According to D'Ambrosio, Strummer saw this all coming. "Certainly, one can say that activists like Strummer are being vindicated by the rise of not only the religious right but of the far right, which seems to be more fascist in its tendencies. This underscores the importance of creating political popular culture that reaches many rather than a marginalized subculture that reaches only the few. With the Clash, Strummer was able to create music that was both entertaining and vitally political, message music that moved beyond the punk world and into the pop world, serving as a counterpoint to the dominant right-wing ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan. And now that Bush will serve a second term, there is more of a need for Strummer's voice. He would be doing the best he could to initiate something to challenge what the Bush regime is doing. When I met him in April 2002, he was terribly distressed about the state of the world and Bush's efforts at the time to march toward war and further destabilization. If he were alive today, he would be writing the new soundtrack to struggle, offering us an alternative to what Bush is doing."

"Voices of a People's History of the United States"
by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
 736 pages
Seven Stories Press
Order from Powell's

"You can't hide from the truth/
Because the truth is all there is."
-- Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Truth"

Speaking of struggle, it should be conventional wisdom by now that the birth of America was no tea party, regardless of what went down in Boston. For every lily-white Republican that plasters 14 American-flag stickers to his ozone-chewing SUV, there are thousands of descendants of Native Americans, slaves, union members, leftists and more who carry the burn marks of America's melting pot across their bodies. Not that we need to start the whole thorny reparations machine up and running; rather, a consensual acknowledgment of factual American history, and all its Manifest Destiny warts, would do fine, thanks. After all, as Rakim rapped in "The Ghetto," "It ain't where ya from, it's where ya at."

Problem is, too many Americans don't even know where they're "at," literally speaking. They think that Columbus "discovered" America rather than Salvador, and that slave-owner George Washington never told a lie. It's just part of our national pastime of creating histories and cultures on the fly, what literary critic Frank Lentricchia called the "desire for the universal third person ... a new self [for] a New World." No one's blameless in this endeavor.

So high schools of the United States should not wait one second longer to add as compelling and indispensable a book as Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's "Voices of a People's History of the United States" to their reading lists. Which might sound like a radical move, but only if you think that the hungry knowledge-seekers that populate the schools of America can't handle the truth. In a country where a secretary of education, the woefully inept Rod Paige, calls the National Education Association a "terrorist organization" in the frenetic midst of a war on terror -- while shelling out a cool quarter million to Armstrong Williams to pump up his hamstrung No Child Left Behind program -- Zinn and Arnove's potent collection is a much-needed wake-up call.

Plus, as Zinn told me in a recent interview, American schools are changing anyway -- for the worse. "There is great pressure on the educational system to put the history of this country in a good light," Zinn argues, "to omit the lies and massacres that accompanied American expansion. A few years ago, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution asking that history be taught in such a way as to inspire patriotism. The distortion of the past always comes from a point of view about the present, and a fear that the new generation will be skeptical of present official policy."

"Our hope is the books like this will break through the solid wall of super-patriotism and give young people a realistic view of their government," Zinn says. "They should understand that the interests of those in the White House are not the same as the interests of the citizenry, and that there is an admirable tradition of resistance to authority."

The author is just as frustrated by Rod Paige's ridiculous statement about the NEA (which Morphizm brutally satirized in a comic strip here, receiving much hate mail in the process, for those who want to check it out). "It reminds me of the Cold War '50s," Zinn confides, "when Congressman Himmel Velde of Illinois opposed funding mobile libraries for rural areas on the grounds that education led to communism." Zinn's earlier book "Declarations of Independence" features this mind-boggling quote from Velde that No Child Left Behind cheerleaders might want to chew over while they're busy signing checks to Armstrong Williams: "Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is education of the people."

Let freedom ring.

Look, if research skills are still a necessity for any good college student, then this book is a great place to learn why. Those studying Columbus would do well to brush up on their Bartolome de Las Casas, who ably took notes while Columbus enslaved the unlucky natives he happened to come into contact with. Those infatuated with the ideological purity of the Founding Fathers -- namely, every so-called Fox News expert -- would learn a couple things from Benjamin Banneker, the child of a freed slave whose letter to Thomas Jefferson (who owned 83 slaves, by the way) illustrates the stark hypocrisy of a country that rebelled so violently and successfully against British oppression only to oppress, in turn, an entire race.

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