A few weeks ago, a friend told me about a book he came across in a bookstore entitled "A Patriot's History of the United States," no doubt a title in response to Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." I rolled my eyes, then did some casual researching and found that the book not only exists, but comes with the cheery subtitle "From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror"--to me, an unintentionally hilarious but then disturbingly provocative postscript, in that it draws some unwanted but weighty connections between the two events. For those of us who have delved into the dark waters of Zinn-esque "revisionism," or who have a capacity for irony, we know the second part of the title might as well read "From the Slaughter of Brown People to the Slaughter of Brown People with Better Weapons."
This strays from my point. While conservatives would anxiously point to what I just wrote as evidence of how books like Zinn's teach us to be "anti-American" or hate our heritage, really, Zinn's book, like many academic writings or even documentaries that get labeled as "liberal" or "socialist" after the fact, was originally conceived as simply another perspective of history. A story that wasn't told. Is that inherently political? Is telling any sort of non-traditional narrative somehow a naturally liberal endeavor?
The issue gets more complicated in the next example. The other night, when I told a friend from home that part of my job was to coordinate the screenings of documentaries about Iraq on college campuses across the country, he asked "But the ones you're showing probably have a liberal slant, right?" I thought for a second, and then replied no, they don't. This is a marker both of how totally horrible situation in Iraq is and how totally warped the partisanship in this country is--that if someone goes to Baghdad and just points a camera at what's going on (anything, everything, whatever), and then somehow released it as a film in America, it would be accepted (on both sides) as a film with a liberal bias. Does that mean the left has a monopoly on the truth of what's going on in Iraq? Maybe currently, but ultimately these films are documents first, and political second.
The conclusion I reached is that many academics, authors, and filmmakers attempt to study or tell stories that have not been told. They are merely filling in gaps, in our post-modern era. There is (usually) no immediate political goal. The goal is enlightenment. Many conservatives, on the other hand, engage in a post-post-modern exercise by refuting the revisionists with a neo-traditionalist narrative--one that actually owes more to the revisionists than the original texts, given the rage and embitterment that the Howard Zinns engendered in the "patriotic" authors and filmmakers, that they carry with them and incorporate in their pseudo-intellectual endeavors.
In all my confused, muddled writing about these disparate "Histories" of the United States, if I can make one thing clear, it's this: it's a sad day when two authors deliberately draw a grand distinction between "the People" and "the Patriots."
But it's an illuminating one. For all their rhetoric about individual liberty (usually in the context of an opposition to intrusive government), conservatives like the authors of "A Patriot's History..." seem to be content to let old powerful white men (the Patriots?) tell the stories. However, old powerful white men told us a story about Iraq, and now we're stuck there.
The good news is that the people are starting to tell their stories about Iraq too.