Thoughts on the death of Howard Zinn

History is not for you.

History is not there to make you feel better about yourself, by telling you how glorious things were. History is not there to make you feel better about yourself by flattering you with fantasies of persecution that have been our obsession since the maenads rent Orpheus (how romantic!). Even Galileo had it coming. History is not there to teach you a fucking lesson, or to tell you how to behave. There may be things to learn from history, but the past is not the present, and here is not there, and everyone can find an analogy to flatter their politics if they look hard enough. If you learn anything from history, learn a little humility. History is there to puncture the idiot tales of power and glory (or innocent suffering, or noble stalwartness) your mother and your teacher and your country told you.

History is a novel without a plot. Actually, that's misleading, because the world of the novel does not exist outside of the slice that is recorded. All of history exists, all the time, but you can only see randomly selected segments. At best, history can have theme, though of course that is written in by the historians. Everything is complicated, contingent, ambiguous. The only thing as consistent as the wretched things we humans will do to each other is our ability to consider the strangest things as normal. History is there to leave you bewildered at the variety of human experience, and terrified at the inscrutability of the past.

History is not for you. You are for history. If you're lucky.