Run Aground, Howard Zinn

Life moved from being very good to being somewhat “less than good” with the arrival of a Monday and the word that my mother up in N Wisconsin was doing quite badly. The decision was reached that the right thing to do was to take the grandsons up there to see her yesterday evening, so five hours of driving for an hour and one half of visitation with a 10:30PM arrival back home came to pass. In the world of families and relationships, Steven Covey of “7 Habits” fame admonishes us to “seek effectiveness over efficiency when dealing with people”. That seemed a good mantra for last evening, and will likely be repeated more than once for some period of time.

I fear it is time to start my book review on “The People’s History of the United States”. I have the odd intellectual curiosity that often lets me crossover from my biases and actually enjoy reading “the other side”. In many cases, a smile crosses my lips as I have “aha moments” where I realize what is behind the thought process of a given lefty. Unfortunately, Howard Zinn is not the kind for any mirth, this is a mindless slog through every mistreatment of any group that Howard could think of, with the assumption (often stated) that “nobody does it worse” than the USA. 

I might re-title it “All the bad news about the US that I could find … even if I had to make some if it up”. If I had any blog readership, this book would kill it … assuming it spares me! 

To his credit, Howard states right up front:

“The historians distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic, or political, or racial, or national, or sexual.” 

He then is fairly up-front that his biases would be anarchist, communist, socialist, primitive, communal, and atheist. The book isn’t long on “alternate solutions”, but it certainly finds capitalism, the US system of government, and especially “private property” to be especially noxious to the development of “the people”.

“Class warfare” is a common theme. The idea of anarchy, destruction, riot, the killing of the “elite”, “capitalists”, the “ruling class” never simmers too far below the surface. You have to love "those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law" -- "just desserts" in academic-ese.  

 “..even the privileged minority-must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of it’s privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?” 

He does tend to do a lot of run-on sentences; I guess everyone does something worth admiration ;-)

He calls out the evil of the family pretty well in this paragraph:

 “Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with children, a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.”

These quotes should be enough to let people know that one doesn’t read Zinn for entertainment. You have to really WANT to learn to hate America and even Natural Law to wade through the endless dreck and drivel, and it says something special about our institutions of higher learning that this is one of the most popular views of US history now force fed to unsuspecting young minds.

Most rational people arrive at the basic understanding that it is a "Henny Youngman existence" ... when asked “How is your wife?”, he would reply “Compared to what?”. As Zinn lists every “transgression” of the history of the US, one wants to scream out “compared to what?” China? Russia? USSR? India? Vulcan? Name a country in Africa that you would hold up as “better”. Is primitive REALLY “better”? Does heaven exist on earth ANYWHERE? If it does, why do immigrants by the millions keep trying to get into the US?

 If they read Howard’s book, they would avoid the US simply because our system has allowed this kind of trash to be printed. I agree we ought to be well educated enough to allow that freedom and be able to 90% point out that it is garbage -- the fact that very few can do so shows the decline of our training in critical thinking. We have declined too far to remain a free people.