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Cranberry Bogs in MA

I consider myself something of a New England enthusiast…Having grown up in the same room, in the same house, in the same town, in the same state my entire life, it is completely central to who I am. I grew up in Hopkinton, MA, and went to Nantucket every single year of my life, including when I was in my mother’s abdomen. I went skiing annually for over 10 years on Sugarloaf Mountain, near Bangor, ME, and have the mountain nearly memorized. New England, for me, is a place I know well, a place I can measure my life and growth by, and a place I can measure time for the world outside myself by. I read the entire WPA guide, called “Here’s New England!” with incredible interest. Most of the photographs were of places I have been, places that still look the same…a covered bridge in Maine, harbors and docks off of Cape Cod, the town of Marblehead, the streets of Cambridge. I also have a book, published in the 1980’s, called “Nantucket Then and Now,” with side-by-side black and white photographs of places in Nantucket in the late 1800’s and in the early 1980’s. It wasn’t the most successful topic for a book, or maybe it was… all of the photographs look the same. It is as though nothing has changed. The tips in the WPA guide remain legitimate. There are still pies and cider where it says there are. The same roads are beautiful. You should still drive to Provincetown and it is still mostly sand and very surreal. I’m unsure if this speaks to the timelessness of the WPA guides or the timelessness of my homeland. Hopefully both, definitely one. My enthusiasm and longing for Massachusetts is a point of ridicule for my New York City inhabiting friends. My love of barns and disdain for NYC’s “fake autumn” are two others. And this guide speaks to nearly all of it. To talk about the reasons one loves New England is to sound like an antiques collector, like someone who burns vanilla candles in jars in their salt-box colonial house. When someone who loves New England tells you what road to drive and they ask you why, it will probably either be because of a view of trees/lakes/ancient houses or because of some historical significance. And it sounds absurd and outdated and charicaturish- because it seems to me like New England is the only place that has stayed this way for so long. I’ve met so few people who love their hometowns in the same weird historical way that I do. That love their areas because they look the same way they did so so long ago, and rarely because of artificial preservation and “historical societies.” Mostly because people just still enjoy living in old houses and barns. And hanging out in forests, and having dangerous roads, and having creaky furniture, and eating cranberries, and growing cranberries, and picking apples with their families. It’s not an effort to get back to our colonial past – it is the present. Somehow us people still like these things. That was a digression. What I’m trying to say is, reading this WPA guide made me think about the reasons I love New England, and that people have loved New England for the same reasons since 1930. And before. It wasn’t a sudden attraction a-la Disney World, or cheap subdivision prices, or the presence of celebrities, or anything new that could be placed anywhere. Perhaps everyone, reading about their homes, felt these things. I hope so. I don’t know how they could (sorry, my colonial Plymouth-rock snarkiness and pride is coming through) but I hope they do. Because then, unlike any Lonely Planet or Frommers ever could, the WPA succeeded in getting down to WHAT IT REALLY IS that makes these places, these places. The good and the bad. But what really matters, living there, to the people who grew up there. They seemed to ask the people who knew, or have been the people who knew. The good friend you want to have when you visit someplace, so you know that you’re seeing everything that a real person-who-lives-in-that-place-and-is-tied-to-it loves. For better and for worse. Thanks, WPA. Hire me next time you need someone to write about Massachusetts.

Chart showing how the American workweek has skyrocketed in the last few decadesReading about the birth of mass tourism during the depression was incredibly fascinating, especially the part about the start of paid vacations. We had an interesting discussion in class about how paid vacations weren’t even on the radar of unionized workers (who were fighting for higher pay, protection, etc) and how absurd it is that paid vacations are so standard to us now. What I find absurd is how much Americans currently work in comparison to the rest of Europe; we have less paid vacations, work more hours each week, and so on. In contrast to the union workers of the Depression, paid vacations are often foremost on our minds. Many of my friends and peers muse about moving to Europe after college to be able to live a life free of the American work-mania. But it seems almost as if the desire to have time off has reverted back to its Depression-era priorities, or similar; it is possible to get a job with weeks and weeks of paid vacation in America, if you’re lucky and/or hardworking. That isn’t exclusive to Europe. But it is nearly impossible to avoid the long days and long weeks of the American workforce if you aren’t working in Europe or living check to check etc. The priority seems to have shifted from leisurely travel back to wanting time to do “life” activities – in other words, live a life outside of one’s work.

