A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

On vacation, I finally read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I’d been meaning to read the Grapes of Wrath for quite some time, but never got around it. Steinbeck is a spectacular writer. I can’t believe nobody made me read Steinbeck in high school. One day a couple of years ago, I read East of Eden and found it gripping, particularly for a book written 60 years ago.

Anyway, the house we were staying in had a copy of the book, so that’s what I read. Basically, it’s the story of the Joad family, forced off of their Oklahoma farm by debt along with thousands of other “Okies” and other midwestern farmers. They scrape together enough money to make the harrowing journey along Route 66 from Oklahoma to California in their beat up jalopy. They’re lured to California by flyers advertising a need for workers. Turns out it’s a scam by California property owners to drive down wages. If you have 5 starving men for every available job, you can essentially feed them bread for day’s work, and they’ll take it.

I’d love to know more about how California went from being a state where the few powerful owners ran the show, taking advantage of soul-crushing poverty to one of the more liberal states in the nation. I wonder if it’s like a Newtonian 3rd law of politics — the liberal state of today is an equal and opposite reaction to the state of the state in the 1930s? It also brought to light a downside of the mobility of the automobile. Whereas prior to the availability of cheap locomotion, Dust Bowl style poverty would have probably resulted in more care for the poor in their own states and/or violent insurrection simply because the poor were backed into a corner and their neighbors would be forced to deal with them; the availability of cheap cars created at least the illusion of an option. They hit the road searching for opportunity. When they got to California, they were separated from their roots, vulnerable to slave wage manipulation, and easy for established Californians to ignore and loathe because they were newcomers.

An abrupt and (to me) unsatisfactory ending, though. I’ll have to look at a Cliffs Notes analysis or something to see the important stuff that flew over my head. I’ll end this entry with Tom Joad’s speech:

“Well, maybe like Casy says, a fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big one… Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere, wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. . . I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there

Over vacation, I read Baghdad Without a Map: And Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz. I should have read “One for the Road” (see below) on vacation and read Baghdad without a Map at home. Baghdad Without a Map is less light hearted than Horwitz’s other books, primarily because the region he is touring is more grim and complicated. He relates his experiences in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. The Middle East certainly isn’t monolithic, and this book tends to bring that home.

One upside to reading this book was feeling a bit better about the positive aspects of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. He was there in 1987, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war, I believe and had no political axe to grind, making his observations a bit more reliable in my opinion. Life in Iraq was just bleak and filled with Saddam 24/7. Songs about Saddam on the radio, pictures of Saddam on every corner. Questions if you didn’t have enough pictures of Saddam in your house. 5 security forces spying on the people and on each other. This doesn’t change my overall calculus with respect to how our Iraqi adventure got started, the cost to the U.S. verses the benefits to the U.S., and whether the whole enterprise was worthwhile. But, the positive side of the ledger has a better balance.

A couple of weeks ago, I read Amazon.com: Books: One for the Road by Tony Horwitz. This was the 3rd of his books I’ve read (the first two were Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Went where he roams the Pacific in the footsteps of Captain Cook and Confederates in the Attic where he explores the “curious” hold the Lost Cause Mythology has on the Southern imagination; roaming the South and tagging along with a hard core Civil War reenactor.)

In “One for the Road,” Mr. Horwitz hitch hikes through Australia. The sheer volume of beer those folks seem to drink gave me a hangover just reading about it. Having done a small amount of backpacking and generally vagabonding around some of the Western states, I don’t think I’d be at all cut out for the sort of long-term rootlessness he writes about, but it’s nice to live vicariously through that sort of adventure, meeting all sorts of interesting people. The randomness of it all is part of the attraction. Though, having read 4 of Horwitz’s books, I get the feeling he has a knack for capturing the interesting aspects of whoever he meets. I don’t think he’s just getting lucky and happens to meet the really interesting people.