Sid's blog

“Just sitting in the sun, watching the Mississippi go by.”

Erskine Caldwell accuses readers, “you have seen their faces.” Written in the 30’s, as America was amidst her greatest recession, Caldwell brings images all too familiar to Americans to their coffee tables.

Heralded as a harbinger to the future of the publishing industry, one wonders are we capable of producing such memorable images of our times, consider the sheer breadth of the rich media we consume today? As I went through this .pdf, the age of the black ink all too apparent on my LED display, my iPad, streaming latetst photos from theGuardian databases lay across the table. Out rose ash from an Indonesian volcano. But before I could process, the software had moved to the next image: President Barack Obama addressing and meeting the victims of the horrific terrorist attacks in the seaside city of Mumbai, India.

Twenty seconds later, onto an Afghan woman south of Kabul, who jumped out of the window because she deemed living with her husband worse.

To lament a lost age, and getting nostalgic has its place. But really, we would not have it any other way. It is said that the information an average man consumed over his lifetime during the civil war is the same as an average New Yorker does in a week. And we like it.

Yet seeing those men sitting by the Mississippi, the sweat of the Great Depression dripping from their foreheads, one wonders in our need to know everything, we might loose out on remembering something. We rush too quickly to call something historic. Yet history, today, doesn’t merely move forward, it sprints. Sometimes too quickly for us to remember anything.
 

Want to live with a moral obligation every time we pass a bum on the street, a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards safely in our pocket?
Read Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing.

No, Tom ain’t homeless because he does not want to work. Neither is he because he is an alcoholic or a drug addict. His mind and heart seem in the right place, and believe me, he wouldn’t hurt you either.

He just can’t make ends meet. Yes, in the United States of America.
 
In the United States of America that was built on a promise: The promise of an opportunity to live without limitation, create one’s own destiny. The Indians were ousted, a country premised on freedom was built: “A frontier land where families had their own acres, own gun, own conscience,” in the words of New York Times columnist, Anand Giriharadas. 

Yet, the cold iron benches, the pouring rain, the filth and the constant hunger that accompanies our protagonist, forcing Kromer to literally wait for nothing and take comfort in the emptiness and morbidity of it all, run parallel to what our subconscious has been conditioned to think.
When else, even amidst the media blitz our lives occur, have we experienced such travesty of the human life. For example, when the man in the missionpops himself with a gun, the narrator writes, “After a guy bumps himself off, he doesn’t have any more troubles. Everything is all right with him” (42) Death seems a relief; a pleasant aberration after the wallows of what is life for Kromer and his ilk.

No wonder this book is hard to find. Even Google, a crusader of free information, doesn’t carry it in its online catalogue. I wonder why.  

It is said that the literary press just didn’t get John Steinbeck. He seemed all over the place.

But Warren French, in his Reference Guide to American Literature, maintains that the diversity found in Steinbeck’s work is a consistently “developing vision of man’s relation to environment.” In that sense, he reckons, Steinbeck was a Modernist, citing Maurice Beebe’s definition of modernist sensibility, as defined by “its irony, its implicit admiration for verbal precision and understatement." 

In 2010, in a school like Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, we take it for granted the freedom granted to us by the legacy of the Modernists, Steinbeck included.

Take my story. Raised in India post-liberalization, in a country crashing head-first into globalization, I was raised to have an inherent distrust of the Government. After all, the Government got us in a place where no longer the country could afford the Government. So poor was India in 1990 that we had to mortgage our gold reserves to secure supplies of food, lest the country starved. In the following years, as India opened up, it seemed change could not happen fast enough.

And boy, India changed. I, raised amidst cities sprouting, roads filling up with cars and Indians getting more confident, had little empathy for the public services. When finally Oliver Stone’s Wall Street came to our cable channel, India collectively chanted, “greed is good.”
 
