History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

If you’ve read Karl Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the most important line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx–“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”–is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both world wars—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.

Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus. According to Zinn, those following the seafaring Italian to the New World did so for one reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property,” maintains the octogenarian scribe.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, he portrays the American Founding as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights are merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately results in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. The same thing, according to Zinn, caused both slavery and emancipation: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as how it allegedly served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University emeritus professor of history writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another diversion to delay the revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on the war in which he served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks:  “[W]as it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon the United States. While Zinn awkwardly excuses the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

The reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire took its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. They are now America’s chief economic rivals, not its colonies.

The profit motive certainly is central to numerous major events in American history. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort in 1848, for example, undeniably stands as the primary reason—alongside the favorable outcome of the Mexican War—for the subsequent population explosion in California. The Gold Rush is one of several historical occurrences that conform to Zinn’s overall thesis. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. For every major figure or event whose catalyst was economic interests, scores were sparked by some unrelated concern.

To question Zinn’s method of analyses is not to say that economics does not influence events. It is to say that one-size-fits-all explanations of history are bound to be wrong more than they are right. History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, ideologues choose theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. By his last month in office, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from late 1982 until mid 1990—historians prefer to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author’s general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he used his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses.

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn highlights immigrants that went into professions such as ditch-digging and prostitution, he excludes success stories like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during 1991’s Gulf War.

How do readers learn about U.S. history with all these omissions? They don’t.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn.

It’s telling that “The Twilight Zone’s” recurring character is not an A-list hearthrob but the diminutive, gap-toothed, akimbo-eared Rod Serling, the show’s chief writer. Rocky Balboa’s trainer, otherwise known as that bow-legged villian of Gotham, is the closest thing one gets to an actor associated with “The Twilight Zone.” Even the theme music steals the limelight from the actors.

A few years ago, I purchased the 28-disc “complete, definitive collection” spanning all five of the show’s seasons. I’m on season five, and I generally watch late on weekend nights after imbibing. The benefits to this are twofold: first, my imagination is more malleable then and, second, it enables me to enjoy the episodes a second time around without deja vu.

After purchasing the series, a friend recommended “The Obsolete Man” as his favorite episode in this his favorite series. Rather than watch sequentially, I skipped to that Burgess Meredith-starring episode. “The Howling Man,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “The Invaders,” and “To Serve Man” are also well done, but “The Obsolete Man” may be my favorite now too. Its set is spartan, the costumes drab, and the budget that of a high school play. Who needs CGI when you have Rod Serling writing the script?

Thirty years before that anonymous man stood up to a tank in Tiananmen Square, Burgess Meredith yelled “The emperor has no clothes!” at the state in “The Obsolete Man.”  Life imitates art. Our hero, Mr. Romney Wordsworth, standing before his prosecutor/judge/executioner, vehemently defends individuality against the dystopic conformity of the total state, books against their burners, and God against the hubristic men who would play Him as they deny Him. “You cannot erase God with an edict!” Wordsworth boldly informs the kangaroo court. His interrogator responds, “The state has no use for your kind.” It’s telling that writers would make the hero not a warrior or a saint, but a librarian.

Though Serling was a man of the Left, so much so that he returned the good cheer of his neighbor Ronald Reagan with contempt, several “Twilight Zone” episodes, particularly “The Obsolete Man,” feature distinctly conservative themes. This is true of a few “Doctor Who” episodes (“The Sunmakers,” “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”) and numerous sci-fi films (“Serenity,” “The Island,” “The Invasion”). This certainly doesn’t make the genre inherently conservative; if anything, science fiction tends to lamely absorb the liberal shibboleths of its age (see [hear?] the Cold War moral equivalence of ’50s radio sci-fi) as it imaginatively anticipates the future of science, technology, government, etc.

Other writers have advanced the idea that “Star Trek” and “The X-Files” echoed conservative themes. I find these arguments interesting but ultimately unpersuasive. There’s an impulse to read one’s politics into what one finds aesthetically pleasing. This is ultimately not as harmful as imposing one’s politics on one’s artistic tastes. But it is still a form of mild delusion. Propaganda isn’t art. And good art generally transcends politics.

Fifty years after the first “Twilight Zone,” one is struck by the dearth of writer-driven shows on television. Visitors to the 500-channel wasteland find an abundance of reality television, celebrity news, and game shows–or a combination of all three formats. Is there a place on the twenty-first-century idiot box for intelligently written programs? Rod Serling’s villains often targeted men of letters. A half-century later, television executives have marked writers as “obsolete men.” We are all living in the “Twilight Zone.”

Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan had something to do with this. So too did the overlooked Captain Lou Albano, who, along with Cyndi Lauper–a live-action cartoon character as unusual as Albano–launched the pop-culture non sequitur ”Rock and Wrestling Connection” that strangely catapulted rather than killed the careers of its participants.

Just as Albano’s partnership with Lauper brought wrestling from UHF to network television, it transformed Albano from in-ring thespian to mainstream actor on such ’80s-era fare as Miami Vice, Wise Guy, and The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Today, I remember Captain Lou at the American Spectator, and dangle rubber bands from my face in his honor. Often imitated, never duplicated, Captain Lou Albano rest in piece.

I hate getting a song stuck in my head. This is especially true when the song is “I Saw Her Again Last Night” and the reason it’s stuck there is because I just heard the news that Papa John Phillips raped his drugged-out daughter Mackenzie the night before her wedding. The “One Day at a Time” star responded by partaking in a consensual relationship with him. At least that’s Mackenzie Phillips’s twisted story.

