The Grapes of Wrath at 75

John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his great American novel about the people of the Dust Bowl migration, in 1939, 75 years ago.  It was controversial from day one.   While 450,000 copies sold in the first year, critics called Steinbeck a Communist, and accused him of exaggerating or falsifying both the Joad family’s suffering and the cruelty of farmer owners, bankers and government. Kern County officials, where the Joad family ends up in the novel, banned the book from their libraries and schools.  It was publicly burned in Bakersfield and in Steinbeck’s home town of Salinas.

But it could not be silenced.  President Franklin Roosevelt talked about the novel in a weekly Fireside Chat, and made the Joad family sound like real people, like the over half a million real people that did flee Oklahoma’s drought to California’s supposed paradise.  First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt actually referred to the novel before her husband did (she often led the way) in her weekly column, My Day.  After reading the book she went on a fact finding tour of the migrant camps and returned to tell both her husband and the Senate that the book was accurate. 

“Yes,” she said, “it is coarse in spots, but life is coarse in spots.  I know it to be true.” 

Sounds so familiar. An environmental disaster caused in part by corporate greed and water wars. Thousands of people on the move.  A polarized political climate, and a “blame the victim” mentality toward poverty.  A president challenged by international military conflict trying to lift the victims of a disastrous economic crisis.

It’s good to be reminded that a book can make such a difference.    Mercifully the Roosevelts were readers.  As is Obama.   I take some comfort in a literate President.  Maybe it’s time for Obama to join in the Big Read, a program sponsored by our National Endowment for the Arts (our tax dollars at work!) that encourages communities to read the same book and reflect on it together.

Recently that Big Read was The Grapes of Wrath on the occasion of its 75^th anniversary.  The NEA provided great resources, including this program.

Here’s just a bit of that transcript: a quotation from the novel and some comments.  Better yet, read it again, especially if you, like me, only read it in high school.  We read a lot of Steinbeck in high school here in the US, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Red Pony.  Great books all.  But even better when read as an adult, a voter. 

And then suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways.  The movements changed them: the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them.  The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them.  They were migrants.  And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them – hostility that made the little towns group and arms as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people […]

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads […] The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.  And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling.  On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food.  And the anger began to ferment.

From the NEA program:

Jay Parini: It’s a great American novel for many reasons.  First of all, its subject is America at a moment of crisis.  It’s a great epic of the American landscape.

Richard Rodriguez: It was never the story we expected.  It was the story of people who did not quite make it in America.  It’s about that story in America that gets repressed over and over again, the losers in America.

Susan Shillinglaw: That’s the book that speaks for the homelessness and the poverty and the suffering of so many people and that said it; it gave a voice to people suffering.

Susan Straight: It’s this huge American story about loss and violence and land and it’s always about family.

Thom Steinbeck: I think it has to do with grace and power under pressure.  You don’t know what people are capable of until they’re put into the crucible of disaster.

Crisis, landscape, losers, suffering, family, grace and power.  So American.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

Marathons: Born to Run

Tens of thousands of Americans will hit the road this coming week.  Literally.  Not in their cars, but in their running shoes. 

Big Sur International Marathon Bixby BridgeOver 35,000 will run the Boston Marathon on Monday.  A mere 4500 have signed up for Sunday’s Big Sur International Marathon in California, but another 10,000 take part in auxiliary walk events along the Big Sur coast.  These two are perhaps the premier US marathons.  East Coast and West, the two events highlight some of the differences between our two coasts.

The East Coast is old and historic, looking back across the Atlantic to Europe.  The Boston Marathon is always held on Patriots Weekend, a huge historic celebration of the Battle of Lexington and Concord that opened the Revolutionary War in 1776. The race itself is the oldest marathon of the modern era, run each year since 1897, after the 1896 Olympics revived the race.   Boston is in the heavily populated northeast corridor, and the race goes through many populous suburbs and ends in downtown skyscrapered Boston.  This year a million people, double the usual, will watch and cheer along the route.