This is far from exactly the same desires of the Depression era workers. But it is a desire to have a life AND a job, rather than just a job. It is a shift in lifestyle rather than a shift in how one spends one’s leisure time. And this shows: the travel industry is suffering, white-collar workers are having a huge number more clinically recognized mental health problems, and so on. So as we distance ourselves from the constructed, hyped travel-all-the-time-get-all-your-relaxing-done-in-one-week desires, we’ve been re-realizing how nice it would be to have a life and a job, rather than a job with a week of life once a year. It makes me wonder how American work habits would be different, and how the infrastructure of America would be different, and even how the mentalities and priorities of Americans would be different, if the travel habit hadn’t been pushed and successfully promoted. (Despite my love of driving, America, diners, the road, travel, photography, and so on, I think it might be a little better. A little more relaxed, a little less obsessed with money, a little more home and family focused.)

Kafka's Amerika

Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million reminded me a lot of Kafka’s Amerika: protagonist is beaten to a pulp by the new world he thought he could handle, with only enough relief in between to get our hopes up enough to have them become crushable again. What was satire and what was sincere was hard to discern, for me – there were some awful racist quotes up front, said in sincerity (within the book) but debatable insincerity (from the author possibly writing a satirical book.) The time period, I think, is what made this less discernable – I had to google “Nathaniel West + Racist” to find out for myself. West seems to take the opposite strategy of Kromer in his attempt to convey the truth: he spins a completely bizarre, over-the-top tragic and nearly slapstick tale that is just plausible enough to still have us emotionally involved. In a way, it is a reductio ad absurdum: reducing the depression and its events until it becomes absurd. But the absurdity of it is the depression’s true absurdity: it is actually there. I started feeling indignant, almost, at the way he treated his characters, and I believe that was his motivation: for us to want to demand that he stop this nonsense, let go of the necks of all his characters and leave them alone. The same could be said about the depression, about the police, about the swindlers, the corrupt, all those beating down the already beaten down. It also had the feeling of a sort of twisted, perverse fairy tale; the characters were idyllic, basic: beautiful girl, endlessly sacrificial young hero-lad, trusty “Indian” sidekick, blundering but useful old man. This served to make the narrative even more offensive when it was so unrelentingly brutal and base, and provided the basis for our suspension of disbelief – that it all would be okay in the end, because this is a fairy tale – being destroyed in the end because absolutely nothing was alright. There was no moral, no reward of the right, no punishing of the wrong as in a proper fable. I loved reading this, because its absurdity and the whimsical form it took served to make it all the more brutal and offensive. What a fun and horrifying way to make a point about the Depression.

Hallelujah I'm A Bum, one of many films that romanticized the life of the impoverished in the 1930's

I’ve been struggling with the concept of romanticization vs. brutal realism throughout this class and our readings. Which has more power for catalyzing social change? Is one more of a valid work of art than another? Is realism possible and is it possible to ever make a work of art (writing, photography, even journalism) that doesn’t romanticize the subject in some way? These questions seem so much more urgent and vital because of the state of our economy as well as our entire world today. When I think of the trend of budding “photographers” (read: trendy kids who like expensive cameras as accessories) taking “edgy” photographs of graffiti and slums and of course, homeless people, I get goosebumps. But then, who is “allowed” to take those photographs? On the global scale of things, I’m upper-middle class. What am I allowed to write about or take photographs of? And I always conclude the same thing: myself, and my life. What I know. Things that I, personally, want to remember. And here’s where the first of many divides between today’s and the depression era’s photographers comes in. The people who were experiencing homelessness, slums, etcetera, didn’t have the equipment to photograph their own life. Their stories, if they were going to be told by photographs, would need to be told by “higher-ups,” upper class people looking down on them, reporting on them as a population foreign to them. This was not only true with photography: many of the nation’s impoverished were illiterate, too desperate/busy trying to stay alive to have time to write, etcetera, leaving people like Steinbeck to fill in the gaps. To tell their story, from a wealthier, separated, distanced point of view. Occasionally, a pure, from-the-source expression will come out; i.e., Woody Guthrie. But only when someone wealthy happens upon him, happens to record him, etcetera. And so begins the efforts to steer clear of romanticization and its debatably inevitable connection to condescension, to separation, to dishonesty. We give cameras to child prostitutes so that they can photograph their lives. We provide computer access to the impoverished, we try to spread literacy, we sponsor music production classes in prisons, and things start coming out- music, books, political movements, paintings, photographs, exposé’s, and so on. But we can never escape these questions of truth, of sincerity. The art that comes out of the oppressed can be just as romanticized: perhaps it is perceived that a good story will bring more attention and support to the cause. Fame is always a question. The only answer I can come up with is this: artwork that is in complete sincerity, total personal honesty and truth, is art that is created without the knowledge that it will be shared. Anne Frank’s diary. The notebooks and photo albums of an abused teen. Letters between illegal lovers. When it isn’t about the public, the publicity, and so on, when it is intensely and deeply personal, especially when only for oneself, and somehow the world discovers it, this is when truth is revealed. It is a specific truth, the truth of one person, but it is their total and complete honesty. And if total and complete honesty is that specific, I want to drop the debate between romanticized and not romanticized, politically motivated and not. That sort of honesty is reserved for things the public was not meant to find. Anything public has another sort of truth: the truth of exactly what the creator wanted the world to hear, and what it wants back from the world. It is an exchange instead of purely an expression. And I want the conversation to be about that. Transparent issues of condescension, of the fitting of a plot arc, of political motivation, are all simple – it is easy to find them, easy to know they’re there, and the debate is only ever about what quantity. I would rather have the conversation be about what the exchange was. This person created something to give to everyone else. Did they want money, everlasting fame, to change an opinion about their demographic? And how did the rest of the world respond to them? It is not just about what is in the work – it is about what answer the world gave back. And in a way, that’s the motivation for any art – a response.

