Beth’s Books: A Comparison

If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em!

~~ John Waters

There are many books that I love, but I have two that are my co-favorites. The one that would be considered a classic is The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) and the more modern, pop culture-ish one is The Stand (Stephen King).

I read the latter many years before the former. To be honest, if I had to pick one favorite, one that I could read over and over again, it would be The Stand. (Sorry, Steinbeck.) Why that book? It’s not traditional “literary” material, i.e., the critics weren’t enamored of it. Well, screw that.

It means a lot to me because I read it in my formative years, when I was in high school, and that was during a time when I was traveling a weird, dark road. I look back at it now and I’m really not sure where that came from, but it was this strange mix of authoritarianism and rebellion, and the authoritarianism part is so far removed from who I am now that I really don’t understand what was going on in my head. Teenagers, right?

Anyway, something in that book just clicked everything into place for me. It was rebellion against authoritarianism, and finally realizing that the two were mutually exclusive meant everything to me. It was a genuine epiphany. It was the age-old question “Will you use your powers for good...or for evil?” Reading about Stu, Glen, Larry, and Ralph making their stand for good honestly changed my life. I’m not a bad seed, by any means, and my ship would have righted itself at some point anyway, but I still remember reading the book and going, “Yeah. That’s the side I want to be on. I want to fight for what is right.”

When I was thinking about these two favorite books the other day (everyone thinks about their favorite books, right?), I initially thought, “It’s weird that these two books are my favorites. They’re so different.”

Then it hit me. They really aren’t that different at all. MIND BLOWN.

That’s right! It was another epiphany! I love having those!

It made me think of the old essay question to “compare and contrast” two very different things. I always loved those exercises because I could usually come up with some pretty good arguments for both. I won’t bother much with the contrast part here, because those are pretty obvious: different time period, different circumstances, different types of people, that kind of stuff. What interests me more are the similarities. And believe me, until just the other day, this had not occurred to me.

• They are both, at heart, apocalyptic novels. The Stand (TS) is certainly the more dystopian story, with over 99% of the world dying from a killer strain of influenza. A lot more people died in that universe. But think of the poor Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath (GoW) and every other family displaced by the Dust Bowl. Wasn’t that the end of the world—at least as they knew it—for them? When you can’t raise any crops and your family is starving, that’s pretty apocalyptic, isn’t it? So what do you do?
• Road trip! In my world, road trips are a fun adventure, but in the worlds of TS and GoW, it is a matter of survival. In GoW, the Joads travel west, as did so many other refugees of the Dust Bowl, in order to find a better life and a way to survive. A dream of a better life. In TS, the survivors of the plague traveled west because of dreams that compelled them to find the source of those dreams. Something was drawing them both west. And along the way, what did both encounter?
• Challenges. The road before you is not always easy. The Joads encountered hostility from people they met, the road was fraught with danger, and people were lost along the way. The survivors of TS had to scavenge for food, deal with hostile, unhinged people, and cope with the end of the world as they knew it. In the expanded version of the novel, they have to attempt an emergency appendectomy on one of their group. Can you imagine? Both the survivors and the Joads had similar experiences as they traveled west.
• Good versus Evil. While TS treats this more literally, with a showdown between those who have aligned with the positive force in the universe (call it God, because that is what Mother Abigail believed it was) and those who threw their support to someone who is possibly Lucifer himself, the Walkin Dude, Randall Flagg, the Joads have to deal with the banality of evil, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase. They encounter petty men who despise them for their refugee status and exploit them for cheap labor. They live in horrible conditions and there is no easy way out.
• The triumph of Good over Evil. Although that’s a little ambiguous in both stories. The survivors of TS eventually prevail over Randall Flagg, but it’s clear that he’s not entirely gone. There is still a worrying doubt about whether anyone has learned anything from what should have been an obvious lesson. Tom Joad has his moment of righteous fury and kills a man, and he gives a stirring speech about how he’ll be there when anyone is getting screwed over. But he has to flee and leave his family, so his moment of righteousness came at great cost.

In conclusion, as in all great apocalyptic novels (or movies, or TV shows), the reader must answer the question, “What would I do in this situation? How would I handle it? Would I be on the right side or the wrong side?” Part of the appeal, at least for me, is the psychological aspect of it. How do we react when we are in dire circumstances? (It’s why “The Walking Dead” is my favorite show.)

I know that my advice would be to stick with the good. Do what you need to do in order to survive and protect your family, but you really want to be on the side of good.

Be like Tom Joad.

Hoovervilles

Just a word of warning before I start. This is not an upbeat entry.

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I watched this last night with a mixture of horror, sadness, and impotent rage.

One of my favorite books and movies is The Grapes of Wrath, but it is a bleak story. It stuns me that arguably the most prosperous nation in the world has come, once again, to this point. Shanty towns and Hoovervilles are back.

After this news story aired, I told Ken that I'm afraid this will be what President Bush is remembered for. He said that we can't lay all of this at the feet of Bush, and that this began a while back. I know that's true, but 6 years of waging war without a tax increase exacerbated the problem to where we've now reached this horrible state of tent cities springing up across our country.

I'm so angry that this is happening. I'm angry at the people who gave their greed free rein, and took advantage of the housing market. I'm angry at President Bush for not forcing the rest of us to make sacrifices, and putting the burden solely on our military and their families. I'm angry at those Wall Street and banking bastards who milked the system for all they could, milked it till it was dry. I'm angry at credit card companies who hand out credit cards like they're freakin' Halloween candy to college students . I'm angry at the mortgage companies who made loans to people who should never have gotten them. And I'm angry at all of us for making such incredibly stupid decisions about finances and credit.