As much as one might want to believe that Mackenzie’s drug abuse discredits her story, one is reminded how much Papa John’s drug abuse credits it. If ever a man’s demeanor vindicated Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ admonition, Papa John’s did. When he was sober, he was still stoned. 

The daughter of the Mamas and the Papas leader remembered, “One night dad said, ‘We could just run away to a country where no one would look down on us. There are countries where this is an accepted practice. Maybe Fiji.’”

Maybe not.

Without John Hughes, would there have been a 1980s? The filmmaker and screenwriter died of a heart attack while walking Thursday in Manhattan. For the uninitiated, he wrote National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off–directing several of those films as well.

Memories of Hughes’s films are as likely to be audio as visual: The Psychedelic Furs, The Smiths, and Simple Minds were among the acts introduced to a wider audience through Hughes’s sonically-savvy films.

No John Hughes, no Molly Ringwald; no Molly Ringwald, no 1980s–it’s pretty simple. But when the 1980s ended, so did John Hughes. He hadn’t directed a movie since 1991, and his work as a screenwriter since his golden age had been spotty. Proof that John Hughes will be missed in death comes from the fact that John Hughes was so missed for the last two decades of his life. The void in high school movies that transcend the high school audience is so enormous in part because John Hughes stopped directing movies. From Justin to Kelly? She’s All That? Dude, Where’s My Car? They don’t make teen films like they used to–at least how John Hughes used to.

You are realizing your age today if you grew up in the 1970s or ’80s. Farrah Fawcett, whose iconic image was as ubiquitous on the bedroom walls of American teenage boys as Kim Il Sung’s was in the homes of North Koreans, died of cancer at 62 yesterday. Age is the cruel fate of all sex symbols. In Fawcett’s case, she not only contended with Father Time but with the public’s changing tastes that dated what once symbolized sex. Demographics, and Sir Mix-a-Lot, killed the pin-up girl monopoly of bleach-blond anorexics. But even twenty years after her heyday, ’70s postergirl Fawcett so symbolized sex that her 1995 appearance in Playboy became the bestselling issue of the 1990s. To put this in perspective, an over-the-hill Farah Fawcett beat Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and Denise Richards in their primes.

Six years after Farrah Fawcett appeared on the bestselling poster of all time, Michael Jackson released the bestselling album in history. Thriller was so big that, not only did it inspire fashion and dancefloor trends, it outsold numbers two and three on the all-time list combined. Jackson, who before our eyes morphed from cuddly, precocious singing/dancing machine to the world’s biggest pop star to Howard Hughes, died yesterday too. For Jackson, life’s victory lap–that even an overweight and jumpsuited Elvis enjoyed–eluded him. The last image embedded in the public’s mind is that of Michael Jackson in a courtroom rather than on a stage. A court of law acquitted him of sexually abusing a minor. The court of public opinion convicted him of being strange. Seeing Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit, or Michael Jackson moonwalking, brings us back to a time when we were young. News of their deaths reminds us that we’re old.

Should the Motion Picture Association of America retroactively slap an “R” rating upon To Have and Have Not (1944)? After all, the classic film famously depicts silver-screen debutante Lauren Bacall and future husband Humphrey Bogart–gasp!–smoking. The American Medical Association Alliance demands that films featuring smoking characters be given an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA already takes into consideration the tobacco habits of celluloid characters in determining a film’s rating. The AMAA’s demand would take that consideration from the MPAA, automatically assigning an “R” to any film depicting an ordinary, everyday activity normally conducted in the open when the cameras aren’t rolling. The ACLU hasn’t voiced objection, but what about Margot Tenenbaum? The Smoking Man? The Man with No Name?

Inspired in part by the Academy Award-winning Milk, California’s senate has passed a bill making slain San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk’s May 22 birthday a Golden State holiday. But the celluloid hero portrayed by Sean Penn bears little resemblance to the genuine article, who lashed out at political opponents as “Nazis,” purportedly staged a hate crime to engender support for a lagging campaign, and promoted Jim Jones to President Carter “as a man of the highest character” just a few months before the Peoples Temple leader orchestrated more than 900 murder-suicides. My City Journal article shows how Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is as real as Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man. Only people so ignorant as to get their history from Hollywood would place the formerly obscure San Francisco city supervisor alongside the likes of Jesus Christ, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and Martin Luther King in celebrating a holiday in his honor.

What does it say about the state of popular music that aspiring acts turn to petty crime rather than singing lessons to establish their musical bonafides? Stephen Gilmore allegedly robbed the Super Stop Food Store last Friday night in Gainesville, Florida, shooting the clerk in the head with a BB gun in the process. An earlier heist at Hungry Howie’s restuarant allegedly netted Gilmore and his confederates $900. But he didn’t rob for the money. His motive was streed cred. You see, Gilmore is an aspiring rapper. And like Vanilla Ice, Akon, and Rick Ross before him, Gilmore gets it that to get over with the crowd that “keeps it real” it’s best to keep things fake.

“I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman,” Prejean answered Hilton. “No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.” Hilton intolerantly celebrates that the answer cost Prejean the Miss USA crown. “That’s not the kind of woman I want to be Miss USA,” he told MSNBC. “Miss USA should represent all Americans, and with that answer she instantly was divisive.” But Hilton asked the question, and giving a definitive answer–which is what he asked for–inevitably would have alienated some large group of people. And had she answered Hilton’s ideological quiz correctly, how would that not be divisive to somebody out there?