Waiting for Nothing - First Edition

I really enjoyed reading a complete piece – a complete novel – this week. Especially one that is so unimaginably obscure that there is no way I would have ever found or read it if not for this class. This struck a sort of literary chord in me unlike the other stories/excerpts haven’t (with a few exceptions, Grapes of Wrath, etc.) I think this was because of a few incredibly tactful/clever devices Kromer utilizes to get us psychologically where he wants us. This book wasn’t necessarily beautiful in a language sense, nor was it a perfect plot arc (or arced at all). But it was the reading I genuinely found most moving and beautiful, and I was utterly convinced (perhaps foolishly so, and if so, then good job Kromer) of its sincerity and truth. I was completely emotionally involved. And then I got to thinking – why? Why this, out of all the excerpts we’ve read, out of all the stories of prostitutes, missions, trains, deaths, amputations, etc?

Our discussions in class confirmed some of my suspicions, and illuminated other ideas as to why Waiting for Nothing was so successful in emotionally involving me and feeling genuine.

1. It was written in present tense. Any writing teacher will tell you to steer away from the present tense unless you have an obscenely undeniable reason for doing so. Typically, the only sort of reason they give for using it is “in a brief scene, where the action is quick and unexpected, and the narrator has no idea what is to come next.” Or something of that sort. To write an entire novel in this tense not only strikes me as literary suicide but also as impossible. But it makes sense, philosophically and in execution. Kromer didn’t have any idea of the specifics of his journey, not even where the end would be or was supposed to be. His entire demographic was literally lost, with a philosophy of hopelessness or apathy, not only not knowing what was going to happen but not caring. And in Kromer’s execution of the present tense, he comes off as colloquial, conversational, as if he’s sitting across from you, with a horrific stench, bleeding all over your tablecloth, explaining how the heck he got here with all of the absurd indifference of a man utterly defeated but somehow still alive anyway.

2. The lack of a plot arc also works in philosophy and execution. There is no plot arc for these very real people, including him. There is no climax of action, no rising or falling action, no resolution especially. Perhaps just a continual exposition, forever, or just action, if action could be represented as flatlining. And writing it this way conveys the truth of this – the lack of literary and cinematic glamour, the lack of Great American Success and Sparkling Conclusions and Resolutions, etcetera. He addresses, by not giving us the satisfaction of a plot arc, that what the public has been doing is applying/imposing a glamorous, friendly, everything-will-be-alright-in-the-end plot arc on real people, real suffering people, who will not be alright in the end. He has turned the romanticization of the American consciousness on its head and given them a book of the real, a book that is the opposite of their narrative/romanticized thoughts. The romance with the prostitute hardly begins and doesn’t end, in a good or bad way. He doesn’t indulge us in his having gay sex for money, and he doesn’t have us believe it was all worth it, or that it wasn’t worth it, because it’s neither, the money never stays. He doesn’t give us that satisfaction.