I don't doubt that even the people living in these 21st century Hoovervilles bear some culpability in this. Perhaps they made bad financial decisions along the way. But I'm also reasonably certain that there are plenty of people who, through no fault of their own, are forced into this position. It's a domino effect, starting at the top, and finding its way down to the construction worker, the person working for an automaker, sales people, restaurateurs, and on and on and on.

You all know that I try to remain an optimist, and I still believe that we will get out of this. When is another question. In the meantime, this is what is happening to some of our citizens. And we haven't even begun to claw our way out of this mess yet. I think we'll hear more about tent cities and see more images of those who have become homeless. I expect that I'll feel this sense of outrage every time I do.

I'll be there

There's no Dust Bowl in these parts today. It's warm enough that it's been raining steadily all day, and with all the snow that was still on the ground...well, as Annie Wilkes would say, it's an oogie mess out there! Foggy, too. Ken has a late meeting, so I hope he doesn't have any problems on the roads tonight.

My pal Milwaukee Dan #2 wrote an entry about taking black and white photographs. (He's quite good at it, if you've never checked out his photos.) I commented that black and white photos have always intrigued me, because it seems that when you remove the colors, the contrasts and details are more apparent. Odd that this came up, because one of the lead stories on AOL today was about Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photograph.

The little girl on the left in the photo is still alive, still in California (where the picture was taken in 1936), almost 77 years old, and cleaning houses. In an interview, she stated that her family was ashamed of the photograph, because it showed how poor they were, but it made them all determined to work hard in order to never have to live like that again. The now-elderly woman told her tale of living in their car, unable to go to school or even to take a bath, and how their mother sometimes went hungry but made sure her kids never did.

One of my favorite books is The Grapes of Wrath, and I've read it a few times. (A piece of trivia: John Steinbeck is the one who coined the phrase "The Mother Road" in reference to Route 66, which the Joad family traverses from Oklahoma to California.) I wanted to learn more about the Dust Bowl migration and the plight of migrant farm workers, so a few years ago I found a book titled American Exodus which deals with the migration. It was a difficult read...not because of the reading level, but because it is such a tragic story.

Contrary to what many people believe, the Dust Bowl wasn't the sole cause of the migration of farmers to California. A severe drought happened to coincide with the Great Depression, and when farmers who made their living off the land could do nothing as they watched their crops die in the fields, many chose to leave their homes behind and make the trek to the "land of milk and honey," as the state was portrayed by many California farm owners. In 1933, unemployment in Oklahoma was 29%, and in Arkansas, a staggering 39%. They left in droves for California, and the resulting glut of workers meant that just like the crops in Oklahoma and other southwestern states, the California jobs dried up. With an overabundance of workers, landowners were able to offer incredibly low wages, because everyone wanted a job and was willing to take a little less then the next guy if it meant keeping their family from starvation.

Squatters camps sprang up at the edges of towns, with squalid living conditions, poor sanitation, and rampant health problems. The government camps established by the Farm Security Administration offered better conditions, but limited space, so the refugees formed their own camps, in which the living conditions were much worse. Before he published The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck released a pamphlet detailing the squalor in which thousands were living, especially when winter set in and there were no crops to be picked:

There is no work. First the gasoline gives out. And without gasoline a man cannot go to a job even if he could get one. Then the food goes. And then in the rains, with insufficient food, the children develop colds because the ground in the tents is wet. I talked to a man last week who lost two children in ten days with pneumonia. His face was hard and fierce and he didn't talk much. I talked to a girl with a baby and offered her a cigarette. She took two puffs and vomited in the street. She was ashamed. She shouldn't have tried to smoke, she said, for she hadn't eaten for two days. I heard a man whimpering that the baby was sucking but nothing came out of the breast. I heard a man explain very shyly that his little girl couldn't go to school because she was too weak to walk to school and besides the school lunches of the other children made her unhappy.

It's hard to imagine such conditions. But that wasn't all that the migrant workers had to endure. They were looked down upon by many of the local inhabitants, and "Okie" and "Arkie" were class epithets on the order of the N-word being a racial epithet. They were distrusted and hated and unwanted, and it was hoped that they'd just keep to themselves and not become a part of regular society.

But assimilate they did. With the arrival of WWII, many went to work in the California munitions factories, and for the first time in many years, were able to make a regular living, put food on the table every day, and a roof over their heads; that tragic chapter in our country's history was over, and was part of the reason for the growth of unions. (Although oddly enough, the independent migrant farmers had a deep distrust of and distaste for unions.)

I've always found this a fascinating topic, but especially so now that some in the media are wondering if we are on the verge of another Great Depression. From everything I've read, and from talking with my parents (who were children at that time), we are far from reaching that point. Things are not great right now, and I believe fixing this will involve growing the deficit before we can reduce the deficit, but we aren't in the dire straits experienced by the American refugees and others of the Dust Bowl era. I would hope that we, as a country, learned from our mistakes at that time: we cannot live beyond our means, we have a moral responsibility as human beings to not allow such suffering, and the government must step in to create jobs and make sure that people are able to make a decent living. Soon-to-be President Obama will be faced with a daunting task, but it is in our best interests as a country to realize that we cannot allow our country to spiral down to what we went through during that time. Job creation, including infrastructure work, will drive the economy. But it won't happen overnight.

I'll end this with a scene that never fails to choke me up...Tom Joad's soliloquy.




Source: Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford University Press; 1989.