I suppose it's fitting that on the same day we sat down to listen to a president who counted Goldman-Sachs among his biggest campaign donors gripe about a government that has catered to big business at the expense of everyone else, we also lost Howard Zinn.His detractors will cheer the death of a zany polemicist, a Marxist reactionary who cherry-picked primary sources in order to craft a narrative upon which he'd decided long before researching.
I'm going to mourn the passing of a brilliant mind who time and time again was on the right side of history. From the civilian atrocities at the end of World War II, to American civil rights, to Vietnam, to the modern feminist movement, to global capitalism, to the Iraq War, the man nailed it with greater frequency than any other contemporary American historian.
Zinn was combative and uncompromising, often at the expense of the message he was trying to convey. But that didn't make him any less correct.
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