Zinn & Salinger
Connected by nothing except the coincidence of their deaths.
Who better to remark honestly on the legacy of Howard Zinn, but former leftist extraordinaire, now echt-conservative, David Horowitz?
The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave.
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Sure enough the bottom-feeders at FAIR pounced on my bite and accused me of spitting on Zinn’s grave. So here’s what I said that was cut from the interview. I’m not putting quotes around it because it’s from memory, but it’s pretty close to some of my remarks and captures the sense of others:
No one should celebrate the death of another human being unless they are child-molesters or murderers. Howard Zinn lived to a ripe old age (87), and bad human being that he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him an extra few years; he’s done about as much damage as he could.
Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain. Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.
When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.
Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn’s life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.
UPDATE: David Horowitz has decided that he came down a bit too harshly on Zinn. The above text is revised to remove the description of Zinn as a “wicked man.”
Got it, David. Subtract “wicked”. We’ll accept the rest as written.
Just a couple of words on J.D. Salinger.
There’s been a curious trend among some obituaries and remembrances to denigrate Salinger’s contribution to American letters, pretty much summing it up as “overrated”. It’s fine if you didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye. I did. I think I still do (it’s been a while). Obviously, it speaks more toward the adolescent point of view, but so what? Are we supposed to reject The Old Man and the Sea because we are neither old nor a fish? Salinger nailed the character, and I think made him universal. We all reject “phonies”, we all walk around barely able to comprehend or tolerate what we absurdly call the world. And if Holden Caufield is an unreliable narrator and a bit of a whiner, have you listened to yourself lately?
But though Catcher may be his best known work, among writers I know, Nine Stories is his most influential. If you’ve ever written a short story (I’ve written several, started quite a few more), you can see how Salinger does what he does, but you can’t see how to do it yourself, short of copying it shamelessly. I imagine other amateur artists feeling the same way when looking at a Mozart score or a Raphael fresco.
I don’t think it can be stressed enough that Salinger was a post-war writer. No one wanted to acknowledge the damage that had been done to the psyches of the young men who survived almost four years of war, whether in the meat-grinder of combat or merely in the vise of military bureaucracy. I feel the sounds of mortars and anti-aircraft fire echo throughout Salinger’s work, even when war is never mentioned. His reputed embrace of Buddhism and his rejection of the world fit into this narrative, it seems to me. Catch 22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), two seminal works about the absurdity and futility of the war, were written more than a decade later; even The Naked and the Dead (1948) couldn’t beat out “Bananafish” (published in the New Yorker 1/31/48).
I can’t say I embrace the rest of his work similarly. Franny & Zooey began to lose me, and I still look at Seymour and Carpenters on my shelf with a mixture of guilt and disappointment. With his retreat from the world and into the Glass family archives, Salinger left me behind. Not everybody, but me and many others.
Some have raised the issue of the importance of Catcher to several famous psychopaths, Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley most notably. I suppose then we have to condemn everything from the Bible to the Koran to Jodie Foster for similar culpability.
Again: not your cup of tea, don’t sip. But a huge influence—on writers, actors, singers, you name it. And a great writer. I feel I have to say.
