Big Rock Candy Mountain?
or The Grapes of Wrath?
for release 09-16-05
Washington D.C.
by Lightning Rod
Oh, I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
And the sleet don't fall
And the wind don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain listen here
Big Rock Candy Mountain is a hobo song. When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell me stories about the hobos. She said that they came around during the Great Depression. They were looking for work or handouts and they made marks on peoples houses to indicate to the next hobo where the food and work was. They were itinerant working people who were displaced by natural disaster (drouth) and economic hardship.
We have a million new hobos in our country now. They are the displaced from Louisiana and Mississippi by natural disaster. They are now spread across the country looking for odd jobs and handouts. This is a massive migration. The Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert on their migration and there were only 20,000 of them. This migration is a million people in a week. That's a lot of hobos.
Steinbeck in his epic novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the migration of the Joad family from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl disaster to California. You could think of it as a dry hurricane with relentless hot winds that ripped the topsoil from numberless small farms which had previously sustained numberless families.
Like the Joad family, the immigrants from New Orleans and Mississippi will face displacement and rude accommodations and exploitation and, as is customary, the poorest will bear the brunt of the misery. We have already seen this in New Orleans. Those who could afford it heeded the evacuation order but those who had no means to leave ended up in the concentration camps at the Super Dome and the Convention Center.
Finally George Bush swoops down in his jet and has his sleeves rolled up in a workmanlike way and tries to tell everybody that the government is going to be johnny-on-the-spot and we're sorry we didn't get here sooner but we were too busy trying to steal your money and fight our way out of a quagmire in Iraq.
The government had no choice but to issue some limp-wristed mea culpas because it was pretty obvious to anybody with a TV set that the poor souls in New Orleans had been left in squalor and disease and despair for nearly a week with little relief. But you see, these people were poor and mostly black. They were not a part of Gdub's fan base. Now if a disaster had struck at Halliburton Headquarters or Pat Robertson's church, you can bet that the first responders would have been there quicker than Jenna Bush can down a shot of Jose Cuervo.
The Poet's Eye sees that it would be wise of the government to split the refugees up and disperse them as quickly as possible. Like the labor camps in 1930's California, and like the Palestinian refugee camps in the 1950's and 60's, concentrations of displaced people tend to organize and start talking about terrible things like socialism and anarchy and jihad.
"Shows the dam bankers men that broke us and the dust that choked us, and comes right out in plain old English and says what to do about it.
"It says you got to get together and have some meetins, and stick together, and raise old billy hell till you get youre job, and get your farm back, and your house and your chickens and your groceries and your clothes, and your money back" --Woody Guthrie
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Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? They could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?
Tom Joad: Maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...
Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?
Tom Joad: I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.
Ma Joad: I don't understand it, Tom.
Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but - just somethin' I been thinkin' about.
Ma Joad: Rich folk come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep acoming, Pa, cus' we're the people that live.
---Dialogue from The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
