Jackrabbit is still more nutritious than a Big Mac. Maybe they had the right idea

steinbeck: "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard."

It seems to me that Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath feels much more disconnected to our lives and our recession than the essays and prefaces we read last week. Not to say that it is any less relevant; rather, it better gives me an idea about how different and alien the world in the 1930’s would seem to me, along with how many of our misplaced priorities, financial woes, and general distresses are the same.

It feels told more from the inside, despite his being a Stanford alumni, NYC resident and a Nobel Prize winner. I wondered why this was, how this could be, seeing as it seemed he was coming from the same distant spectator-traveler perspective as, say, Asch or Rorty, and it turns out, he grew up in a small rural town, relatively ridden with crime and subject to the same human rights violations against migrant workers as any other fertile place. Learning this made Steinbeck’s writing sound so much more sincere, to me. Not to say that those who are well off can never write about those who are less well off, but there is a certain something to many of the writers in early American history who hadn’t been put through the laundry press of a college education.

Nonetheless, the imagery in Steinbeck’s work: inches of loose, soft dust, loud and tough grandparents whos meanness equates to love and merriment, teenage younger brother out having fun and doing various animalistic things to local girls (wherever those local girls may be, seeing as the are surrounded by a houseless plain of dust and sun) while the family lives on the edge of annihilation… this, to me, informs me of the emotions of a place and time I know very little about and have no direct access to. Rather than telling me what “the country” is feeling and what myriad nameless gas station attendants have mumbled, all blurring into one generic blue-collar worker/story/saying, Steinbeck chooses to tell me what select, humanized, fleshed out people are saying, experiencing, hearing, seeing. It is left to me to feel, to infer; and since the feelings aren’t told to me and I am forced to emotionally investigate, to imagine what they could feel, the emotions well up inside of me personally rather than being intellectually recognized on a page. Empathy is created in me, and this feels realer and more useful than the intellectual acknowledgement that, Yes, the Great Depression and today’s recession have some similarities, Hmm.

The most minute details of physical inconveniences: nice shoes that are too nice to be good walking shoes, and feet going into dust instead, or pride fighting with practicality and the humiliation of laying down in a dead cotton field to avoid a stupid cop waving his headlights over you, protecting land that doesn’t need protecting because it serves no purpose. It speaks to human depth that these things could elicit more emotion than the gargantuan statements of a 25% unemployment rate.

And so, whether or not it is entirely correct or accurate, Steinbeck has conveyed to me that the terrors of our times are different. The lawlessness, the coarseness and blind (brilliant? comforting) religiosity, the nothingness, the dehydration and the starvation, are worlds away from our overgoverned big-brother fears, our satellite imagery, our Evangelical Christian politicized mania, our overpopulation, our access to water and fear of it becoming privatized, our malnutrition and obesity occupying the same demographic. Perhaps the character of a disaster cannot be seen unless you stick your face in the muck of it and rub it around until you can’t breathe. You cannot drive through it, talking to everyone for a moment, just long enough to get their name. You cannot fly over it in Air Force One and get any sense of the damage, of the children’s toys floating with bodies out of the schools. You cannot make a sleek glossy-magazine pictograph-map of our country’s poverty and unemployment and expect it to make people feel anything at all. Though all of this might help. But what we probably need is a Grapes of Wrath for today’s impoverished of America. (Though, I suppose, among some of the very upper tiers of wealth, reading anything of substance has gone out of fashion.)

On another note, I found Steinbeck's Nobel Acceptance Speech incredibly interesting, and it can be found here: Steinbeck's Banquet Speech