Howard Zinn & The State of the Union

Howard Zinn & The State of the Union

Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010. He’s the fourth of the people whose portraits I’ve painted to have died. The others are William Sloane Coffin, Molly Ivins, and Utah Phillips.
Zinn died at the age of 87 --- ironically, on the same day Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address. I say “ironically” because Howard Zinn spent his life diagnosing the state of the union, trying to assess the health of our democracy, what people and forces created that health, what impeded. If anyone should have been standing in front of Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, and the American people to tell us the truth --- instead of a toxic mix of hyperbole, fear, military hypocrisy, and false hope --- it should have been Howard Zinn. How reassuring that would have been! For a brief moment I actually thought that the president could not help but mention the passing of a great man like Zinn, the author of The People’s History of the United States. I mean, what modern historian has done more to tell Americans true stories of how our freedoms have been won, the courage it took, the reasons for the opposition?

And then I laughed at myself. How naïve! Presidents flatter the American people, tell them they are the greatest people on the planet, and tell them their government admires them. Presidents don’t tell the people their nobility was earned by opposing the state --- that the proper relationship is for the government to fear the people as it should fear the press. The greatest Americans have fought to expand equality and justice --- people like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Daniel Ellsberg --- and they had to struggle against the state. They were treated as enemies of the United States. These are the stories Howard Zinn told. And that’s why the president could not offer a fond tribute to the death of the man who said democracy is a bottom up, not a top down affair, who said our crises are not exacerbated by civil disobedience, but by civil obedience. Democracy is not a humming little abstract engine of philosophy and laws set in motion by our founding fathers. Democracy is a continuum of individual, courageous acts necessary for its own defense. Democracy’s engine won’t take us anywhere without tinkering troublemakers to keep it running cleanly.

The last thing the president would want to do is remind people that their finest hours have been in the streets, on the picket lines, sitting in, committing civil disobedience, demanding the truth, resisting injustice. When the people fight for their rights, the government must be accountable to its own ideals. As President Obama spoke, he used his lofty language to praise the ideals but ignore the accountability.

A recent cover of The New Yorker magazine showed Obama casually walking on water but suddenly falling through. Their point was that his failure to win health care reform and provide jobs for unemployed workers has rendered him mortal. But what he continues to do is walk on blood. He enlarges America’s illegal and immoral wars, justifies the numbers of civilians killed as collateral damage, feeds a war budget bigger than the military budgets of all the other countries of the world combined, and starves the necessary programs of education, health, environment, and compassion that foster community. If Obama really wanted the programs and policies he seems to espouse --- health care, education, Wall Street regulation, climate change regulation, bipartisanship --- he would follow the advice of Howard Zinn. He’d encourage the people to get out in the streets & stay there until they get the policies they need for a healthy future.

Howard Zinn rarely showed anger. His voice remained halting, humble, dry, bemused, ironic. Like Molly Ivins, Utah Phillips, and William Sloane Coffin he made one laugh at hypocrisy. He used this method to reassure people, people who witnessed corruption and injustice but heard it called the triumph of the American system, that they were not crazy, that what they saw, no matter what the media said, was indeed an outrage. Zinn was indispensable in the effort to have the true stories told. Our media/political barrage of spin, propaganda, and willful falsehood is constant and determined. Lies maintain power. Everything is permissible as a means when the only end being sought is power. Zinn showed us again & again that the soulless pursuit of power destroys democracy.

Many of the mainstream obituaries referred to Zinn as a radical and a hard leftist. This language is meant to frighten you --- as though any sensible person knows that good, normal people are centrists who take comfort in the reasonableness of the middle ground. Radicals are scary passionate people --- not far removed from terrorists. Hard leftists are ideologues who don’t know how to compromise. Well, actually, Zinn was a realist. He merely points out that it took “radicals” like Rosa Parks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, Muhammad Ali, Woody Guthrie and Helen Keller to challenge the comfortable center so that America could live up to its own radical proposition that all people are create equal.

From the moment we are born, each of us is an empty vessel that gradually fills with time and information just as a reservoir fills with water. And just as a reservoir may fill slowly with clean or polluted water, so, too, the time that gradually builds up in us, second by second, ounce by ounce, may tell true stories or false, be clean or polluted. Polluted time is history that has been purposefully injected with false story, time that leads you away from understanding the truth of your country, the time in which you live, and your obligations as a citizen. If you knew that a president was lying about the necessity for a war, you would know that the patriotic thing to do is try to stop it, not fight in it.

So, imagine your life like a clean glass slowly being filled with dirty water, dirty time, time that clouds and obscures your vision of who you are, what is happening around you, and how you should act. Dirty time is not the result of the mixing of competing, relative truths. Dirty time results from the intentional polluting of story with falsehood in order to maintain power and enhance profit. Howard Zinn’s life was spent as a filter, straining and purifying our time, our history. His legacy is in the struggle for true history. True history is not radical, not leftist. Without that truth we drown in our own poisoned stories, the myths of our exceptionalism, the justifications for bailing out banks too big to fail and accepting wars for resources and empire promoted in the name of democracy. In false story we have no idea of how to behave to increase justice because justice becomes equated with power and profit and ruthlessness. We think that a true American hero might be John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan or Robert McNamara instead of Mother Jones or Eugene Debs or Jane Addams …. or Howard Zinn.