
The people of this country have their own mandate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard Zinn, the author of "A People's History of the United States," is a
columnist for The Progressive.
When I first made this website I was unprepared for the number of people
who wrote to ask me about Howard Zinn. Such as who WAS he and why
was he so important to me. I wrote to Howard about this situation and
explained that I was losing focus and time from my work. It was growing
clear I needed to link him in somehow in order to cut down on an
unexpected email diversion He visited the site, admitted it wasn't anything
close to his normal landscape, and gave very generous and gracious
permission to use his own writing to explain as best I could.
I'd rather use my own words as an explanation since I feel a personal
connection to the Zinn mystique. During my first weeks in Boston I attended
a benefit reading primarily because I loved the work of all the women
reading. When I got to the Arlington Street church where the reading took
place, I discovered a somewhat politicized atmosphere. Since I was new to
town I didn't yet realize that's just how things felt at the time as general rule.
The reading was being held to benefit the BU5. They were professors at
Boston University who'd caused themselves some trouble by refusing to
dis-honor the clerical union's strike lines. At that point I'd had a two-year
secretarial gig (for the Girl Scouts of America) and it was enough
experience for me to grasp clerical workers needed unions very badly.
They also needed 'credible' support from the outside world. Howard Zinn
was/is one of the BU5 and when I later went to work as an administrative
assistant in the BU law school, my office mate was one of the prime movers
and shakers of the union.
He was in fact one of the people who came to BU and worked in a clerical
capacity specifically so they could organize. This intriqued me with its
implications of passion and sacrifice but pragmatically I thought it was a
little insane. The point I intended to make was that folks like my office mate
evoked Howard Zinn's name like my boyfriend-now-husband and his
musical cronies evoked names like Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. Since
my husband's a bass player we'll also throw the names John Entwhistle and
Stanley Clarke into the mix.
It happens in the interest of larger context that this is the same time frame in
which People's History of the United States was about to break out of
Howard's internalized world and into the potentially tamer realms of our
larger collective consciousness. The Boston University atmosphere of the
time was crackling with life-force. I spent many sunny mellow hours of my
precious youth locked-away in both intent and a Kenmore Square
brownstone, earnestly cranking out District 65 newsletters.
I told my son all this in the context of him wishing to read People's History
and me advising him to wait until he wasn't reading seven other history texts
for a class at school. He was amazed to discover that I had what he called
Outside Awareness of Howard Zinn. In the context of my explanations, I
had over-dramatized a sense of admiration for his stance in support of
clerical workers by saying 'any one of us' would have typed endlessly into
the night for him. I did subsequently admit I only knew that I myself would
have done it - once or possibly twice if something really important was
involved.
I haven't been a clerical worker for a couple of decades. I know entire
groups of people who don't have a frame of reference for why I might
suddenly get a bit didactic and hot under the collar on behalf of those
currently working in this segment of the job force. No sustainable future can
be built on a society that doesn't honor and support the workers who do the
most baseline sustain-able tasks at any society's hand.
That type of awareness is something I've heard expressed, time and again,
as an illumination or catalytic force of social action that has been gained by
people reading and acting-upon the words of Howard Zinn. I find his
historical attitude remarkably upbeat for the slant it takes and this makes it
galvanizing to read and absorb some difficult passages of historical and
therefore KARMIC reality. These dual threads of accounting life's force are
woven in the spine of our separate bodies as well as the central nervous
system of our collective consciousness.
But what about the places where your life's philosophy disagrees? This
was asked of me by somebody who was distressed to think I was
attempting to merge flower essence awareness with an exhaltation of
someone who doesn't believe in any jails. The lack of congruent
connection was bothering her enough to write a very thoughtful rather than
reactive letter.
My answer to the question is another question and I pose it without a hint of
flippancy: What ABOUT those places? Don't they exist within every
inter-relationship of human dynamic? Lover or foe, stranger or family - we're
all going to find places where our life's philosophy disagrees.
I had not originally meant to have a Howard Zinn web page and I'm really not
sure what I'm going to 'do' within the space other that write different
presently unknown things in response to letters that keep arriving on this
topic at a pace equal to the mails about flower essences. Some days the
Howard Zinn mail is even more extensive than the benefit raffle project
inquiries! I don't yet know what to make of that but I'm hopeful it will
ultimately prove educational for everyone who has chosen to be involved.
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