The New Criterion

Some projects are born fatuous, some achieve fatuousness, some have fatuousness thrust upon them. Which melancholy comedy best fits the news that A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s anti-American fantasy masquerading as history, is—finally, at last, after so many failed attempts—going to be turned into a television show? Somehow the crowning glory of the farce was the news that the actor Matt Damon (who grew up next to Zinn) would perform in the four-hour miniseries titled “The People Speak.” “Matt Damon, Matt Damon”: the squeaky-voiced puppet playing Damon in the movie Team America offered the perfect epitome of his ostentatious, self-regarding political childishness. And here he is helping to dramatize a book whose message is that the New World, once a paradisal playground instinct with benevolence and creativity when Columbus met the gentle Arawaks, was ruined when rapac ...

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