Bixby BridgeThe West is all about open space.  Its cities are newer, the population younger and more diverse. Looking west across the Pacific (hence the use of “International” in the name?), the Big Sur Marathon, consistently voted “Best Destination Marathon,” is a course completely coastal and rural, never more than a few hundred feet from the sea, with granite cliffs plunging to crashing waves. These marathoners hear the starting gun in tiny redwooded Big Sur and cross the finish line in quaint Carmel-By-the Sea.  Few family and fans make it down the closed-off highway to cheer on the runners.  It’s pretty quiet except the waves.  The race’s motto is “Running on the Rugged Edge of the Western World.”

I wrote last April about the Boston Marathon and about the Church of the Finish Line, Old South Church, and what it was like when two pressure cooker bombs went off at the finish line, killing 3 and horribly maiming over 250.  This year many ceremonies and stories are marking that anniversary, while the trial of the accused suspect, Chechen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, proceeds even more slowly than some of the runners.

Security will be tight at both races, but there’s something about races and runners that defies any attempt at control or caution.  Runners run; it’s sort of crazy really, to run 26 miles.  There are marathon runners who have done 1000 marathons. One guy did 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. 

Boston patriot Paul Revere was not just a hero of the war; he was one of the first crazy runners.  (Well actually, rider – allow me some artistic license here.)  I wonder if Boston kids still memorize (as I had to) “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem about that famous warning ride the night before that battle, which begins:

“Twas the 18^th of April in ‘75
And hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his men, “If the British march,
By land or sea from the town tonight,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the Old North Church as a signal light.
One if by land and two if by sea
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm
For the country folk to be up and to arm…”

A pianist playing at the end of the Bixby BridgeI am not a marathoner, but I have completed both the 12 mile and 21 mile walks that are part of the Big Sur race events.  I’ve never been to the Boston Marathon, but I’m sure it’s fun and inspiring and filled with wild and crazy people.

But I tend to think another feature of the West Coast is a wilder and more crazy spirit than those East Coasters.

Some of my favorite moments along the Big Sur Marathon route are:

• As you cross historic Bixby Bridge, seeing and hearing the tuxedo-clad guy at the grand piano.  (He mostly plays the theme from Chariots of Fire, over and over.)
• The Taiko drummers whose insistent beat helps power you up the killer hill to Hurricane Point.
• The sexy and raunchy Big Sur Native belly dancers and their band at mile 24 who cheer you on that last tiring stretch.
• The residents of Carmel Highlands who hand out fresh strawberries as you pass through their little town.
• The grey whales that sometimes surface and give you an encouraging smelly blow as you both move north in parallel.
• Hearing your name and your time called as you cross the finish line.

Both marathons always take place in April, but this year they are only 6 days apart, Monday and Sunday.  400 folks have signed up to run both, in what’s called the B2B.  And 400 is the limit; many more wanted to, especially this year, to show support for Boston, and their motto, “Boston Strong.”  These runners show that the coasts aren’t really that different, that many of us are bi-coastal, and that one of the best things about marathons is that there is no loneliness of the long distance runner.  We all run together.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

Outlaw Country

Willie Nelson is 80 years old and lives in Maui.

The iconic “outlaw country” music star of the 70s and 80s is on the road again.  I know this because he’s been in my neighborhood this week.  I didn’t see him in concert here at Carmel’s Sunset Center – just felt like too much money, $120 a ticket, and the audience of rich retirees would not be as raunchy and sad sweet as Willie.  My husband, also born in 1933 (my husband and Willie Nelson are the same age?!) didn’t see him the next day at the Greek Theater on the UC Berkeley campus, where he spent the weekend.  But our daughter and her boyfriend did see Willie earlier this week at UC Davis.

Talk about reinventing yourself.  Willie’s on the road again, but this time in busses fueled with bio diesel.  When he’s not at his off the grid solar-powered compound in Maui, he promotes his “Bio-Willie” fuel at truck stops and in his book (Willie wrote a book!) “On the Clean Road Again.”

