Sunday, December 10, 2017

Heroes for a New Age: On "The 'S' Word" by John Nichols



When I was in college, a friend let me borrow a copy of Zinn’s people’s history. In those pages I learned about Columbus treating the Arawak Indians worse than his dogs, but I also learned hope in the words of Eugene Debs and the millions that voted for him over several years.

It was part of history that just wasn’t part of the history they teach, the gloss over where in high school I wrote dates of things in my notebooks from sheets on the wall, or projections on the overhead. There was less about history as a dynamic process but a procession of dates that led to the end of history about 1993. Of course, I graduated high school in 2000 so there was triumphalism – the only global conflicts were based on figuring how to break apart the Soviet Bloc.

There is another history, and they have been deliberately forgotten from the pages of the history books that we use to teach the kids in school. Books like Zinn’s and Nichols’ are remedies for the History of the Victors. This book is for all the kids who look around and see injustice and inequality and ask what they can do to make it better. This book gives heroes that you may have read about on one line of text. Or you may even have spent a week with Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” in school, but you never knew he was a true revolutionary and his influence has ebbed and flowed, waxed and waned, and been misappropriated by those who want to grab his name and hide behind it. This book also gives you new heroes Like Victor Berger standing up for real free speech in times of fear when dissent was punishable by imprisonment. It also shines new light on heroes like Lincoln, and we can trace how his party went from a radical party of the people to receding to being a party of the powerful.

The only real drawback is that the book feels as if it was written for a time of socialism in ascendancy – Bernie Sanders gets positive notice here, but it predates the 2016 election and Bernie’s ultimately unsuccessful run for the presidency and Trump’s eventual election. This puts the movement on a different, more defensive footing reacting to the whims of the Tweeter-in-Chief. No matter. For every dusk there is dawn. We can look for hope in the rise of the DSA and leftists in real opposition and not quited by uncomfortable support of the capitalist party that is closer to the ideals of the left.

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