Things are very bad. Very—very bad. Unemployment is high, bankruptcy, crime and failure are high too. People are losing their homes, their jobs, themselves. Treachery is also high. If things are very—very bad, then we know to be very—very afraid. Iran and North Korea are striking forward for nuclear weapons. Terrorists are waiting on every corner. The end of days, as we're lead to believe, is scheduled on a calender. It is more than likely that Judgment Day is in the works too. On top of global warming we have free radicals and cancer to worry about, plus unfavorable legislation in congress. In short, we're all fixin' to die and in the most horrific way.
Yet, I wonder, have we not been in this death process already? Has not the lead up to this moment been, in fact, a slow long-winded beginning demise?
We're stricken with drought over the past several years. Yes, droughts in the fields and on Wall Street. Foreclosure rates and economic slumps are the walls of the modern day rut, right? This is the impression I get when I read the newspapers, or when I see news broadcasts. It's like we're outside the palace walls in the immensity of hell, and this hell is the new Dust Bowl.
Yes, the new Dust Bowl.
Coming up in the 1970s as I did, we learned about the dust bowl in school, in history class. Our current affairs: the bludgeoning human population as a staggering 4 billion, mixed with the drought in California; bent over the hostages in Iran, inflation and the notion that the earth was actually cooling with the development of the next ice age within our lifetimes. Current events.
For some reason, I took solace in our classroom discussion of the dust bowl. You see, the dust bowl of the great depression of the 1930s was bad, bad indeed, but somehow not as bad as our current (1970s) problems. And somehow the problems of the 1970s seem fairly easily tackled next to the problems of today.
Primo Levi in his novel The Monkey's Wrench hit this piece of human nature: “How obstinate is the optical illusion that always makes out neighbor's troubles look less severe and his job more lovable!” Well, in this model, why do the problems of our past, individually or collectively, seem simpler than the problems at hand?
And furthermore, who thinks about the dust bowl anymore?
A couple of my favorite books, and there are many more, of the 1930s: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and James Hilton's Lost Horizon. Why would they be favorites? Well, they're both anthems of bad times. Steinbeck takes on the dust bowl; fruit pickers, Okies, power struggles and poverty. It's a 1937 account of a really bad time. It's real. It's the story of so many more than just the Joad clan. It's alarm, it's pain, it's sweet, it's Steinbeck.
On the other side of the pond, four years prior in 1933, Englishman James Hilton delighted readers of the entire English speaking world with Lost Horizon. This novel gives us, and more especially the readers of the 1930s, an account of adventure and the possibility of ever-lasting life in Shanghai-La. It's not exactly fantasy, but in 1933, the year it hit the shelves and the best seller list, the book provided readers with a pleasurable escape. Now, some 80 years later, only one of these books endured. Perhaps we like the conflict of the bad times, the ones we ought to remember. Perhaps it is something more tragic indeed, something I like to suggest: yesterday's problems just don't seem so bad compare to those of today.
I digress.
We were discussing current thought, governments and civilization. We were talking of the middle east. We were talking high unemployment, rising food costs and environmental concerns here at home. We were singing the ballads for the good times.
At the onset of this new Dust Bowl, who are our literary heroes? Who are the writers that come 2092 will give future readers insight and rest and leave of future current problems? Who?
Cruising the best seller lists I see espionage and adolescent vampires. It's odd stuff. TV has gone reality and reality has mimicked TV. The cellular has gone far beyond phones, it has gone to thought. We need it, whatever it is, as long as it's 140 characters or less. And still outside individual tunnel vision, our world has an ever-increasing population, our country has an ever-increasing problem with debt and poverty both economically and intellectually. We are slowly racing for the new Dust Bowl, and from it, hopefully new thoughts and views and ideas will sprout from the dust blown, sun caked dirt of our current thoughts. And when thought arrives, so will rain and perhaps we'll bloom. Yet in the meantime, it's the approach of the end, and awaiting, eagerly, awaiting the Dust Bowl.
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