Zinn & his disciples

[alice malice]

I love Zinn for writing about the people who built America, but I
dislike his simple minded approach to debunking the orthodox history
that, he and his disciples, and so many others ... stuff into the
strawman. The problem, Zinn argues,  is not history but who tells it
and how. Of course, Zinn has an excellent  point: how we tell stories
and who tells them to whom is an excellent point to focus on, as any
high school history student knows.

They also know that you can't do anything about history. It's history.

But you can teach people history, and, though I don't think history
ever repeats itself, it does, sometimes, as someone said, echo, and
so, by teaching it we might make things a bit better in the future,
and we might even solve some big problems.

 I like to think the Beatles had it right when they said things are
getting better all the time. And they are. Zinn's history is too often
focused on how things are getting worse because of who has been
telling us a pack of lies.

The truth is, this kind of conspiracy theory approach to history, not
muckraking or truth finding, but radical debunking all the lies our
history teaches told us, assumes that we've been lied to all our lives
and, stupid people that we are, we believed the lies.

First off, this is not 1955. This is not because Zinn awakened us,
but, as Zinn shows us in his history of people, because countless
others made and wrote and spoke history that countered the American
propaganda books and broadcasts, and because  we are not stupid people
who suck in the slime from the TV set and salute the flag. Though we
have our moments of hysteria and jingoism, and even decades of
retrograde (Nixon to Reagan revolution plus Bush Clinton and the black
president ...etc.), we won't be fooled again. So Zinn is history. And
knocking Fox news or these other idiots in the "press" is a waste of
time. Unless of course, you really believe that we are still a nation
of slime sucking idiots.

The shining light on the hill is capitalism. America is the Empire.
You live in it. I don't love capital anymore than the next poor
person, but you can't fight the Fed, or a coordination of central
banks or the maniacs who run nation states. That's over.

Buy oil stocks. They are cheap now. Growth will never increase enough
to improve your welfare. You must own assets. Hate it, but don't be a
fool. Hell, you've read Zinn. So even if you were a fool in 1955, you
been educated now.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l