Howard Zinn? No, not an Astronaut

Professor No-It-All Gets Attitudinous! Answering Questions That You Never Actually Asked, Yet Ever So Helpfully!

Today’s lecture: I See Dead People. I See Dumb People (And Hear Them, Too)

            Gotta love those otherwise intuitively skeptical, pro-liberation listeners to KPFK (90.7 FM), the non-corporate alternative Pacifica network community radio station which features the BiblioFella on his modest weekly books show. The station is just now fundraising to stay on the air as the singular independent, reality-based community arts and public affairs media outlet in Southern California. Most KPFK supporters seem to at least try, heroically, to stay on that reality-based track, even as status quotidians, mystics, hucksters, New Agers and conspiracy theory types hoe their own row on the rest of the dial and NPR struggles to become a “mainstream” news source, abandoning its original premise of 1970s citizen-owned corrective to the media monopoly. 

              KPFK plays hours and hours of lectures and talks by — and interviews of — Noam Chomsky, Martin King, Harold Myerson, Arundhati Roy, David Corn, Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich, all practitioners of critical thinking — as against so much of the nonsense offered by the commercial news machine. 

             Still, as if fated with flying monkeys stuck on their backs, even some KPFK listeners cannot shake the ideological weight of the “spiritual” and the religious, especially in language and metaphor. The credulous — religious believers, “truthers,” miracle health cure disciples, positive thinkers — have little room in their brains or conversation for more than one metaphor, more than one book, their Book or construction or theory.  This figurative language-based ideology — often expressed in the assumption of a supernatural — shapes their vernacular and so, their thinking. Unthinking. All can be explained, if only we ignore, well, everything else and embrace some phrase, some rhetorical paradigm, usually exactly the opposite of what we mean. 

            Time, then, for some intellectual self-defense.  (Don't say I never gave you anything!) The tyranny of monotheism and other exclusivist thinking is the easiest controlling metaphor to hear, if only we will listen for it and talk back, interrupt — politely of course. But nobody talks back. Here’s your chance. Next time a religionist or spiritualist tells you he or she admires representative democracy, embracing it while they live here on Earth (about 78 years, average), ask them how we can believe them. Ask them, politely, how we can trust their commitment to representative democracy since they aspire to dwell after death in a place called Eternity (a lot longer!) not as voters or activists in a democracy but as subjects in a monarchy, with a lord and king telling them what to do. Hard to reconcile, no? 

            Yes, actually. Very hard. Meanwhile, back at KPFK, on Monday afternoon a caller to “Reality Check with Harrison,” a funny news and commentary show, reported that she’d learned Professor Howard Zinn (1922-2010) had died. But, no, she didn’t actually say that. Instead, she offered that he’d “left the planet.” Left the planet? In fact, he’d had a heart attack. It happens, to all of us, and I mourn his death.  

            Professor No-it-allovich’s favorite anecdotal aside: At a memorial service for his friend the poet Allen Ginsberg, the late Kurt Vonnegut began his remarks with this wonderfully droll and humane caution to his audience: “Please, please, please. Nobody else die!” Funny. (And, no Vonnegut is not so much late himself now as he is dead.  See actual photo, above!)

             So: Howard Zinn did not leave the planet. He is not visiting faraway galaxies, did not go to heaven, and will not come back as an animal or a spirit or a king. He lived, he struggled, and he was a really smart, empathetic and brave person. And then his body stopped living. I miss him.  

            Yuri, Alan, Valentina, John, Neil and Buzz “left the planet,” via the Vostok and Mercury and Apollo programs, but they came back. They were cosmonauts and astronauts. Howard Zinn? He was a radical historian. He was not an astronaut, and neither are you, friend. Next week:  Herbal Tea Partiers.