Editor and writer Paul Buhle’s new comic book version of history is out, and I recommend it as heartily as the classic A People’s History of the United States. Radical Left historian Howard Zinn’s classic has famously sold a million copies, been adapted and referenced and popularized.
A famous “The Simpsons” featured Marge reading it.
Now Buhle, who recently edited a graphic nonfiction book on the Wobblies, has taken some of the best of Zinn’s already accessible revisionist history text, added some elements of Zinn’s autobiography (You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train) and created A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation with illustrator Mike Konapacki. Finally, you can also go on line and watch excerpts of the comic book in a short (yes, animated) film narrator by sexy left-wing actor Viggo Mortenso.
I would have recommended this text anyway, but this morning’s news report adding magpies (yes, the birds) to the list of creatures who, like humans (some, anyway) can recognize themselves in a mirror further inspired my book report. Some of the best moments in American Empire arrive with Buhle’s retelling of Zinn’s own life story: working class kid, son of immigrants, WWII bombardier, Spellman College anti-racist activist. (Many high schools use A People’s History of the United States and if our students know one historian, it’s Howard Zinn!)
In the chapter titled “Street Smarts” young Howard learns class consciousness. After helping out his waiter father serving tables to rich people, Zinn of Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn joins an anti-fascist rally. A police billy club upside the head teaches him about demonstrations and dissent. “I woke up perhaps a half hour later with a painful lump on my head. From that moment on I was no longer a liberal — a believer in the self-correcting character of democracy,” he recalls. “I was a radical, believing something was fundamentally wrong with this country.”
It turns out that magpies, like dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants and humans (age two and older), pass the “mark” test — a crude but definitive mirror experiment of self-recognition — “an example of convergent evolution, the development of similiar traits in organisms with very different ancestries,” i.e. birds, mammals.
Importantly, Zinn recognizes his country for what it is. And he sees himself in the mirror that is Empire, USA. Maybe it’s not easy for some teachers to offer students the obvious and easily documented history of their own country as an imperialist force. Or is it? The rest of the world knows it. This new comic book helps. Go to YouTube to watch the movie.
