Re: From Your Friends at Dissent

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 4/5/2004 10:34:39 AM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I am negotiating with an agent now.  She is insisting that I make everything "dumber" to make the work popular.  To do so would require opening me up to the kind of questions that Zinn is getting -- but it is an art form to be able to do that. Doug Henwood has been able to write about economics at a popular level. I have not.  Nor have most of us. Comment   History happens and historians to one degree or another become propagandists of ideas that inspire. The Civil War in the American Union was a very traumatic event involving a multiplicity of factors, clash of individual wills, personality factors and sectional interest. How this story is told by the historian depends not simply on the individuals point of view but the audience he/she seeks to reach.   The same applies to the scholars of economics. The art or skill in constructing the beauty of the story can be elusive as each generation shifts in its ideas of beauty.   The people of the American Union are not passive actors who accept the "legitimacy" of the national, state and local governments as such.  This of course implies a different vision of the history process. All of American history is marked by profound social struggle and upheaval as various regions of this huge country passed through a given stage of economic, political and social development.   Without question our history is written on a parchment of genocide in blood ink.  On the other hand we are talking about very real millions of peoples seeking to eke out a better life for themselves and their children within specific boundaries of possibilities. "Boundary of possibilities" becomes an arena of enormous strife for the individual author.   American society is in continuous rebellion against itself as it exits at a given moment.  From the factory worker who tells another worker "to take it easy, we are not trying to do all the work," to the professor that challenges a given orthodoxy to open the mind of his students to new possibilities, to the soft ware programmer that resists the corporate demand to simply and dumb down his work in pursuit of profits to the nurse that is scolded for spending "too much time" with patients, to the executive that "blows the whistle" on harmful corporate practices.   In my particular version of history the concept "legitimacy" is overpowered by possibilities in all is subjective pursuits. I would argue that the withholding of "legitimacy" is the reason half the population refuse to vote. History that is not wedded to personal narrative has always been a difficult concept of me. The personal narrative often appears as the vision of the individual writer.       Melvin P.