The New Grapes of Wrath

“And it came about that owners no longer worked on their land. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Doesn’t it feel that America is about to reap the grapes of wrath? Do you get the feeling that we’re trapped in train car decoupled from the locomotive, hurtling backwards toward a sheer cliff and a two-thousand foot free fall?

Not to hear our morally, intellectually, and curiosity-challenged President; according to George W. Bush, everything is moving along the tracks just fine, according to plan. For purposes of sheer survival, you’d think GOP bosses would do everything in their power to keep Bush away from microphones, press conferences and speaking engagements, because every time Bush opens his mouth the Republicans drive another nail into their coffin. The same goes for Dick Cheney. While young Americans die in a pointless war of which Cheney was chief architect and head cheerleader, Cheney goes fishing with Middle Eastern potentates every bit as corrupt as he is.

I haven’t felt such acute loathing since Richard Nixon occupied the White House. I can’t even watch George W. Bush throw out the first pitch at a baseball game – and I consider myself a baseball nut. This pinhead is our President! This embarrassment to every good impulse our country ever stood for? Does the Supreme Court still think installing this joker in the White House was a sound idea?

It’s simply astonishing to listen to George W. Bush speak on the state of the economy or the Occupation of Iraq. The disconnect from reality! The giddy denial of facts! The total disregard for experience! Why angry Americans haven’t stormed the White House gates demanding Bush’s removal from office is beyond me. A populace with a normal level of outrage and a functioning sense of indignation would have exhausted all patience and tolerance long ago, taken to the streets of the nation’s capitol to overturn cars and set them on fire, battle the Blackwater riot squad with sticks and stones, bricks and bottles; nothing less than outright mayhem seems to get the attention of the American ruling class.

Bush and his GOP cronies have sodomized America on a mind-blowing scale. Even now, near the end of his disastrous reign, Bush’s phallus is buried deep, his hands are locked on our hips and his trousers are down around his ankles and he’s banging away with a smirk on his face, this twisted, perverse product of the ruling elite, a man for whom utter failure is a way of life.

Regardless of political orientation, Americans should be outraged. The Bush junta has no plan for the Iraq follies except more deaths, more waste, more shame; they have no plan to deal with gasoline prices that will soon soar north of $4 a gallon; they have no plan for the economy except a stupid tax rebate scheme that will send Americans down to Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target and Circuit City, there to gorge themselves on products – made in China. And in the long run this helps us – and by us I mean people who work for wages -- how? Public investment in school construction, teacher training, highway and bridge repair, energy conservation, job training, mass transit projects that put money into America and make that money multiply – that would be a true stimulus program. But the Bush Junta’s “free market, private is always better than public” ideology prevents them from taking that sensible course; the best idea they can come up with is to give people money so they can buy imported goods made by exploited workers.

The Grapes of Wrath, then, and now. Maybe it’s true that everything that dies one day comes back, maybe we are once again heading into an era when government is seen as an entity that counterbalances corporate power and provides for the common good, rather than an evil that stifles, strangles and steals.

Remember your Steinbeck: “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”