An Enjoyable Bromide

This book is a necessary book, not because the reader should agree with all of Howard Zinn's ideas--he occasionally drifts off into ranting, especially in his chapter on the Clinton presidency---but because Zinn poses explanations for events in US history that are plausible. The idea that the top one percent of US society has since the inception of this country held its position by maintaining divisions among those below it makes sense given the current distribution of wealth in this country.

What strikes me as unconvincing is his claim that the slightly privileged (mostly middle-class whites) have been used as a buffer against potential concerted action by society's losers. He provides evidence that suggests that this might be the case (uncited eveidence, as this is a history written for a wide audience), but I didn't see conclusive proof of the grand conspiracy against the downtrodden. In many cases, Zinn quotes three of four people whose cases might mean they were victims of calculated exploitation.

The value of this book, in my eyes, is as a corrective of the great men, great country interpretation of US history that I was fed in middle school and high school. Every society, after all, is made up of a small minority of winners and a mass of losers. What Zinn does is that, by strongly suggesting that the US is no different than elsewhere, he deflates the notion that this is a special land.

The culture that might be considered an anomoly to what he sees in the US was the pre-Columbus Native American culture, which held most everything in common and was ignorant of monetary culture. So in a sense, Zinn weeps for a lost, ireetrievable past.

This a book that every educated person should know about and enjoy reading--for Zinn is a fine writer. It needs to be part of the discussion of US history.

The End of the Novel

There was a time, once, when a novelist’s examination of, and rumination over, the mind of her subject made some sense, but no longer. Tolstoy devoted hundreds of pages to the slow, painful, psychological demise of Anna Karenina, for example, as did Dostoevsky toward Raskolnikov. I am now thinking of Theodor Dreiser’s account of the slow descent ofHurstwood in Sister Carrie.
The point is not that the writer’s trade has diminished or that style has gone awry; it is a crisis of a poverty of subject. That is to say, a media-addled, morally indifferent subject simply isn’t worthy of anyone’s time—on the writing or reading end of things. There is simply no depth to the recent personality—why would there be? Gameboy and immediate gratification? The novel is the improper form for such an audience. The novelist should meet them on their own terms—the 140-character (as it currently stands) snippet of comment. The nuanced commentary is decaying fruit.
I was once a research librarian at a major university. In 1999, I found myself aghast at the indifference of graduate students to the possibilities that lay within the stacks. Whenever I fielded a question from a graduate student and pointed them to the dark, mystery-ridden floors of stacks of books that loomed behind me, “Nah,” they would reply, “Way back there? Anything on the web?” With that, we would make our way, the grad student waddling some distance behind me, toward the bank of computers that lined the walls of the coffee shop/library. I can only imagine what the students are like today.
People seeking the quick out, the immediate solution, are not worth study. Why would anyone write about them?