The Good Old Days

Grapes Of Wrath is an amazing show. Mostly I think because of our headlong rush back to those good old days when the corporations and unethical businesses crushed actual human beings without restraint. The whole culture of offering jobs to many more people than you needed, and kept them so desperate that those willing to work for pennies were the only ones given work, and law enforcement officials used deadly force to quell dissent, or simply turned their backs on those who attacked dissenters with deadly force. If you don't think that is where big corporations would like to take us again, you should return all the oxygen you've wasted since birth. Failing that, stop using oxygen.

Interesting ending to the show. It was abrupt and surprising. The family is mostly dispersed, the daughter whose husband left has just had a miscarriage while their shelter is being inundated, and fled the flood with her father having to carry her. Up to that point she was the weakest character in the play. Not with regards to acting which was great, but the actual character. The whiney one you expected would die ignobly, probably taking others with her. They found an barn on higher ground, already occupied by a gravely ill man and his son. There is nothing they can do for the man, who is dying. They have no food to keep him alive. The daughter who just lost her baby, asks everyone to leave, and proceeds to nurse the dying man. Curtain.
Startling, and in thinking about that I saw the weakest character at the very nadir of her existence step beyond the bounds of propriety to save a strangers life.

For me the message was courage. Something our society has lost, or more likely put into cold storage. Are we so callow it will require that kind of misery to reintroduce courage to our national soul? To move beyond the avaricious cowardice which defines corporate entities, and in the long run seems to be the only value with any staying power they bring to our society of consumption. When did the balance change? When did our society become the servant of corporations, rather than being served by them?

I like to think Steinbeck really saw the courage he portrayed in his writing. It was a vile and abusive power structure these people faced, are facing again, and to think they'd lose even their courage is not something I'd like to believe. Too hopeless. It could be that bleak. It is my hope the human spirit is stronger than the WalMart's and Halliburton's of the world. If not, with the next fall of civilization they will be erased, and viewed in the distant future as a very sick aberration, even if they aren't remembered by the names they work so hard to brand. Won't do us living now a flipping bit of good.

When it comes down to it, today's corporations are nothing more than a privatized bureaucracy. The conceit of the western world is certainly not unique, but how many really acknowledge we are governed at the whims of these privatized bureaucracies? "Oh no, we're free, more free than humans have ever been in the history of the world." say the ignorant. Bull-fucking-shit. Maybe a bit over 100 years ago we were a model of freedom, but certainly not now. We are much too timid to embrace actual freedom. We've freely chosen temporary safety, persecution of the other or weaker, and valued fat-ass comforts over freedom for much too long. It is so much easier to dismiss these thoughts as the ravings of a lunatic. If you are honest with yourself, maybe you'd find being a real lunatic would be more comfortable.