Re: From Your Friends at Dissent

[andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen@xxxxxxxxx>]

 "Chris Doss"  <nomorebounces@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> "Zinn reduces
> the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious
> attempt to address the
> biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S.
> history: why have most
> Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist
> republic in which they
> live?"
>
> --
> What's so daunting about that question? Don't most
> people accept the legitimacy of whatever social
> system they are socialized in, provided it is
> stable?

I'm also not sure that Z doesn't make an attempt to
answer this question. It's just that he had no
particularly startlingly new answers, just the usual
ones, right? Racism, ethnic division, repression and
cooption of radical organizing, individualist
ideology, backwards labor laws, the lack of a labor
party and the historical attachment of the main part
of the labor movement to the Democratic Party, etc.,
first past the post winner-take-all elections, big
money in politics, etc. We all know know this stiff,
it's just that it's not really obvious what to do
about it.

Zinn talks about all this stuff. It is true that his
main task, as he takes it in the PHUS is to
delegitimate official ideologies by attacking the idea
that American history is the the story of the shining
city on the hill.

I consider myself a patriot, and I even admire a lot
of aspects of American elite history, but I'm not
offended by Zinn's deflationary approach, and it
mystifies my why many self-styled social democrats and
liberals are. It's not at all in the same category as
raving about fascist Amerikkka. Besides, far as I know
no one really questions Zinn's accuracy and
scholarship except for an incidental detail here and
there, isn't that right?

Sparking of which, let me put in a nother plug, for
New Yorkers and those living nearby, for the Broadway
production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, _now open
and running,_ the only musical ever made about people
who have assasissinated or attempted to assassinate
Presidents of the US. It's about the dark side of the
American dream. One chorus is called "The Other
National Anthem." The good guy in show, the only one
who offers a trace of hope or an alternative to
desperation, murder, or resignation, failure, and
lies, is Emma Goldman. Sondheim's no Marxist or
anarchist, but this show is very much in our ball
park. The music is beautiful and the songs are great.
Check it out.

jks

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