Howard Zinn’s Message of Hope

I picked for my early summer reading that book I was supposed to read upon entry to Left Wing Academy: Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I took six years to pick it up because I’ve detested its $16.95 paperback price at bookstores, and the only copy I’ve seen at my local used bookstore is beaten up badly and has all its pages stuck together — it’s sat on the shelf for years now. I made up a story that that the copy came from some grimy grey-beard lefty who would pull it out from under his bed at night and stroke himself to Zinn’s account of successful democratic and peace-loving movements throughout our nation’s history.
 
That was before I read the book. Now I think differently. That cum-covered copy certainly belonged to some creep from the power class, some stockholder of a company with a long history of brutal corporate thievery like Bechtel or Chiquita Brands International. That’s because the people’s history of the United States as Zinn tells it is a series of scorched-earth, 100% victories for the axis of mega-wealth and government-sponsored violence.
 
Zinn’s book has only one big gaping flaw in his approach to explaining things. Beyond that, it’s one great read that delivers answers on all kinds of questions about the prospect of positive developments in American society.
 
So let’s get the hopelessly naive analysis out of the way: Zinn has this premise that the occasional Indian, slave or worker rebellion that crops up between massacres and years of brutal suppression by the power class is a sign of a democratic tendency by “the people.” For example, there’s a part in his history of the Great Southern Slave era where he cites a few dozen reported slave uprisings over a seven-year period in the 1830s-1840s as evidence of popular resistance to the plantation system.

Reading that passage I thought, OK Zinn, but if you consider that there were millions and millions of slaves in the South, and that 7 years is a fairly large window of time, a few dozen uprisings divided by (millions+millions of slaves x 7 years) = .000000002 slave uprisings per slave capita over a 7-year period. Hardly worth pointing out as a sign of rebelliousness. Better to use that evidence as even greater proof that any sensibility of resistance was utterly steamrolled across thousands of square miles of American slave country.

I can’t fault Zinn too much for his optimism, because finding these sad attempts at resistance may well have been his driving motive to write this useful book in the first place — and at least with this author, the bias is out there way in the open, and is very easy to steer around.
 
Now for the good stuff. As I said, I think Zinn’s book is a fantastic Ouija board for questions that really get to the heart of things about hope for the people America. I had read various bits of American history piecemeal before, but the cumulative conclusions one can draw from Zinn’s book really do justice to the value of history as they tried to tell me at college: it’s an excellent predictor of what will happen in the future.
 
Such as: Have you ever wondered what would happen if a bunch of people really did get together to stand up to the American political and economic system in a way that might meaningfully change it to work in their favor or prevent it from getting what it wants?

“They’ll fucking kill you,” is the answer that screams from Zinn’s book. They will send troops and propaganda in your direction and kill you and your children (or if you’re lucky coopt your agenda and make it tame and decadent within a few decades). If the state or federal government doesn’t have money at the time to pay for National Guard troops to come and kill you, don’t worry, J.P. Morgan or some other financier will inevitably loan it to them to get the job done. The fact that there isn’t much people-stomping going on these days is a testament to the total absence of popular resistance to things as they are. The political and economic system worked out the kinks — the Cherokees, the populists, the Wobblies, the labor movement, black power — a long time ago, and is running very smoothly.
 
Another question: Is every single military volunteer in the history of the United States a poor sucker who fell for big, brilliantly constructed, stirring lies about honor and service to country?

Yes — 100% of them, and every single one of them will be.
 
Followup: Does every time of war in America feature a cuddly bunch of senators who give stirring speeches and votes against it but then cave in to allow funding “for the troops’ sake” when it’s under way?

Yes — 100% of them, and there will always be a Robert C. Byrd or Russ Feingold to cheer for.

When it’s the 4th quarter in the latest episode of the people vs. the powerful and the New York Times is on deadline to write its editorial on the topic, does it come out in favor of the powerful using the most evil rhetoric imaginable?
 
Yes — 100% of the time, and it always will.
 
Zinn’s book delivers answers to questions like these hand over fist, always promising a 1,000 megaton dark fate that would leave Oedipus feeling like his lot wasn’t so bad after all.
 
On the bright side, Zinn dances around two different directions of possible hope for “the American people,” but the implications of them are clearly too troubling for Zinn to say out loud, as one would have to accept violence as a tool, and mass death of innocents as a medium, while the other would have to embrace the reality that this is still a slave nation and that there’s absolutely nothing innate in the human condition to desire self-government.
 
Hope through action: Action, as in collective democratic action against the political and economic system, in the form of the creation and practice of alternative culture, social beliefs and economic habits by a critical mass is possible, but in order to get there, vast numbers of participants will be lost in the meat-grinder. There’s no way around it. Labor workers and Wobblies were really making some strides, achieving some great degree of class consciousness — AKA regularly losing in violent battles — in the early 20th century, but there’s nothing like that now. It will only be when you see daily reports of dozens or hundreds of Americans killed by police and military that there’s any sign that democratic sensibilities among the populace are on the rise. Looking around these days, there’s no almost no fight to be had at the cultural level either; as long as people in Iowa and Nebraska proudly wear NYPD baseball hats or those t-shirts with FBI blazoned on them — and they do — you can forget about that too.
 
Hope through inaction: I’m a lot more optimistic about this approach. It’s one fitting of our legacy of slavery and our contemporary slave society. American Slaves, Zinn unwittingly points out, and slave societies in general are typically crap at rebellions, but pretty decent at passive resistance. He quotes slave owner after slave owner bemoaning the lack of enthusiasm that their slaves have for their daily duties.

It’s that sullen instinct by the slave to resist ‘playing ball’ that I think could do the trick. What was the first piece of advice George Bush gave Americans after 9/11? “Go Shopping.” And they did. But if Americans choose not to go shopping for a while, they might get themselves a welfare state. It wouldn’t be freedom or self-government, but at least they might get some cheap health care out of it.