Colin Sheridan: Romantic America is dead and gone

Matt Damon and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.

THERE’S a scene in Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon scans the bookshelves of the therapist he is forced by court order to see. “You people baffle me,” he says, aghast at the conformist propaganda displayed before him. “You spend all your money on your fancy books. You surround yourself with them. They’re the wrong fucking books.”

He then goes on to tell the bemused Robin Williams, his shrink: “You want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, that book will knock you on your ass.”