“Clean” as in fuel.  Willie’s never been clean as in polished or nice or even sober.  He’s been an active advocate of the legalization of marijuana for years, co-President of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.)  His other recent book (Willie the author!) is called “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.” There’s a great YouTube video  of him performing that song at a big smoky NORML concert and he introduces it with “I’ve got a new gospel tune for you.”

Willlie’s not “clean “ in the music sense either.  “Outlaw Country” is a music genre he practically invented, along with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, to challenge the polished, formulaic and conservative Nashville sound and lyrics.  Willie is scruffy and rebellious.  He’s been busted a few times for dope.  And he got a $32 million bill from the IRS tax folks a few years ago.  You’re supposed to pay taxes, Willie.  Turns out he had bad accountants, but he bought aggressive lawyers, made a best selling double album, “The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories,” that paid them back, and is now well, on the road again.

He’s doing a fundraising concert later this month for Texas outlaw-type gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, the pro-choice single mother state representative who filibustered the legislature for 12 hours last year to stop an anti-abortion law (later enacted on a technicality.)  She said, “I love listening to Willie Nelson.  There’s something about his voice that pulls at your emotions.  He’s certainly seen his fair share of troubles, but he just keeps rolling.”  Willie’s been an advocate for marriage equality, anti-war, he started the FarmAid concerts.  We’ll see how much his name helps Davis in her David vs Goliath campaign against the Rick Perry “old boys” of the Lone Star State.

I’m not a huge county music fan, but it’s hard not to like On the Road Again, You Were Always on My Mind, Crazy (which he wrote as a young man, better known as Patsy Cline’s song), Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys. 

Willie did a great self-parody of “Mammas, Don’t Let….” as a public service announcement for the Texas Department of Transportation.  It was part of a campaign called “Don’t Mess With Texas.”  Which was not about gun rights or anti-immigration laws or anything you would associate with red-necked Texas.

It was an anti-littering ad campaign.  20 years ago, Texas realized it was spending over $20 million a year cleaning up highway litter, and studies showed it was mostly pickup truck driving young men who were to blame.  Over the protests of nice garden club ladies who wanted something more polite, the ad agency came up with “Don’t Mess with Texas” and enlisted all kinds of bad boys and girls to promote it.  (A focus group tried to have them add “please” at the end of the phrase.)

Willie’s spot was the most popular, won awards for best ad of the year. Sitting in the middle of a highway, strumming his guitar, he sings:

Mammas, tell all your babies, don’t mess with Texas.
Don’t let em throw cans from those old pickup trucks,
Don’t let em throw bottles and papers and stuff.
Mammas, tell all your babies don’t mess with Texas,
Keep your trash off the road,
She’s a fine yellow rose,
Treat Texas like someone you love.

Every ad maker dreams that their slogan will outlive the product.   “Don’t Mess With Texas” has become a macho, secessionist battle cry that’s the opposite of what Willie and Waylon and Wendy want for the Lone Star State.  Keep on truckin’ Willie.

My daughter said Willie was great in concert, and the reviews are good too.  He plays with his two sons, from his fourth marriage, they are in their 20’s.  She said she teared up twice – once when Willie sang a duet with his sons about death, and once when Willie sang Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

Willie spent time signing autographs after the concert and Norah got one, on the only piece of paper she had with her, a study guide to the Great Depression, for her graduate courses in how to teach high school American History.  I said she should get Willie to come to her high school class and talk about the last 80 years of American history, from his birth to poor laborers in Texas during that same Depression up to his biofuel work today in Maui and on the road.

That’s a real American.  Don’t mess with Willie.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

US Supreme Court: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Level Playing Field

A “level playing field” is generally considered a good thing. In sports, it means that a team wins because it has more skill, not because the other team had to run uphill all game. It’s also used metaphorically; in the game of life, in business or employment, access to education or elected office, a “level playing field” means that everyone has equal access and opportunity. There are no hidden, unfair advantages, no way to rig the game.

