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Thursday
Evil is when you go out of your way to deprive the destitute of basic life necessities. This is a regular theme of the Hebrew prophets and of Jesus, as well as of world religions generally. In Isaiah’s famous passage about how there is no rest for the wicked (57, 58), God sets forth our responsibility. Is it not, the Lord rhetorically asks,
to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
One therefore reads with horror about the Trump administration destroying 500 tons of USAID emergency food rather than distributing it to hungry children. As the Atlantic recently reported,
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food–enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week–are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.
Those of you who have read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath can predict the episode I reference today. Concerned with the issue of food pricing, it contains the passages that most stuck in my mind when I read the novel in high school. To a child, seeing perfectly good food destroyed when people are starving appears an abomination:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit–and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
“The smell of rot fills the country,” Steinbeck writes before continuing on:
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
At this point Steinbeck channels Isaiah, Jeremiah and other Biblical prophets:
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates— died of malnutrition— because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
Then comes the grand finale, which contains the line that provides the novel with its title:
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Steinbeck borrows the apocalyptic “grapes of wrath” image from both John of Patmos’s Book of Revelation and Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Here’s the Biblical reference:
And another angel came out from the altar, who had power over fire, and he cried with a loud cry to him who had the sharp sickle, saying, “Thrust in your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for her grapes are fully ripe.” So the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.
There are other current day applications for Steinbeck’s novel. He mentions how the little farmers are getting squeezed out by the corporate farms, which have their own canneries and use their monopoly power to force bankruptcies (after which they buy out the small holdings). In our case, American farmers are being impacted both by tariff threats and by the vindictive cutbacks to foreign and domestic food aid programs.
The novel as a whole, meanwhile, is about farm laborers picking crops, which in the 21st century is mostly done by undocumented immigrants. With the Trump administration more interested in xenophobic posturing than in solving immigration issues, crops are going unpicked and are rotting in the fields. Here’s the comparable situation in Steinbeck’s novel:
And first the cherries ripen. Cent and a half a pound. Hell, we can’t pick ’em for that. Black cherries and red cherries, full and sweet, and the birds eat half of each cherry and the yellow jackets buzz into the holes the birds made. And on the ground the seeds drop and dry with black shreds hanging from them….
And the pears grow yellow and soft. Five dollars a ton. Five dollars for forty fifty-pound boxes; trees pruned and sprayed, orchards cultivated-pick the fruit, put it in boxes, load the trucks, deliver the fruit to the cannery–forty boxes for five dollars. We can’t do it. And the yellow fruit falls heavily to the ground and splashes on the ground. The yellow jackets dig into the soft meat, and there is a smell of ferment and rot.
Trump and the GOP have been relying on rural voters, but it’s an open question whether these will remain loyal in the face of severe economic downturn. Perhaps, like Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath, they are filling with anger and are “heavy for the vintage.”
The novel dramatically ends with Rose of Sharon playing the Good Samaritan by breastfeeding a starving stranger after having lost her baby. It is an action that the sociopathic Donald Trump and Elon Musk could never conceive, but Steinbeck believed that, in the end, care for the stranger would win out over self-absorption and greed. I end with Tom Joad’s stirring declaration, which envisions a future that communal action can bring about:
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 in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.
We’ve been through bleak times before and survived. No reason to stop fighting now.
