Big Mike: A Zinn Meditation

Truth, whatever the hell that is, is a commodity today. It’s sold in supermarkets. Chicagoans call their supermarkets — the food kind — Dominick’s and Jewel. Here in Bloomington, we call them Kroger and Marsh. Everybody professes loyalty to one or the other. So it is with Truth supermarkets, only the stores are a bit more numerous and they go by names like The O’Reilly Factor and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Each of them peddles The Truth. Their competitors, they say, are either pawns of some tyrannical colossus, just plain dumb, or flat out liars. So you make your choice. Dominick’s or Jewel. O’Reilly or Olbermann. If they sell it, it must be good. And true.

Me? I’ve always shopped in any store that had the best prices, the crisper lettuce, the redder meats. I go to both Kroger and Marsh. Yet when it comes to news and an historical perspective, I stay away from the supermarkets altogether. Even if O’Reilly, improbably, served up what seemed to be a palatable tomato, the rest of his selection is so rotten that I’d have to think twice. And Olbermann seems hell bent on selling anything O’Reilly doesn’t, even if it’s not edible.

Truth consumers, though, are fiercely loyal. If O’Reilly utters it, it must be true. And if Olbermann names you The Worst Person in the World, then there it is. I suppose people need some illusion of stability, a pretend foundation upon which they can build their beliefs.

Maybe it all started back in elementary school when our history teachers told us fairy tales about America. This country, they fibbed, always welcomed the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses. George Washington couldn’t tell a lie and Abe Lincoln always returned a penny. This nation only ever used its military might to advance liberty and democracy around the world. And every single one of those men who donned Union blue was willing to shed his blood so Negro slaves could be free.

What kind of idiots did those teachers think we were? In our defense, we were only nine and ten when they fed us all that silliness. We’re grown now but most of us still want to lap it up.

One guy who famously wouldn’t lap it all up was Howard Zinn. The old bird died this week and that’s a shame. He was one of the last of the real liberals. What passes for liberal these days would have been the man in the gray flannel suit in an earlier day. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Puh-leaze! They’re considered liberals only because Newt Gingrich and his gang stole the term and turned it into a pejorative. If Gingrich, Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, or any of the others ever came face to face with a real liberal, they’d suffer the vapors.

Zinn was no softie. He served as an Army Air Force bombardier in World War II and even was one of the first to drop napalm on civilians. Unlike chicken-hawks Rove and Dick Cheney, he saw the ugliness of war firsthand. He fought because he wanted to defeat fascism. That experience turned him against war. War, that is, as fought by the American empire after World War II. War in some far off jungle against a shadowy enemy that had no real quibble with this holy land.

War, in other words, waged by a big bully.

Zinn was always on the side of the little guy. He saw himself as a little guy even though he spent his life in college lecture halls. The more he studied, the more he delved, the more Zinn came to the conclusion that from the beginning America was a nation of a few big bullies pushing around a lot of little guys.

His crowning achievement, the book “A People’s History of the United States,” occupies a proud and prominent place in my bathroom library. In it, Zinn argues that Christopher Columbus was a homicidal sadist and Abe Lincoln was a racist. I don’t believe that these assertions and many other such controversial pronouncements in the book are The Truth. But they all represent truth — with a small T

Abraham Lincoln, the man who wrestled with his own feelings that brown human beings were intrinsically inferior to white ones yet still found it morally imperative to wage war against slavery, is a far more fascinating and honest character than the dope who chased some dame down on foot for three miles to return a penny to her. Zinn’s Lincoln is a human being.

My sixth-grade history teacher — just like the loudmouths in The Truth supermarkets — gave me cardboard cutouts.

The choirs are filled up but now there’s an opening for a new soloist. I hope someone out there picks up where Howard Zinn left off.