3. He doesn’t locate us in any significant way. His location is America, Cities, Railways. This highlights the indifference and immense apathy/nihilism of the men on the road. The location doesn’t make a difference to them, because the struggles are the same everywhere. We aren’t allowed to imagine any of the satisfying details of a city, its architecture, its climate, its history, because they aren’t allowed to even think of it. They – the men of the road – can only think of survival, and don’t have the energy or the life to indulge in romanticizing their settings. I could go on and on, and wish I could, but I’m running on almost 800 words here. So in conclusion, Waiting for Nothing struck a literary chord in me because of its awareness of literary tactics and strategies, and its subsequent sticking them up their own you-know-whats in the name of brutal honesty. Some old adage talks about needing to know the rules before being allowed to break them, and that’s what Kromer holds onto. He knows what makes a good read, what people want to hear, how people even romanticize their own lives. And he seems to know that not only has everyone else already done that, but also that writing these romantic stories about hobos has done nothing to change the conditions of hobos, or to even raise awareness about what he perceives as their reality. Waiting for Nothing strikes me as a sincere attempt at truth: not for change’s sake (he dismisses radicals) not for personal gain (if he wanted $ he would have written a romanticized book) but for truth’s sake. Side note: I looked him up on Wikipedia after reading this, and the saddest few paragraphs came up, noting that the article was a stub, etcetera. Seems like the end of his life story was just as real and plot-arc-less as his book was.

Woody Guthrie and his famous fascist-smashing guitar

The reading that most interested me this week was Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. The name, of course, hooked me – Woody Guthrie is one of my favorite musicians. We’ve read so many travel stories at this point – a near endless amount – that they tend to blur together, the better moments and more powerful scenes sticking out but not from a particular narrative, typically just out of the massive flood of people moving west, stories of people moving west. I feel as though this is indicative of the time period – events would last, the people seemed and felt irrelevant. Individual narratives were all the same, save for a few poignant things that would be saved, remembered, learned from, felt and felt again. After reading Bound for Glory, though, I sat back and thought about how it was written by Woody Guthrie. Bound for Glory was not without its moments – the generous old man and old woman, secretly giving things to Guthrie while warning him not to tell the other, his stolen paintbrushes, the song of the bubbles in his wine jug, etcetera. But overall, nothing screamed VOICE OF AN ERA at me, nothing even screamed Guthrie, nothing screamed. Was this an issue of Guthrie needing to find his medium? Was this an issue of me reading nearly infinite travel stories? No – because I hadn’t read a fraction of all of the travel stories that were written. It was almost reassuring to read his relatively lackluster nonfiction. A brilliant mind could also create something ordinary. And could also have the same experience – overall – as the other thousands of minds moving West. And on the flip side of the coin, something brilliant could indeed be made out of the same experience that all of the others had. That his narrative seems ordinary connects Guthrie to his era, to everyone else in that time, doing those things. And that legitimizes even further the songs he wrote, knowing that they came from the same experience. It validates them as a product of a truly iconic (in the commonality sense) life, and set of experiences. A refined, super-potent distilled version of a thousand narratives, including his own. Nothing spectacular made Guthrie’s songs, because his stories of himself were nothing spectacular. The truth, a universal and ordinary truth, made the songs.

A Bourke-White PhotographThese books of photography and text approach the same problem – spreading awareness about the plight of the impoverished in America – in wildly divergent ways. Agee and Evans’ book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (my personal favorite) is filled with gritty, realistic and rather journalistic photography, and emotional/slightly unhinged bizarre and stream of consciousness writing from Agee. It is truly a work of art, but not as easily readable or digestible as the others. Dorothea Lange’s and Taylor’s American Exodus has some of the most famous images of the Depression, seeing as Lange was one of the photographers with the most “hit” photographs (Migrant mother, etcetera.) But Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s book, You Have Seen Their Faces, is perhaps the most divergent. Bourke-White, previously a commercially successful architectural photographer, approaches her depression-era subjects (people) with the same strategies she approached her commercial work (buildings and industrial structures) with: dramatic, surreal lighting, unconventional angles of shooting, distorted proportions as a result of these strange angles, etcetera. The resulting pictures are surreal and hyper-dramatic, almost like a well-lit play. The creases and shadows of her subject’s faces are in high-contrast, subjects are often backlit, shot from the ground so as to appear gaunt or shot from above so as to appear diminutive and defeated.