But soon, the Indian story became inevitability. As urban India began settling in its newfound prosperity, I came to New York in 2007. A New York, in the words of Hans Van Der Broek, protagonist of Joseph O’ Neil’s bestselling novel, making a million bucks “was essentially a question of walking down the street — of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat.”

A year later, it would all crash.
 
Greed ain’t longer good, if you ask me. If it wasn’t for the modernists, and I’d write novels for a living, the critics wouldn’t have given me a dime.

Thank God for 2010.

What is about recessions, bleak times, that sometimes it spawns the best in us?

Think the Federal Writers Project in the 1930’s under the Works Progress Administration.
Now, think of the additional $ 50 million funding to the National Endowment of the Arts included in the American recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
 

Much of the National Endowment remains controversial though. The Endowment, dedicated to “supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education,” has its fair share of detractors. 

In 1981,when he entered office, President Reagan took it upon himself to abolish the Endowment over a three-year period. In 1989, David Wildmon, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson, prominent conservative figures, attacked Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ for anti-christ bigotry. Fellow photographer’s, Robert Mapplethorpe, exhibit at the Corcoran Exhibition of Art was cancelled due to the same reasons.
   
Conservative media only increased attacks in subsequent years. The NEA Four, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes,had their grants vetoed by the then chairman, John Frohnmayer because it was deemed controversial. Finley took the Endowment to the Supreme Court, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. The court stated in its judgment, “the NEA Chairperson shall ensure that artistic excellence and artistic merit are the only criteria by which applications are judged.

More recently, under President Obama, conservative blogger Yosi Sergant alleged that the Endowment was directing artists to create works of art promoting President Barack Obama's domestic agenda, shedding new light into the Endowment.
 

But history, sometimes, can show us the future. The Federal Writers project was not without its critics, including W.H Auden. But the writers produced an impressive 275 books, 700 pamphlets, and many other writings like leaflets, radio scripts, and transcripts, including “America Eats,” and the American Guide Series.

Maybe when the dark clouds hovering our economic future clears up, who knows, we might have art, a legacy of our life and times.

That is an ideal worth achieving. 

Much has been said of Annie Leibovitz’s ad campaign for Louis Vuitton starring Bono and his wife, Ali Hewson. Most of which has been outright derision, aghast at toting 1000$ bags in the African savannah, a place of abject poverty.

The past few years have seen a democratization of international travel. The travel infrastructure that existed in America, built in the 30’s, now has been replicated elsewhere. Information is ubiquitous too. A Google search is all it takes sometimes to find an inside scoop that could shave off a few extra dollars. Also, we not only know more about the world, we know more about each other too. If Victoria backpacked around Europe after University, Elizabeth wants to backpack South America.    

More people travel. And as numbers have gone up, the industry has moved on from being a relatively niche one to a mass market one. Think of a modern airline. Airlines try and squeeze in as many seats in mostly an all-economy configuration, while consumers use website that survey the Internet for the cheapest fare.

Did anyone say the destination was the journey itself? Trying telling that to you on a layover in Denver, sandwiched in a crowded terminal, only awaiting to be packed like sardines in a Southwest A330.

This is the very reason that the Louis Vuitton initiative needs to be celebrated. Think of the greatest journeys in life. They are often ones that you undertake because you simply can. Not because you have to. You just want to.

This isn’t a lament against budget travel. Just that the scorn most see luxury travel with is unnecessary. It is an ideal worth achieving. I realized this a few weeks ago on an Airbus 380 flying business on a free upgrade from Dubai to New York. Having made my way through security, immigration and boarding, finally the plane took off. After the meal service, the lights turned off, I relaxed on the 180 degree recline.

I closed my eyes. Only to open them a few seconds later to a nightsky with a thousand twinkling stars. Maybe it wasn’t real, but 37, 000 feet up, what is real and what isn’t?

Food is constantly a theme in the Joad family's cross-country migration in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. 

