Always Look On The Bright Side Of Death

Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up.  I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something.  Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery.  People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap.  Who wants flowers when you’re dead?  Nobody.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Just a month into 2010 and two famous writers close to my 16 year old heart, Erich Segal and J.D. Salinger, and a radically leftist anarchist Howard Zinn have passed away. I was delighted to see an overwhelming response to their deaths on Facebook and Twitter and even though it is no secret that Segal and Salinger have global readership, I am more than sceptical whether everyone who tweeted about it actually read Howard Zinn.  I hope these people jumping on the RIP Howard Zinn bandwagon fully appreciate that Zinn was anti-war and an anarchist and what that means in today’s world. You can’t be swearing allegiance to Zinn and then supporting the US-led war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You can’t appreciate what he did for the rights of black people in America and then ignore the apartheid in Palestine. You can’t be passionate about a cause espoused by famous dead leftists and ignore the injustices in your own backyard. If you can tweet about the former, you can tweet about the latter. In Zinn’s own words “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

Instead of mourning the death of Howard Zinn, I choose to be grateful for the existence and persistence of the likes of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Norman Finkelstein, to name a few. Out of these I urge people to read Finkelstein especially because he’s not appreciated enough and the way his struggle is going, it won’t be a surprise if he kills himself soon.

Having been hit by news of so many deaths in this month, there is some solace in Monty Python urging us to always look on the bright side of death.