Our Modern-Day
'Grapes of Wrath'
By Les Payne
12 September, 2005
Newsday
The alienation of the poor of New Orleans
prior to the hurricane is as much a calamity as the displacement of
this permanent underclass in the wake of Katrina's floodwaters.
It took this force
of nature to expose for all the world the man-made myth of Crescent
City harmony. This yarn had N'alins as a racial jambalaya synchronized
by cool jazz, brotherhood and mint juleps. The drinks on Bourbon Street,
it seeped out last spring, cost blacks nearly twice as much as white
imbibers. Still, the lumpen-proletarians of the 67 percent African-American
majority lived tucked away in the suppressed squalor of the ghetto wards.
The terrible winds
of Katrina drove the invisible black masses out into plain view. God
knows too many of them died. Others scribbled and waved flags atop their
flooded rooftops as the lucky ones got rescued and huddled together
in the Superdome.
It is a given that
most of the alienated in New Orleans would be black. Granted, it is
the birthplace of the blues, the whites and the beige, the Creoles,
the Cajuns and a half-dozen shades of mulatto-roons. Still, this flooded
urban cup is America. In this partying town, for example, only the poor
blacks of the racial bouillabaisse have been excluded from Mardi Gras.
Traditionally, they are barred from the bigoted crews that build the
gaudy floats as a Gomorrah excuse for springtime debauchery in the French
Quarter. It's been swept away, this Mardi Gras, along with the gambling
boats that plied the Mississippi draining rent money from the suckers.
This displacement
of the poor recalls "The Grapes of Wrath" as written by novelist
John Steinbeck. The farming Joads of Oklahoma have been uprooted by
tractors during the Great Depression and make their way to California
seeking fruit-picking jobs.
Their creaky jalopy
joins an endless caravan of the dispossessed streaming as far as the
eye can see toward the golden hills of California. As poor as they might
have been in Oklahoma, the Joads loved the land and departed with great
reluctance. The grandfather dies en route and the father shortly afterward
as the family meets extraordinary hostility and endures.
President George
W. Bush was introduced to the film "The Grapes of Wrath" as
a student at the Harvard Business School, where he got admitted on his
family's name. "I wanted to give the class a visual reference for
poverty and a sense of historical empathy," macroeconomics professor
Yoshi Tsurumi told a researcher for Kitty Kelley's book, "The Family:
The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty."
"George Bush
came up to me and said, 'Why are you going to show us that commie movie?'"
Tsurumi recalled. "I laughed because I thought he was kidding,
but he wasn't. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss
the Depression and how he thought it affected people. [Bush] said, 'Look,
people are poor because they are lazy.' A number of students pounced
on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics.
He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside."
The incident and
a semester of exposure burned into Tsurumi's memory a disturbing view
of the future president. "His strong prejudices soon set him apart....
Most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or
unprincipled. George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion,
with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility
and unconcerned with the welfare of others."
The Harvard professor's
recollection of his "abysmal" student is not inconsistent
with what we have since learned about Bush as president. How else could
a sitting president remain deafeningly silent on vacation for four days
as a major city was destroyed by the greatest natural disaster ever
to hit the continental United States?
In a public relations
attempt to obscure the wasteland that is their eldest son's heart, Bush
41 and his wife, Barbara, took to the hustings last week to do damage
control. Instead, the mother served only to reveal the maternal link
to the president's view of the less well-off. Gazing upon the flood-displaced
poor in the Astrodome who had been bused penniless from their homes
in New Orleans with barely the clothes on their backs, the president's
mother saw only Texas hospitality.
"Almost everyone
I've talked to says, 'We're going to move to Texas,'" she said.
"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to
stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so
many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway, so this," she said with a chuckle, "this is working
very well for them."
Steinbeck must have
recoiled in his grave.
© 2005 Newsday,
Inc.