On the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Trail, the Dust Bowl Still Resonates
26th January 2015
This is an interesting piece in and of itself, but even more interesting for the context. This is not an article that would have been written by somebody who actually lived in Oklahoma; no, this is the sort of article written by someone from Washington, D.C. (or New York or Boston or San Francisco), a bona fide inhabitant of the Crust for whom the middle of America is effectively a foreign country, one inhabited by people who kind of speak the same language but in accents that Our Author only hears in movies or on TV by somebody trying to be funny or trying to express foreign-ness.
This comes out even in the opening paragraph:
The freedom of the open road holds no appeal for my 16-year-old son, Miro. Like many of his generation, he sees cars as agents of global warming and the reason American suburbs can be soulless places with no sense of community, let alone pedestrians. Plus, he gets carsick.
Typical Crustian kid being inculcated with typical Crustian concerns. His only experience with ‘produce’ is what shows up under plastic at Whole Foods. Being concerned about global warming is just What Kids Do, like posting selfies to Facebook. He might actually mow a lawn but more likely it’s done by somebody whose first language wasn’t English. (Full disclosure: as mine is.) The whole point of the family’s trip is to retrace a route, not as an actual family from the Dust Bowl era would have done it, but as characters in a Famous Literary Work were said to have done. (I suspect that the author was an English major in college.) This is like trying to learn medieval history by tracing the adventures of Lancelout from Le Morte d’Arthur.
I couldn’t believe how relevant the 75-year-old book—with its depiction of industrial agriculture squeezing out small farmers, climate-driven environmental woes, and migrant workers at the mercy of big landowners—felt today.
Note the desideratum: Relevance. Not accuracy, not authenticity, not getting into the head of people from back then; relevance. (Can ‘consciousness raising’ be far behind?) The author could be a Peace Corps volunteer tromping down Route 66 to See What The Natives Can Teach Us About Our Lives.
As they saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.