He was decent and reasonable. When you listened to him, he was actually a very funny guy and full of life. I am sorry he is gone.

Because I am not as decent a man as Howard Zinn: Hey Curmudgeon, “go fuck yourself.” If anyone deserves a Nuremburg Trial and hanging, its the warmongering Chimp, along with his puppet masters and stooges. This includes the one I quoted to you. When comparing Zinn and Bush, ask yourself “which one actually served in a war?” And then “which one started a war based upon lies and torture?”

@williamc: I think Krugman is a good candidate, but he seems to think he is a more “high-class numbers-guy” Zinn, and Eric Alterman imagines himself to be a hipster Zinn, but I don’t think that anyone out there, historian or otherwise, FEELS the people like Zinn did

I’m in graduate school for History right now and I can tell you why that’s the case: I grew up in a middle class family but, in comparison to my colleagues, I come from the poorest background. They are all good lefty-liberal types, but none of them (myself included) came from the working class or from poverty. So we can empathize with the Average Joe’s, whether through our reading or our research, but we can never sympathize because we never lived that life.

I’d guess most liberal arts departments are similar.

Zinn, however, was from that background.

This, alone in my mind, is why we need a new GI Bill-type education program. To get some diversity back into higher education.

@New Yorker:

Exactly.

I have to think that the massive Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, along with the Bush administration being as popular as an STD, had to be cathartic for him. It was as if he got confirmation that he wasn’t, in fact, crazy.

Hey, stop badmouthing STDs by comparing them to the Bush administration, I mean say what you will about STDs, at least they’re fun to catch.

They’re all pretty darned good.

may he RIP.

They that have the power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit Heaven’s graces,
And husband natures’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence …

And I second the notion that Michael Moore is about the only other lefty activist who deflates the rightwing narrative in a convincing fashion, yet he remains like Zinn peripheral to the mainstream media and the preferred storyline. “Ohh, that’s just Michael Moore (or Howard Zinn)” – as if ideologically placing someone diminishes the need to grapple with their criticism.

Seriously (and I’m looking to you, Winfield Stuck) mentioning that Obama has been far from energetic on the issue of Health Care Reform or saying that he could have laid out a clear agenda to Congress on what he wanted to see in HCR instead of taking a Medicare expansion off the table from the start and then playing coy about the public option and not leaning on Baucus to stop bleeding out slowly in front of the cameras is not the same as “abandoning” him or throwing him under the bus.

I don’t regret electing the guy and I think he was about the best we could have gotten for this term. But he’s not a progressive, and calling him one will not make magical progressive fairy dust shoot out his butt. The only thing that is shooting out his butt is a lackluster Senate bill that may do nothing more than add the portion of the population that’s dying and going bankrupt because it’s uninsured into the portion that’s dying and going bankrupt because it’s underinsured.

LOL, Republicans are sitting down on their hands on the line that if banks can afford to pay out bonuses, they can afford to pay back the loans the taxpayers gave them. And now they’re refusing to applaud a list of tax cuts. Explain to me their optics strategy on that one.

Exactly.

I have to think that the massive Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, along with the Bush administration being as popular as an STD, had to be cathartic for him. It was as if he got confirmation that he wasn’t, in fact, crazy.

I believe that all of the bloggers who contribute Edge of the American West are professors. C-SPAN once aired a program in which Eric Rauchway discussed his book about William McKinley’s assassination.

Anyway, there’s lots of Zinn’s out there. It’s just not the sixties, so they don’t push their way onto the bestseller list.

First, The People’s History was first published in 1980, not the 60s. Second, plenty of liberal/left people make the best seller lists—Michael Moore, Al Franken, etc.

What I meant, and most people caught the idea, was who is there standing up for “the little guy”, countering the endless bullshit? Moore and Franken are good calls.

James Lowenen is a great pop-historical heir to Zinn. Highly recommended if you haven’t read him.

Second:

[“believing in ordinary people”]… it’s reminiscent of the patronizing attitude of Marxism.

Is a joke, right? Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck—these guys are patronizing, but their endless fake celebration of the “regular guy” has resonance to an audience. Where on the Left is there the same commitment to the Little Guy anymore? Zinn wrote his book to address how the people—the average people—had to fight and claw to oppose the vested interests of wealth and privilege. Who is singing that song now? Marxist? Who cares? Sticking up for and believing in those without power—ordinary people—used to be something of a liberal value.