Zinn & his disciples

[alice malice]

One of my favorites. A woman with only half her ass, that almost as
funny as Saci, the one-legged cartoon lad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saci_%28Brazilian_folklore%29

will that redeem us Uncle Remus?

On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 6:55 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Read Candide.
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:42 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l