From Existentialist Cowboy: How Steinbeck 'Predicted' a Decline and Fall of America

The great motion picture --The Grapes of Wrath --was all about the disastrous, often heart-breaking loss of jobs that began with the incompetent if not evil policies of a GOP administration, that of Herbert Hoover. Interestingly Hoover was the last of parade of three GOP Presidents who preceded him. Those presidents were Harding, Hoover and Coolidge (not necessarily in that order). The GOP OWNS its creation: the GREAT DEPRESSION.

Daring to tell the truth about the Great Depression and the GOP which created it earned John Steinbeck numerous death threats, an FBI investigation, and --to be expected of the nation's moronic/crooked right wing --charges of 'Communist sympathy', charges that were never proven. They were not proven because they were not true! However, the actions of the GOP/right wing define them thus: 1) they are liars who know their 'economic policies' are disingenuously conceived and promoted; i.e the GOP knows its hooey but does not care; 2) they GOP are ruthless proving that they will rig elections in order to seize power.

In the meantime, we have no choice but to exercise free speech until it is denied us by a tyrant. We narrowly survived one recently --George W. Bush who might have parlayed a success in Iraq into a 'triumph' perhaps with laurel wreaths had things turned out as the GOP had believed, hoped they would. That the GOP is utterly incompetent may very well be the only thing that works in our favor. And --what if they had been? Are we not guaranteed freedom of speech and, by extension, the freedom of conscience that inspires it?

Not surprisingly, it was an Oklahoma Congressman who labeled John Steinbeck's novel --The Grapes of Wrath' a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript”. Nevertheless, it remains one of America's great novels, one of America's great motion pictures starring Henry Fonda. Predictably, the GOP despises it because it told the truth and depicted it realistically.

Tragically, a 'sub-stratum', i.e, the right wing inclined, had refused to evolve, progress, grow or, in any way, transcend a disastrous mental constipation that has --it seems --forever retarded our nation's best but utterly lost dreams and better aspirations. One fears that America will be remembered as Rome is remembered, that is, as a repressive, failed, cruel empire.

Full Story and original post: http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-steinbeck-predicted-decline-and.html