Howard Zinn: Obama will Need Demonstrations, Protest, Letters, Petitions, to Do the Right Things

[G_j]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/130949/howard_zinn%3A_obama_%22is_going_to_need_demonstrations_and_protest_and_letters_and_petitions%22_to_do_the_right_things/

Howard Zinn: Obama "Is Going to Need Demonstrations and Protest and Letters and Petitions" to Do the Right Things
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 12, 2009.

The author of A People's History of the United States discusses his newest project and why dissent is as important as ever.
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 12, 2009.

The author of A People's History of the United States discusses his newest project and why dissent is as important as ever.


Last month in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to attend a performance of Voices of a People's History, the groundbreaking show conceived by historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, and Anthony Arnove, co-editor of Voices of a People's History and author of books including Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New Press). Blending historical narrative with spoken word -- and some spunky bluegrass performed by the San Francisco-based Stairwell Sisters -- it was an event that, in one brisk hour, celebrated the power of protest and made manifest the best traditions of radical American thought, creativity, and dissent.

The show is brilliant for its simplicity: Take a handful of famous American texts (and several more obscure ones), some movies stars with radical politics (and a few non-actors), mix in some rabble-rousing music, and make sure the audience includes students, activists, and people who believed in hope and change before Obama came along. In San Francisco, the result was Diane Lane, playing writer and activist Mary Ellen Lease, crying, "We want the foreclosure system wiped out!" to thunderous applause, while reciting a speech called "Wall Street Owns the Country" (circa 1890). It was Kerry Washington deliver Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" -- first spoken in 1851 at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio -- with ferocity and sass. It was "W" star Josh Brolin play the socialist Eugene Debs, hip-hop artist Boots Riley give Muhammad Ali's speech against the Vietnam War, Benjamin Bratt, as Sgt. Camilo Mejia deliver his 2005 statement on GI resistance to the war in Iraq. The non-actors in the cast were equally impressive; Civil rights attorney Renee Maria Saucedo paid homage to the Latino youth of the country -- and of Mission High School, where the show took place -- as she delivered Chicana activist and writer Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez's "Be Down With the Brown!" (Martinez herself was in the audience and got a standing ovation.) And union organizer Clarence Thomas, who powerfully embodied the spirit and wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. in "Beyond Vietnam," also tapped into the urgency of people's hope in Barack Obama -- and what's at stake -- when he delivered Langston Hughes's poem, "The Ballad of Roosevelt." ("I am tired of waiting on Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. Damned tired of waiting on Roosevelt. And a lot of other folks was hungry and cold, done stopped believing what they had been told by Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. Because the pot is still empty and the cupboard is still bare and you cannot build a bungalow out of air."

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[Taverner]

1. Sounds interesting, but run on sentences (paragraphs?) like that give me a headache