It’s a popular promise made by politicians, to level the field, and it sounds sort of American. After all we call ourselves the “Land of Opportunity.”

But the US Supreme Court said this week that they don’t care about level playing fields when it comes to elections. Ruling in a predictable 5-4 split, they rejected the current dollar limits on what an individual can donate to a candidate. They reaffirmed previous rulings that money is a form of free speech, protected by the First Amendment; to give someone money is a form of self-expression. To restrict what people can give to candidates denies free speech.

If Sheldon Adelson, billionaire gambling mogul and pro-Israel fanatic, wants to give Newt Gingrich $15 million and then Mitt Romney $30 million, as he did last election, he is just exercising his free speech rights. Last weekend every possible Republican candidate went to Las Vegas to bow down and worship Adelson, not because he might write them a check, but to give him a chance to exercise the First Amendment.

“The Court therefore found no merit in arguments calling for a level playing field or evening the financial resources available to candidates. The five justices voting in the majority put it this way: ‘The First Amendment prohibits such legislative attempts to “fine-tune” the electoral process, no matter how well intentioned.’”

That’s from Forbes Magazine’s analysis of the ruling, not The Daily Worker. The business community can get out their checkbooks along with everyone else.

(Another depressing thought: these Republican appointed justices are going to be around for a long time; they are relatively young. All the women – three! - voted in the minority. But Bush left us the gift that keeps on giving; these guys will be ruling, I guess you call it “making” rulings, but it feels like ruling, for decades to come.)

I wrote about sports last week. Maybe that’s why I noticed the phrase “level the playing field” in so many reports about the Supreme Court decision (and what it didn’t do.) Like a lot of sports analogies and sports phrases in our language, it’s colorful, but doesn’t quite make sense. I mean don’t most teams change sides at the half, so if there were a better or worse side it would be shared?

I went to high school in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and our playing field was anything but level. It was the bottom section of the ski slope (yes, skiing was one of our sports.) I played wing, both in soccer and field hockey, same field. But we didn’t call the position left or right wing. We called it uphill or downhill wing. But it changed at half time. I wasn’t very good, and lots of balls sailed on down the hill to the far away creek. A level field would have made my job a lot easier.

Sports teams have surely wanted level playing fields since the days of the Caveman League. But surprisingly the phrase has only been used metaphorically since 1977, when a business journal quoted a lobbyist for the US Banking Association to the effect that competition between banks was great, as long as the playing field was level.

Now it seems like every pundit, politician and president promotes level fields. President Obama uses the image a lot as an argument for various social programs. (Another favorite image is the “social safety net” which I think refers to another crazy sport, tightrope walking. Perhaps more accurate; life for the poor and disenfranchised is like a terrifying tightrope, not a soccer match. Don’t make people live that life without a net.)

During the last election Mitt Romney criticized Obama’s use of the level field image, accusing Obama of wanting, not equal opportunity, but equal outcomes for that dreaded 45%, the moochers and takers. Romney raised a specter of a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort or willingness to take risk.” In a match between the makers and the takers, that socialist Obama would, according to Romney, just give the takers the trophy before the game even started.

It’s the myth cherished by the entitled, that “good sportsmanship” is all that’s needed, some effort and risk, but that equal access to the field is just not an issue. To slightly change the metaphor, if Obama has tried to unlock the doors to the big stadium filled with jobs and education, the justices keep putting up signs that say “private property” when it comes to where folks can play. Fields don’t need to be level and it would be even better if there were in private clubs where the 99% can be left out.

Paul Krugman had a good column in the NY Times a couple years ago about how uneven the playing field is in the US.

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

Last vaguely sports related metaphor about economic justice. I first heard it from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. “Don’t believe that old promise that a rising tide lifts all boats. Not if like most people, you don’t have a boat. The tide will drown you on shore.”

