A Fitting Beginning
I saw this priceless Non Sequitur strip today and thought it would be perfect for the first Damek entry:
http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/2004/06/13/
It goes well with the book I happen to be reading at the moment, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. To plagiarize from Amazon’s descriptions a bit, Zinn’s approach to history is to say that the versions we are used to, with their narratives of national unity and progress, are a smoke screen disguising the ceaseless conflict between elites and the masses whom they oppress and exploit. One thing I am loving about it is that he isn’t arguing that there is any large, overly conscious conspiracy of the powerful against the weak. Rather, it’s enough just to assume that those in power do whatever they can to keep things they way they are, and, if possible, gain more power for themselves. One major way they do this is by manipulating language to keep the majority of the population from uniting.
It’s a very long book, but you can skip around and just read a few chapters, such as the one on the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution. The best part are the sources, consisting of the often-ignored texts from actual poor whites, slaves, and indians, as well as similarly ignored passages from letters and diaries of the wealthy and powerful illustrating their desire to keep the status quo and their awareness of what they were doing. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, hopefully that will set the tone a bit. I don’t intend this to be a political blog, but politics is part of who I am so it will crop up quite a bit.
