Zinn and the Art of Democracy Maintenance

Today has brought the unexpected news of the deaths of Howard Zinn, 87, and J.D. Salinger, 91. Neither death should be particularly surprising, given their ages, but, as very different quintessentially American icons of cultural and political upheaval, I think it is safe to say there is a true void in this country's soul that didn't exist a few days ago.



If I can leave a discussion of Salinger for later, I would like to concentrate on Zinn, the iconoclastic historian activist. Like Catch-22 author Joseph Heller and 1972 Democractic peace candidate for President George McGovern, he served on bombers during World War II (if Tom Brokaw wants to make his case just from these three, maybe we can talk greatest generation). Returning to his native Brooklyn, he worked in the shipyard before taking advantage of the G.I. Bill and starting college at 27 (I can't help contrasting Zinn's bio with the Keystone Conservatives facing federal charges after being accused of trying to tamper with Senator Mary Landrieu's phone system here in New Orleans. Probably seemed like a good idea at the frat house kegger.).

After earning his Ph.d. with a dissertation analyzing the congressional career of left-leaning Republican (no, it's not a misprint, my apologies for any computers whose hard drive is fried trying to process such a concept [but it's good practice for next week, when all those computers are going to have to process the Saints' victory in the Super Bowl. Who Dat!]) Fiorello LaGuardia, he settled into a teaching position at Spellman College, the historically Black women's institution in Atlanta, where his students included Alice Walker. He was fired from that position for his strong support of students' participation in the civil rights movement, and continued his academic career at Boston University.

Although Zinn was best known as an historian, with A People's History of the United States (now in at least its third edition) serving as an initial corrective to the conventional historical record for many. He was also very much directly involved in the tumult of the late 1960's. A diplomatic trip to North Vietnam with radical Catholic priest Dan Berrigan (there I go flouting the conventional wisdom again) resulted in the release of three American POW's in the midst of the Tet Offensive. And Daniel Ellsberg entrusted a copy of the secretly-copied Pentagon Papers (which showed a pattern of official deception on Vietnam policy stretching back to Truman) with Zinn, who (along with friend and colleague Noam Chomsky) edited and annotated it before its release to the New York Times in 1971. Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (a darkhorse candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, despite a public record whose heroism dwarfed the others) then read it into the Congressional record in dramatic fashion, confirming for many the moral and constitutional disaster the war had become.

Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to see Howard Zinn live, though I came close. He spoke at Portland (Ore.) State University when we were living there, and my wife Sheila and I planned for attending. For some reason, we got a late start, and got there pretty close to the time it was scheduled to start. I didn't expect to have great seats, but expected the auditorium to accomodate what would certainly be a large crowd.

You have to remember that this was Portland, Oregon, where radical politics is both a way of life and a passionate spectator sport, and Zinn is right up there with with Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek and a handful of others in the stratosphere of living icons. However, Zinn's appearance was sponsored by the student history association, who apparently saw him in rather narrow academic terms, as a distinguished scholar of particular insight. So the hall they had reserved for the lecture was abysmally small, as they had drastically underestimated Zinn's appeal to the general public. So the doors were closed by the time we arrived (how many times has the fetus of the revolution been aborted in its conference room womb by that insidious, draconian representative of soul-destroying bureaucracy, the fire marshal?), with other stragglers engaged in passionate arguments with bewildered security personnel. It was just such a perfect microcosm of the age-old opportunity for deep democratic dialogue being stifled by ignorance and blind adherence to rules.

I don't remember what Sheila and I did instead, but that was pre-parenthood (not to mention pre-Netflix, Facebook, and blogspot), so we probably went out, spent our overflowing disposal income on a nice meal and drinks, and went home and made passionate love until dawn. Those were the days, weren't they?