Howard Zinn: Why the U.S. May be Doomed

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Howard Zinn's 'A People's History of the United States' is must reading! It should be required in American secondary and high schools but most certainly won't be! It will remain anathema in states like Texas! Why is that the case? Simply --Zinn told the truth about our nation, it's history of genocide, aggressive war, income and wealth disparity, elitism, slavery, bigotry, growing distrust of one another, the need to 'feel good about ourselves' when maybe we ought NEVER to feel good about ourselves.

Back to Zinn who wrote:

There is evidence of growing dissatisfaction among the guards. We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn't care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government-combining elements of racism with elements of class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust for the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left.

--Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Texas may be 'the' case in point. It seems to have been the GOP 'lab' in which were tested 1) its radical, extremist, elitist, right wing ideology and 2) the means by which this ideology would be sold if not blatantly foisted upon an unsuspecting, often soporific public content to be easily distracted by the increasingly radical right wing, extremist media.

Texas had been Democratic for some 100 years! And then it was taken over by GOP cultists, a process begun in the middle 80s when at least one extremely conservative consultant --Paul Caprio of Chicago --engineered wins for the GOP even as Tom DeLay gerrymandered the state. Caprio's prominent client was State Sen Mike Richards representing the extremely conservative, elitist Houston suburb --Sugarland.

It was in Sugarland that reps from the Taliban met with Unocal and other pooh bahs of big oil just prior to 911, just prior to the U.S. attack and invasion of Afghanistan. Who has followed up on this? What payoffs were made to the Taliban? What has become of those representatives of the Taliban who journeyed to the suburbs of Houston to met with big oil and other right wing extremists? Recall --this is Bush/Perry country. This is the cancer from which sprang Dick Cheney's efforts to carve up the oil fields of Iraq.

The GOP takeover of Texas is even older. You may recall this date: November 22, 1963. Just prior to the tragic, cold-blooded murder of JFK, a slim, often slouching figure was photographed 'hanging around' beside the front entrance to the Texas School Book Depository Buiding on Elm St. This slouching figure is that of a man I came to know in Houston. His name is George H. W. Bush

The fact of that discontent is clear. The surveys since the early seventies show 70 to 80 percent of Americans distrustful of government, business, the military. This means the distrust goes beyond blacks, the poor, the radicals. It has spread among skilled workers, white-collar workers, professionals; for the first time in the nation's history, perhaps, both the lower classes and the middle classes, the prisoners and the guards, were disillusioned
with the system.

--Howard Zinn, A Peole's History of the United States

It's only gotten worse! People are desperate! There is no check on right wing mendacity, psychopathy, elitism, imperialism, greed! Anyone daring to oppose them --Dem or indie --are crushed. The right wing, the moneyed elites, make the rules and finance their stooges. The electoral systems favor the status quo because it takes BIG MONEY to even get into the race; ergo --everyone who runs --regardless of party affiliation --are but pawns of the vast right wing money and power machines.

---

---