Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a nice piece about him yesterday, I think he says many of the things our SCLM doesn’t have the brains nor spine to say about the man. Meanwhile it practically sent Michael Jackson out on a celestial barge on par with Ronald Reagan and Diana Spencer. We truly live in the Stupid Ages.
I’d rather not pontificate about the sorry state of things but rather the good things I learned from him. Unlike most people, I didn’t discover him through his most successful book A People’s History of the United States, I accidentally received a copy of Declarations of Independence from the literary critic at the Milwaukee Sentinel (definitely a paper which wouldn’t touch Zinn’s work with a ten-foot pole). Written around 1990, I don’t recollect the exact point of the book, meaning was it an autobiography, a history text or essays; I think it was the latter. It still had a solid narrative because I remember having trouble putting it down. He definitely struck a chord with me as Bush (the first) was beating the drums of war to “liberate” Kuwait from Iraq.
Throughout college, I was never very much with the Liberal camp. It was the Eighties so American GroupThink turned Liberal into a dirty word and Marquette was (still is) a Moderate-Conservative university. Besides, alleged college “liberals” tended to belong more to the Limo Liberal and LUG (Liberal Until Graduation) delegations along with others who mean well, yet haven’t thought it all the way through. Then there are the hanger-ons only looking for free weed and scoring with Neo-Hippie girls. These people are their own worst advertising on campus. I could never belong anyway for I disagreed on the whole South Africa issue. Zinn was more convincing than any tie-died doofus reeking of pachouli. He put his money where his mouth was more often; he was involved in the Civil Rights movement, protesting numerous wars and speaking out when he could’ve lost his position at Boston College. Being a WWII veteran also helped put a cork in the noise holes of the Chickenhawks I ended up working for at GDW. He was certainly someone who pointed out the more practical side to me.
As a historian, I feel the radical label was inaccurate. Anyone who has taken a college-level course on the subject will learn all about the dirty laundry of near mythical figures and events from primary school. Pointing out America’s foibles doesn’t mean he hated the country; he just believed that ignoring them or covering them up would lead the nation into making the same errors. Sometimes those points can be unsettling if you’re a fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King or Joseph Smith. One of his ideological descendants, James Loewen said it best (paraphrased), people get upset when they find out their heroes have feet of clay.