In the conversations that so often come up regarding journalistic photography, the “integrity” and “truth” of a photograph is often questioned. A knee-jerk answer to the question, “Which photographer was the most honest?” would probably be Evans or Lange. The photographs seem unposed, candid, etcetera. Bourke-White is often criticized and dismissed for how theatrical her work looks. Baudrillard (somewhat unrelated, I know) wrote an amazing essay that I feel pertains to this issue, called In Praise of Cosmetics. In this, he discusses how if we are to wear makeup, it should be brash, obvious, obscene, etcetera, or else we are liars. We should embrace that we have the desire to decorate ourselves, present ourselves in a certain way, and we are more honest in doing this; to wear makeup in a manner that is to make ourselves appear more naturally beautiful, as if we weren’t wearing makeup at all, is misleading, dishonest, depressing.

I feel as though this is incredibly relevant when it comes to journalistic photography. As soon as we choose to “present” something – whether it be our faces (makeup) or a photograph, conscious decisions are made as to how that thing will be presented. Even if a photograph is completely candid, the photographer still chose what to leave out of the frame, what angle to be shooting at, what the depth of field was (how focused the image is on one distance, one subject) and so on. The photographer also decided that the moment was worth photographing to begin with, as opposed to the infinite other moments they could have photographed. And this doesn’t, in my opinion, expose the falsity or dishonesty of all photographs. Instead, I think it reminds us that different styles of photography show different truths, and that we shouldn’t measure the “accuracy” or truth of a photograph the same way we would zero a scale. It is not that sort of measurement. It is not that sort of reality, in a basic, physical way. It is always an expression – the discussion should rather be about the choices the photographer made and what emotional truths are displayed, what simplifications and perhaps universal truths are garnered from a photograph that summarizes an era, and so on.

Lorena Hickok

Lorena Hickok's writing particularly moved me, I believe, because of its lack of affectedness. I did not get the same sense that she wanted to be perceived as a “travel writer” like the others, a great being to be remembered rather than someone documenting a time to be remembered. Her letters were written under the impression of semi-privacy, only being meant for Hopkins, meaning that she didn't have to fear looking like a “red” and could be as truly critical as she desired. This also meant that she knew her exact audience, and didn't need to linguistically search around for ways to emotionally involve the audience (I.e. what normally would have been her readership, the public.) Instead, her writing seems earnest, incredulous at times, unconcerned with her appearance and entirely concerned with conveying the basic information about what she is seeing to Hopkins. The tone is conversational, emotional, believable because it is Lorena Hickok herself speaking.

I also enjoyed the format of letters themselves; rather than travel the country and write a report at the end of all of it, we see her hindsight in short bursts, and there's no way for her to go back and change her first impressions; we already know them. They have already been sent. This gives new insight on what the actual process of traveling and investigating is like, in the moment. We see her surprised to keep finding things to write about; “I hate like the dickens to add another letter to the stack, but what I have to say...” and “I am not fond of Miami.” We also get her closing lines: “I could go on and on. But I'm tired, and I daresay you are.”

We also get her statistics, her disagreement based in fact with the Florida citrus growers and the NYC relief system etcetera. This is a reporter writing as a reporter, rather than a reporter traveling the country looking for some Greater Meaning so that they can write a book and become a Writer. Her tone is incredibly different. And in it is a sort of off-hand sincerity that is lacking in a lot of the fiction written during this time. She seems sincere because there is no reason for her not to be. Her job is to convey information, and she knows the ear on the other end is listening.

In the end, her letters were incredibly refreshing. They lacked the affected nature of sensationalized news articles, and the affected nature of “travel fiction.” Somehow, both news articles and fiction share a sort of fictionalized tone. But a letter, dug up and published later, never meant for public consumption, reveals such a raw and unconcerned sort of truth that I am not used to. It makes me wish there was some way to get reporters to think that they weren't writing for public consumption, and then make their articles public. How different and earnest and strange the news would become.

Statue of Liberty: Art? Propaganda?

Last class, we were discussing whether The Grapes of Wrath was art or propaganda. And I was bursting with the question: why art or propaganda?

Not only do I believe that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, I also believe that there needs to be some sort of overlap to make either medium successful. Artless propaganda has been dealt with before, legally and socially: everyone knows how to handle it. It fails to get at the guttural feelings of a human being. It is the information someone needs to be convinced, but without the convincing.

On the other side of the coin, art without motivation falls flat. If the artist didn’t even have a reason for showing me this, why am I looking at it? The purposes of both art and propaganda are to express and communicate; art might be more on the expression side of things, and propaganda more on the communication side, but they absolutely need each other to be successful.

