"Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (Documentary) (2004) - Movie Review

The scale of how much ignorant I am of current affairs, history and people can be gauged by the introduction of new wonderful people I never took the effort to peruse of through films. Howard Zinn a historian, author and an activist is today’s “learn about people you idiot” section of mine. This is a biographic documentary film of his life, works, speeches, interviews and the points and idea of democracy and non-violence. It is more than a film and this write up will be less of a review. It will be thoughts, opinions and disarrayed vision for lucidity by this reviewer.

Passages and sentences are narrated from his book by the voice of Matt Damon. A man brought up in poverty and hard labour through his passion for reading earned Ph. D and became a Professor. He is student’s person and his advocacy of civil disobedience and action through non-violence, movements and discussion against war and for civil rights became instrumental and still is on the lives of young people to look for character not in the irons of weapons but in the stillness of character.

I will let the film dictate the history of this historian and humanitarian. The points jotted down as sentences and strong will about the idea of democracy brings forth lot of discussion. Lately along with the ideology of religion and atheism, patriotism is one another topic I have largely pondered upon. Many of my mail bears the strong quotation by George Jean Nathan which is “Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” Strip off the sticky substance defined as one’s self esteem; character and duty which would leave the giant mass of dirt spread across boundless and limitless with sky blanketing this game of power and acquisition is nothing but earth. That is a truth which is not said to disgrace or humiliate a country or a person’s withhold of character but to grasp the enormity of the human existence. It is the perfect inconvenient truth.

What is left of us is and will be nothing but memories. And making memories are the sequential and cumulative collection of those into a chapter of life. The tranquility and disturbance, subconscious darkness and attested hatred, sweetness in the hold of child’s grip over one’s hand and the punching fist for immediate vengeance are the contrasting pictures of tone and voice consummating our death. In that how much of the effort it takes in a day to day life of practicing passivity and governs the rights as well? It may be few and people like Zinn are the personalities scooping those as the restless but seasoned lethargic practice onto our faces. History is those memories.

I remember the frustration of my friend Mathi in the people visiting diverse countries particularly to US do not take the pain to peruse some pages of the past or history to be precise. I am going to buy the book “A People’s History of United States” by Zinn for the history in perspective of various people. History has been perceived and delivered as a representation of art of architecture and victories of war, injustice and its revolution but the people who stood on the streets of those cities ruled by power are the maps to the memories of those past.

I might not have the complete education on the character of Zinn or his actions with the sole literacy the film has provided. And the film itself is a soft spoken statement of the man’s life but reading his books are the adjudicators to sculpt the character. But that is not the juice I am reading for and it would be the discussions, debates, anger, frustrations, ideas, speech, rational of the irrational and the irrational of the rational in the egoistic stand of intellectualism.

The immediate outcry or for more aggressive readers, the shouting sarcasm over this reviewer would be that what I am doing for the cause of it. Are these glimmers of immediate reaction which lies flat in the bed and lays there then next morning to be eviscerating in laziness? It would be untruthful to deny those but these are the positive stains accumulating as the stepping stones for the accumulation in myriads of smaller actions and build up into a passing philosophy from one to another. I made a memory through this review and would be doing so for rest of my life.