Howard Zinn, cont'd.

Bob Herbert's column ends with a line that I regard as very true. "That Professor Zinn [based on his work as an activist and a historian] was considered a radical says more about the society he lived in than about him."

I could not agree more. This was a column I felt compelled to comment on because NPR had invited David Horowitz to say something in remembrance of Zinn upon his death. It basically said that Zinn had a chip on his shoulder about the American story and wrote an ideological tract that appealed only to the fringe left in our society. I was not the only one irritated by NPR's editorial judgement. Friday, "All Things Considered" was forced to read many of the views of people like me that saw this as idiotic and incompetent journalism, not to mention grossly unfair.

Maybe I've misread Benson's account of Herbert's column because Benson does point out how often our media are content to skim the superficial surface of our public life, not digging deeper beneath the lingo that covertly stigmatizes certain groups and certain interests without pausing to suggest a critical parsing of the words. For example, the Republican use of the phrase "tax relief for hardworking Americans." This Frank Luntz special is code for demonizing efforts to get the rich to pay their fair share of the tax burden (see my post related to Gail Collins's column on Saturday). The figures from my comments come from the AFL-CIO and Nancy Peolosi's office--a 5.6% surtax on incomes above 1 million generates $400 billion in revenue, enough to create four million jobs, and reduce the unemployment rate to 6% from its current 10%. Even though the GDP grew at a 5.6 rate in the last quarter of 2009, it was mostly due to replacing inventories so no new jobs were created. In order to get unemployment back to where it was before the Mega-recession, we'd need four consecutive years of this growth rate. In short, what has been done to fix the economy and fiscal mess is wholly inadequate. Now, why won't Speaker Pelosi or Pres Obama actually go forward with this proposal to ask to rich to pay their fair share after they've basically had a free ride for three decades? Why won't political journalists dig deeper than the Obama visit to the GOP's "lion's den" in Baltimore as if that televised exchange somehow was the national equivalent in politics of the Super Bowl? It was a pure spectacle, and you can expect each party is culling through the tape to find sound bytes and images for its 2010 Midterm ads already. But what if this is just the media's version of politics?

This is what the Capstone needs to be asking. What if The State of the Union, the showdown in Baltimore, the dust-up on Howard Zinn's death -- what if all of it is a diversionary spectacle designed to sell a journalistic product but also to keep the masses from asking the big questions? The Radicals we read about in Week One would say the same thing that Herbert did about Zinn's marginalization as a "radical." Such says more about our society than about those so stigmatized. What might lie beneath the surface of such gossipy dust-ups that warrants closer, deeper scrutiny before we pull ourselves out of the hole we're in? We'll take a stab at this in tomorrow night's class.