Much of casual dining and fast food happened in the relative prosperity of the post-war and the boomer years, but the seeds were sown when the great interstate infrastructure was created in the 1930’s. Think Hackney’s, Big Boy, Shoney’s, Steak and Shake, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Jack in the Box, and we see the beginnings of the standardization of the food industry. In 1940 came McDonalds and gave United States one of its most iconic brands worldwide.

Americana expanded, franchise after franchise. The empire to exercise power in the world was passé.

Think of Big Boy. Who hasn’t been on the road in the Midwest for thirty minutes and not come across the chubby boy in red- and- white checked overalls? Or a few drinks down, found the tongue salivating for the Big Boy sandwich? Started by Bob Wian in Glendale, CA, it spawned Shoney’s. Andrew Schoenbaum, the franchisee of the restaurant in Southeastern United States, broke away in 1947 to form the chain. And the revolution went full steam ahead.

While road trippin’ the USA as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze the remarkable infrastructure that exists on American interstate highways. Steinbeck’s America was a different one, but the ideal was the same. As Amelia mentions in her blog post, the food prepared on the road was the same as the one back home in Oklahoma, Americans, perhaps, love the idea of home, of a palette uniformly diverse. A country built on road, of commuters and the truckers, one could trust the next interstate exit, whether for gas, sleep or food. 
  
As the 90’s came and the United States ushered in an era of prosperity unheard in human history, increased standardization brought efficiencies, but also made it too ubiquitous and cheap to be desirable. As American excesses were exposed in its foreign policy, high deficits and burgeoning obesity levels, much of its iconic food industry began to symbolize this era. Rather unfortunate that, sometimes, the genius of American food industry gets mired with the times we live in.

But ask those on the dark, open road for hours, miles away from home, Christmas lights twinkling from the nearest exit, there ain’t no December dinner like a Cracker Barrel one. Washed down with Jack Daniels, of course.

In order to be deemed successful, progress needs to be striking or, at the very least, present on paper. Yet in terms of a man’s lifespan, society moves forward, sluggishly so though. As a result, youthful idealism turns into adult cynicism and disillusionment with man’s capacity for change. Indeed, humans often quit trying to change their surroundings because as the obstacles increase, so does the sense of the futility of the goal. Nevertheless, some do not give in to disenchantment, as is the case with Tom Joad of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Tom is placed in a dire situation wherein he must fight hunger and abuse. And he goes beyond the realms of his individual suffering, and reaches out to the plight of other migrants.

Although Tom starts out as a pragmatist, his character evolves into a revolutionary who considers the situation from a simplified perspective. Coming out of prison, Tom is portrayed as a man who is “jus’ puttin’ one foot in front a the other”. Even the way he acts when returning to his family attests that: instead of highlighting his arrival and expecting excitement, he simply waits for his father to recognize that his son has returned from jail. Gradually Steinbeck imbues his protagonist with impatience and a sense of injustice. Soon Tom’s pride takes over as he insists that “we still go where we want, even if we got to crawl for the right”. His growing awareness of his value as a human forms him into the person he is at the end: someone who chooses a moral path that involves the defense of the migrants. He states “wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there”, and his proclamation’s appeal to basic human needs and emotions such as hunger and fear, as well as its repetitive sentence structure all attest to his desire to fight for the rights of his class.
 
While Tom’s refusal to pretend to be “bull-simple" as well as his willingness to risk being blacklisted in his fight for his peoples’ dignity are honorable, his methods for doing so are nevertheless simplistic; his biggest potential error is his selective application of Pastor Casy’s idea of the “great big soul”. Tom calls for segregation, saying, “throw out cops that ain’t our people”, thus introducing an ill-conceived plan that asks Tom to differentiate between his “people” and California natives. But how does one separate the oppressors from the oppressed when California’s residents are also, to some extent, victims of the very migrants that Tom so tirelessly defends? Nevertheless, his willingness to submit himself to the potential consequences of his actions, such as hunger, and in the worst case, death, showcase a selflessness that is not apparent in the other migrants, whose bleak situation has rendered them apathetic and resigned to their circumstances.