--
William Smith
Indiana
IC-746, FRG-100
1500 foot longwire

wrote in message
ups.com...
A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. It should be
required reading in all our schools but it isn't since they are still
clinging "George Washington cut down the cherry tree" fare . Put it
at the top of your Christma present list to give to everyone you care
about.

Howard Zinn is a genuine American hero. He fought all the good fights
of our era--the integration of Negroes into American life, an end to
the Vietnam War, the rights of labor, the limits of civil
disobedience, opposition to militarism and government secrecy, and,
unceasingly, establishing justice.

Here's a sample of his writings and remarkable insights into
American history. True brilliance from a genius the American
establishment doesn't want you to know about.

"The Declaration of Independence became an embarrassment to the
Founding Fathers almost immediately. Some of George Washington's
soldiers resented the rich in New York, Boston and Philadelphia,
profiting from the war. When the Continental Congress in 1781 voted
half pay for life to officers of the Revolution and nothing for
enlisted men, there was mutiny in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania
lines. Washington ordered two young mutineers shot 'as an example.'
The shovelfuls of earth covering their bodies also smudged the words
of the Declaration, five years old and already ignored, that 'all men
are created equal.'

"Black slaves in Boston took those words seriously, too, and,
during the Revolution, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for
their freedom. But the Revolution was not fought for them.

"It did not seem to be fought for the poor white farmers either,
who, after serving in the war, now faced high taxes, and seizure of
homes and livestock for nonpayment. In western Massachusetts, they
organized, blocking the doors of courthouses to prevent foreclosures.
This was Shays's Rebellion. The militia finally routed them, and the
Founding Fathers hurried to Philadelphia to write the Constitution, to
set up a government where such rebellions could be controlled."

"Beyond Voting," a column that appeared in the Boston Globe in
1976 and beginning, "Gossip is the opium of the American public," like
many of the Globe columns, is as timely today as the day it was
written. "So we get high on trivia, and forget that, whether
Presidents have been impotent or oversexed, drunk or sober, they have
followed the same basic policies. Whether crooks or Boy Scouts,
handsome or homely, agile or clumsy, they have taxed the poor,
subsidized the rich, wasted the wealth of the nation on guns and
bombs, ignored the decay of the cities, and done so little for the
children of the ghettos and rural wastelands that these youth had to
join the armed forces to survive--until they were sent overseas to
die.

"Harry Truman was blunt and Lyndon Johnson wily, but both sent
armies to Asia to defend dictators and massacre the people we claimed
to be helping. Eisenhower was dull and Kennedy witty, but both built
up huge nuclear armaments at the expense of schools and health care.
Nixon was corrupt and Ford straightforward, but both coldly cut
benefits for the poor and gave favors to rich corporations.

"The cult of personality in America is a powerful drug. It takes
the energy of ordinary citizens which, combined, can be a powerful
force, and depletes it in the spectator sport of voting. Our most
cherished moment of democratic citizenship comes when we leave the
house once in four years to choose between two mediocre white Anglo-
Saxon males who have been trundled out of political caucuses, million
dollar primaries and managed conventions for the rigged multiple
choice test we call an election. Presidents come and go. But the FBI
is always there, on the job, sometimes catching criminals, sometimes
committing crimes itself, always checking on radicals as secret police
do all over the world."

It is a temptation to quote at length from this book because I
feel that Zinn's voice should and will prevail over today's cacophony
of time-serving editorialists, self-satisfied academics, pompous
pundits, and dishonest politicians. In the essay called "The Problem
Is Civil Disobedience," Zinn says the law is the Bill of Rights and
the Constitution, and adds, "But there is another part of law that
doesn't get ballyhooed--the legislation that has gone through month
after month, year after year, from the beginning of the Republic,
which allocates the resources of the country in such a way as to leave
some people very rich and other people very poor, and still others
scrambling like mad for what little is left. That is the law. If you
go to law school you will see this. You can quantify it by counting
the big, heavy law books that people carry around with them and see
how many law books you count that say 'Constitutional Rights' on them
and how many that say 'Property,' 'Contracts,' 'Torts,' 'Corporation
Law.' That is what the law is mostly about. The law is the oil
depletion allowance--although we don't have Oil Depletion Allowance
Day, we don't have essays written on behalf of the oil depletion
allowance. So there are parts of the law that are publicized and
played up to us--oh, this is the law, the Bill of Rights. And there
are other parts of the law that just do their quiet work, and nobody
says anything about them."

The final paragraph of this remarkable essay could serve as a
rallying cry for any citizen's group trying to achieve justice for
working class people.

"What we are trying to do, I assume, is really to get back to the
principles and aims and spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that
deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue
happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to
alter or abolish their current form of government--and the stress had
been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop
obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way
it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical
offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My
hope is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this
country but in other countries because they all need it. People in all
countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which is not a
metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And we need a kind
of declaration of interdependence among people in all countries of the
world who are striving for the same thing." Today, even more than when
those words were written, "People in all countries need the spirit of
disobedience to the state, which is not a metaphysical thing but a
thing of force and wealth."


Thanks for the heads up about that book. I am sure it will be an interesting
read.