Looking back on it now, Howard Zinn had a major impact on my radicalization. I remember reading The 20th Century, essentially a subsection of The People’s History, on a park bench in Rutland, VT. I recall my surprise that the progressive political agenda whose return I had hoped for during the Clinton presidency was, in fact, a reactionary force.
The political giants of the era who, I had been told for years, fought against greedy and monopolistic corporate barons had, in reality, actively crushed social movements challenging the economic dominance of said barons. The 20th Century also introduced me to dozens of individuals and communities that I had never read about, but with which I felt an immediatel and powerful solidarity*.
I spent most of that day and the following months and years unlearning the “leftist” history I had accumulated in my first quarter century on earth. I marveled at the monstrosity of the crimes committed by the paragons of the progressive political narrative*. The ruthlessness with which they smashed nascent unions, sowed discontent between the races, and used police, prisons, and the courts to break up organic social structures that were rapidly forming across the working class brought into question, for the first time in my life, the notion of political solutions**.
In Zinn’s telling, every chapter ends in a victory for the conservative establishment. Every populist movement is destroyed or absorbed, its energy dispersed or twisted to serve the increasingly powerful ruling class. Throughout the entire book, chapter by chapter, you get a sinking feeling that, if the pattern doesn’t change, the people he’s writing about are going to end up . . . well, exactly where we are.
Dennis Perrin wrote a post about Howard Zinn’s passing titled,
The Human Train which does a better job of expressing my sentiments than my own post. The title triggered a feeling within me, which I’m having a hard time pinning down. I feel loss, which I am not accustomed to when strangers pass. Maybe it’s a feeling of connection and motion, even between people far removed. Anyway, I’m saddened by his passing, and very grateful for his work and the influence it’s had on my life.
* Yeah, and the ones on the right too, but I already knew they sucked.
** RIP that notion ~2002
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