Maybe you are out of work. Maybe you are like me, and have worked online for some time. Regardless of your situation, chances you are at least somewhat more homebound than you used to be. This month’s foray into nerdery dips into the realm of history. There are plenty of literary genres that could classify as “geeky,” and I very well may delve into a list of suggested scifi novels for our future months of quarantine. But for now, let’s stick with history. 

I seriously love history. I started college as a history major, but I dropped it for sociology so that I could find a better job after college (HA HA HA HA … but, follow your bliss). I have read many history books, and I do teach a history class professionally, so I guess my recommendations in this regard might count for something. Each of the following books was chosen because I feel they have something to share for people in our quite strange moment in history.  

(Of course, you shouldn’t be going to book stores right now. Each of these books is available online as an eBook.)

“A Peoples History of the United States” by Howard Zinn

With eviction filings for Franklin County spiking in late March and early April, local housing advocates agree a “tsunami” of evictions will hit Columbus and the rest of the state if Governor DeWine and the Ohio congressional delegation do not act.

A wave of evictions for Franklin County this summer could be a foregone conclusion. 

Even before the pandemic, the county’s eviction court was one of the busiest in the state, averaging 75 hearings or cases a day and around 17,000 per year, according to the Legal Aid Society of Columbus. 

City Council member Shayla Favor has been tasked with the looming housing crisis. She told the Free Press her top priority is making sure Columbus residents are able to stay in their homes. 

The 12-18 states that will decide the presidency this fall are already being primed for voter suppression and election theft by the Trump GOP. Our ability to overcome will decide the fate of the Earth.

Donald Trump is in the White House because in 2016 the vote count was stolen in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (plus, most likely, North Carolina and Florida). Hillary Clinton won the election nationwide by 2.8 million votes. But she and her corporate Democrats did and said nothing about the theft of the Electoral College in those key states.

At great personal expense the Green Party’s Jill Stein did go into WI, MI and PA with Bob Fitrakis and other activist/attorneys to demand recounts. All three states showed massive fraud on Trump’s behalf. Clinton was almost certainly the rightful winner of their Electoral votes—-and thus the presidency. But she killed the recounts, then attacked Stein and the Greens.

When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.

What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.

(Propaganda, by the way, is the way the ruling classes get the working classes to march off to war and how the billionaire CEOs of the multinational Big Pharma, Big Medicine corporations (and Bill Gates, the CDC, the WHO, etc, etc) gets parents to willingly over-vaccinate their vulnerable, immune-compromised infants with vaccines that have never been subjected to FDA-approved, double-blind clinical trials to establish safety or efficacy, especially long-term!)