I am reminded of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a futurist poet from Soviet Russia who wrote propagandist poetry still read today as glorious, ingenious literature. His poetry was named as art and propaganda from the start, and neither took away from the other. It didn’t even limit his audience… Americanized Eastern Europeans from former satellite states of Moscow like me are reading it in the year 2009.

In a more modern sense, I’m also reminded of IVAW, or Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group of veterans doing public performances and reenactments of brutal events in Iraq, in places like Times Square and at the DNC in Denver. They are loud, terrifying, disturbing, too real for comfort, and perhaps most importantly, performed by actual veterans who have experienced these things firsthand.

They lend their credence to the cause, rather than being rich college students (who would be easier to dismiss as disconnected, spoiled, misinformed and whiny.) On the other hand, they don’t present themselves as “artists.”

What they are doing is almost undeniably art, and undeniably propaganda. It is artful propaganda, or propagandist art. In today’s age of numbness, an ordinary protest (even if in uniform) would hardly phase anyone. Pamphlets certainly wouldn’t; people can choose to throw them away. Watching their performance is not voluntary; there is no choice.

The artfulness of this protest is what makes it effective. It is working outside of the normal language of protest, so people don’t know how to react and therefore aren’t immediately dismissive. It is engaging and immediately emotionally involving.

I feel as though all of this could be said about The Grapes of Wrath. True, writing has been a form of protest for almost forever, but The Grapes of Wrath presents itself as literature, not as propaganda or protest. Steinbeck uses his credence as an upper-class, skillful and reasonable man, to lend to the cause of the migrants.

The Grapes of Wrath was so dangerous because it got at the guttural feelings of human beings, it made people put their protest/propaganda-guard down, it made them experience the information before they realized what it was promoting. And because of this, I would argue that Grapes of Wrath was important and incredible because it was both art, and propaganda.

The scene in Mae’s diner, where she talks about the “shitheels” living well and stealing things from her anyway, embarrassed me. I’m from south of Boston, and those people were undoubtedly from the “North”. Beyond that, in the conversation between the Wilson family and the Joad family, where they are identifying as Kansans and Okies, they make a snide comment about how they both talk a little different, but folks from Massachusetts talk and you can’t even tell what they’re saying. Those bay-staters are the people flying around in their nice cars, hitting people in jalopies and killing caravans of homeless families, lacking in human empathy born out of struggle.

I assumed it was human empathy born out of struggle, anyway. There seemed to be a direct correlation between who was willing to give a little (the gas station owner, Mae, the Wilsons, etcetera) and who had been struggling.

However, look at this map of unemployment rates in the US. It shows rural areas, metropolitan areas, the change in unemployment over one year, and so on. And all of the states mentioned/traveled in Grapes of Wrath (with the ironic exception of California) are not only doing better than the rest of the country, but also have been less changed over the past year. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming; all of these states had been doing pretty well, and are doing even better when compared to everyone else within the past year.

The metropolitan areas were horribly hit. And yet, we still don’t see the basic human empathy; rather, we see people scrounging for whatever they can despite living in relative luxury, financial crimes, white collar crimes, Ponzi schemes, demands for bonuses and vacations and other unnecessary, indulgent things.

So maybe empathy isn’t about who’s hardest hit. Maybe it’s about the nature of one’s business, what one does for a living, being connected to the work one does…along the same lines as Steinbeck’s writing on the mechanization of farming. The middlemen and middlemen of middlemen in white-collar business and the workplace is essentially infinite. There is no connection to any physical product, or how the product helps people. There is no "produce" to love.

In a small business there’s no room for the inhuman, unnameable something that runs Banks and Large Companies to sneak inside. It is all solidly humans. And it is all human empathy. The small restaurant I work for (and I mean small: ten two-person tables) feeds any homeless person that walks in. Somehow I can’t imagine an Applebees or Chili’s or McDonalds doing that, and it has nothing to do with the people working at that particular branch. Those waiters and waitresses care just as much about other people – but they have to fear the nameless, formless something that would punish them if they did not do as they were told.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is: despite our actually having someone to “go after” now (those big headlining white-collar criminal) going after them won’t solve it, because this empathy problem is more than the couple of sociopaths we hear about. How lovely if we could return to being a country of small businesses, where everyone knows what exactly they’re doing and why they’re doing it, where people feel close enough to the center of the company that they don’t fear retribution if they do something kind.