Howard Zinn, Historian and Optimist, 1922-2010

"No, it's not true!"

Those were my words of denial last night when I first heard Howard Zinn had died.

There's so much to say, I'm at a loss for words. He was a hero and a mentor and someone who helped bolster my belief that humanity is basically good.

"I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?)," Howard wrote a few days after the 2004 presidential election, "but I keep encouraging people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests."

He wore many hats and accomplished many things - historian, author, teacher, playwright, orator, television producer - but it was his unflappability that I hope people remember most.

In March 2008, colleague Chuck Rosina and I recorded Howard and Professor Irene Gendzier at a symposium on empire and war at Harvard Law School. During the question and answer period, a student criticized Irene and Howard as "naive and impractical" for proposing an immediate US troop withdrawal from Iraq and asking them why, after so many decades of activism, "have groups of your persuasion accomplished so very little?"

Howard seemed a little angry at this student's ignorance but kept his emotions in check. "So here's what you're saying, I think, 'we haven't changed policy, therefore we've failed, therefore there's something wrong with what we're saying.'"

"Well, you have to examine what you're saying," Howard continued, "and see if it's right or wrong. I examine what we're saying about withdrawal from Iraq and I conclude we're saying the right thing. And you say, 'but our policy hasn't changed.' And I point to the fact that any time you look at any movement that is going on, before it succeeds, it has failed.

And you can look at the Black people in the South after they've been doing this and that and the other thing, and nothing has changed and you say 'see, you must do something different; must be something wrong with your tactics, you failed.'

No, the tactics of protest and resistance and spreading knowledge and agitation and civil disobedience, those are the tactics that have been used historically, and are still being used. There are no glamorous new tactics, that are required in order to bring about change. What is required is persistance and patience. Not the patience of passivity but the patience of action, continued action."

Author, social critic, and comedian Barry Crimmins agreed to come on the radio show this Sunday to help Marc Stern and I remember and reminisce about Howard. Barry's taking this very hard, noting that Howard was a father figure to him. Barry also is writing about his friend and mentor, saying that one of Howard's most endearing features was his voice: he could scold governments and sooth his audience at the same time, his words always articulate and never shrill.

After a long hiatus away from the grind of the road, Barry told me he's considering touring again, to speak-out about the issues important to Howard and to fill some of the void that inevitably will be left by Howard's absence.

"I have never felt so despondent over the death of an 87 year old man," says Barry.

Sums it up for me too.

Hang In There Baby!

Like that poster cat hanging on for dear life, I’m going waaaay out on a limb to make a bold prediction: Martha Coakley will win the Senate election.

I’m not saying this is equally a sure thing as predicting Jack E. Robinson will lose any election in which he takes part.

But there’s a new paradigm developing in the minds of Republicans that their guy, Scott Brown, can turn a blue state red and I’m just not buying it.

[By the way, please read the editorial by OMB’s Jason Pramas who giggles at the way Repubs have co-opted the color traditionally associated with communists…]

Why am I prognosticating a Coakley win on Tuesday? Because I don’t believe you base a new paradigm on ONE poll.

Recently, a voter survey originating from Suffolk University in Boston put Brown slightly ahead in the race. Oh my gosh, you would have thought the editors at all the local TV and radio stations and networks such as CNN had lost their minds at the exact same moment. A collective hysteria, if you will, which gained momentum through the bloviating of pundits desperate for an upset to talk about.

After all, who’s going to win big money gambling on two great teams with close odds (the Colts and the Saints in the Super Bowl) meeting to decide the victor when an underdog (the Jets anybody?) can be elevated to the role of supreme spoiler?

Secondly, much of the discussion is being driven by television commercials for and against the two candidates and extensively paid for by political action groups from outside the state.

[By the way, congratulations to all the broadcast stations on all the revenue this election has generated for them in campaign ads. I hope we see an increase in hiring across the TV and radio industries.]

But short of Brown’s calling Coakley a puppet and Coakley accusing her opponent of being anti-choice, how much will voters remember of all the vitriol once they step into the booth? Very little is my guess.

And so we have the mythology of Scott Brown, languishing in obscurity in the Massachusetts state legislature, rising up to slay the Kennedy mystique (a bit of a mythology itself) and the “in the back pocket of the Democratic machine” state Attorney General Coakley.

The problem with this theory of Republican ascension is that the vast majority of voters in MA belong to the ranks of the unenrolled; nearly half of all registered voters in fact. And trying to predict what they will do is like figuring out what kind of a season Daisuke Matsusaka will have.

It’s true that during the 1990’s and early aughts, Massachusetts voters installed Republican Governors and in the legislature, overwhelmingly Democrats. Former Governor Michael Dukakis has said he believes this phenomenon came from voters who believed one party should keep the other in check. But in the aftermath of the social and economic devastation wrought by the Cheney/Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress, has there been any evidence that independents are ready to vote for gridlock rather than maintain Democratic control of the Senate?

Not at all…

Are people angry at and scared of double digit unemployment, tens of thousands of foreclosures, and cuts to education, welfare, and municipal services of all stripes. Yes, of course. But are they thrilled that federal stimulus money is filtering down to cities and towns and non-profits doing all sorts of recovery work in neighborhoods, and that the cost, for example, of having COBRA – the federal program that guarantees health insurance for families of people who lose their jobs – was slashed by two thirds by the Obama administration and recently extended for another 18 months?

They should be…

In this humble opinion, voters in Massachusetts are more sophisticated than either party gives them credit for. Citizens will remember that if recent history teaches them anything, it’s that members of the party of big business (the elephants) constantly scream bloody murder about taxes and yet gainfully accept subsidized health benefits and all the perks that taxes provide them: like police and fire protection.

Oh, and the two wars the Republicans have been saying we can’t do without for the past decade.

Finally, if you live in the Bay State, don’t forget to actually cast a vote on Tuesday; regardless of the weather. And don’t fall prey to the trap into which the professional gamblers would have you stumble: that a confident “poker” face should cause you to fold your cards.