Comrades Zinn and Goff
February 15, 2008Comrades Zinn and Goff
From Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States:
All those histories of this country centered on the Founding Fathers and the Presidents weigh oppressively on the capacity of the ordinary citizen to act. They suggest that in times of crisis we must look to someone to save us: in the Revolutionary crisis, the Founding Fathers; in the slavery crisis, Lincoln; in the Depression, Roosevelt; in the Vietnam-Watergate crisis, Carter. And that between occasional crises everything is all right, and it is sufficient for us to be restored to that normal state. They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors,
That is bull.
Histories centered on the Founding Fathers teach Americans that every twenty years they ought to overthrow the government, in an individualistic-yet-communitarian effort.
