Howard Zinn (1922-2010)


A well-lived life of 87 years is something to celebrate and be joyful for, but some deaths strongly separate the world that remains for us, the living, from the one that was there only a few hours or days before.

Howard Zinn almost single-handedly changed the way I saw the world.  I was in high school when I encountered A People's History of the United States and Declarations of Independence and I have never been the same since.  They hit me like alien messages from a more enlightened planet.  I'm not sure I've ever learned as much from any other books, if learning can be defined not only as the gaining of information but the adding of awareness, the opening of new vistas previously hidden.  I expect this was Zinn's effect for many people, especially those who, like me, encountered his writings during particularly impressionable years.

I went to lectures Zinn gave three or four times, mostly during the mid-1990s.  I bought audio tapes of some of his lectures and radio appearances.  I eventually collected most of his books.  After Matt Damon gave him a shout-out in Good Will Hunting and then George W. Bush was appointed President, Zinn seemed to be everywhere, with lots of new books, CDs, DVDs, TV shows...  I didn't keep up with him too much during the last decade, mostly because I had other interests, other things to look at and read, but I was glad he was out there, fighting the good fight, and I was thrilled to see he was able now to draw bigger crowds than had ever attended the events I'd seen him at.

What struck me in Zinn's writing was the clarity of its arguments; what struck me in him as a person was his apparent decency.  He didn't come off as a wild-eyed nutball, which folks on the political right-wing surely saw him to be, but as a fairly normal guy who'd been thinking about stuff and wondered why, as human beings who proclaim ourselves to be decent and civilized, we are so often willing to wield power in both our political and personal lives in ways that are fundamentally indecent and uncivilized.  "Why are we so horrible to each other?" he seemed to ask, "And why do we support systems that are profoundly more horrible than most of us would ever dream of being?"

There will be plenty of eulogies for Howard Zinn.  I hope they're full of his own words.  Here, for instance, are the last paragraphs of Declarations of Independence:
One of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, who later was a scientific adviser to President Eisenhower, chemist George Kistiakowsky, devoted the last years of his life, as he was dying of cancer, to speaking out against the madness of the arms race in every public forum he could find.  Toward the very end, he wrote, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "I tell you as my parting words.  Forget the channels.  There simply is not enough time left before the world explodes.  Concentrate instead on organizing, with so many others of like mind, a mass movement for peace such as there has never been before."

He understood that it was not the bomb he had worked on, but the people he had come to work with, on behalf of peace, that were the ultimate power.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b...
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie...
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d...
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not ...
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, ...
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw...
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes fro...
Read more