Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[alice wellintown]

Looking into Zinn again, in his Afterword, I am reminded that Zinn
was, as he stresses in the Afterwqord, a common son of immigrants, a
man who grew up without privledge and worked with common men as a
shipyard worker then served his nation in war, then, with the GI Bill
of Rights, studied history. He was brought up under the flag, looking
up, as MB intimated in his post, to the founding and pilgrim fathers
and the white history makers who are not "WE" the people but a class
of men who made the history books while others were marginalized. Zinn
does mention napalm, byw, since he comes of age or is radicalized by
the Vietnam war, and he begins to think the world would be better off
if it formed one universal and united nation under the sky, for we
would never drop the bombs on Japanese children or Vietnamese children
of Afghan children were they Our children. Of course, he is no longer
engaged in history once he spins these utopian dreams, and he admits
that he has no dellusion about objectivity and that he doesn't think
facts are ever objective because historians must subjectively present
some while marginalizing or omitting others. What strikes me most
about this wonderful Afterword now, is that the book may be useful to
students who are like Zinn was when he had his "granfalloon" burst.