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter

American’s Two Favorite Pastimes: Sports and Money

Lots of sports news this week.  Baseball season opens!  Playoff berths just about set in professional basketball and hockey.  But the most dramatic sports news  came from America’s other favorite pastime besides sports – money, the money in sports.

The National Labor Relations Board in Chicago ruled for the first time that college football players at Northwestern are university employees and so they may organize into a union and negotiate for salary and benefits.

We have a sacred myth that our college athletes are amateurs.  They put in all those hours outside the classroom and wreck their bodies without any long term health insurance solely because of their love of the sport and how it builds character.  The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) has strict rules forbidding any payment or inducement or gift or bribe to those whom they love to call “student athletes” or to their families. 

But these young men and women’s thrill of victory and agony of defeat nets  millions of dollars for their coaches and schools.  Just the ever expanding TV coverage of games generates hundreds of millions of dollars: CBS/Turner Broadcasting pays the NCAA over $700 million a year for the TV rights to the basketball finals.  And now regional sport conferences are forming their own TV and cable networks with massive advertisement income.  

But the NLRB agreed with three Northwestern football players that their athletic scholarships were salary, based on the hours they work (up to 50 a week), and that the control exercised by coaches is akin to an employer.  “It cannot be said that the scholarship players are ‘primarily students,’” the ruling read.

The NCAA is being charged on several flanks with profiteering on the backs of unpaid players, corruption, exorbitant salaries, anti-trust -  just your basic good American business practice.

While this NLRB ruling may be overturned, it is widely seen as a historic beginning to the end of the NCAA’s monopoly and exploitation of slave, er student athletes.

In other sports news, this month (and a little of April) is called March Madness here in the US, the playoff season for college basketball.  Teams of so-called “student athletes,” compete all over the country in regional contests, from 64 teams to 32 to the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and the National Championship.  Even President Obama indulges in “bracketology” or as it’s called for him, “Barack – etology,” filling in his projected team winners (and in his case, sharing on national TV) on a blank grid of 64 lines telescoping down to two.  And then one.

This year, America’s 2^nd richest man Warren Buffet got into the bracket game, offering one billion dollars to anyone who correctly filled in each line. The fact that the odds of anyone winning were 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9 quintillion didn’t stop over fifteen million people from giving it a shot, as it were.  By the second round there were only 3 people out of 15 million that might have cashed Warren’s check, and by next round none.  That’s because of the “Cinderella” teams, the unknowns and upsets who foil the best predictors and guessers.  A great publicity stunt for his cosponsor, Quicken Loans.  But no payout required. 

But there will be, of course, a massive payout , not to athlete or bracketeer, but to the winning school, millions if not billions.  Accordingly to Forbes Magazine, a trip to the Final Four generates $9.5 million dollars for each team’s school, primarily from that precious TV contract, but also from happy alums.  No wonder many college basketball (and football) coaches make more money than the institution’s president.  Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski made $7.2 million last year.  (Too bad his team was eliminated in the first round.  I wonder if he’ll get a pay cut next year.)  His so-called boss, the university president, was paid $500,000.   Here’s a great graphic from Deadspin about the highest paid employee in each state.

Political cartoonist Joel Pett had a good take on the brackets and player’s unions this week.

Since sports fans love numbers so much, stats, ERAs and free throw percentage and shots on goal (pardon my sloppy conflating of so many different sports in this piece) – here’s one more disheartening number from the field of money ball, in this case, the unglamorous (no TV contract) sport of wrestling:

At Ohio State (where the football coach gets $4 million a year), the Athletic Director got a (measly?) $18,000 bonus this year, thanks to a 141 lb student athlete.  Buckeyes wrestler Logan Stieber won the NCAA championship in that weight class last week.  He didn’t get a dime.  But AD Gene Smith had an incentive clause in his contract that rewarded him for Logan’s hard work. 

Who says sports doesn’t develop character?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter