Moby Dick was very poorly written and John Steinbeck was a fraud. That these opinions of mine did not set well with some of my instructors as a literature major you may be able to imagine and caused me no little grief. But as to Steinbeck, my contributions to the Weedpatch Memorial Library pretty well covers my disaffection with his view of the Dust Bowl migration and the way his socialist views obscured what was really happening. For people who know nothing about life in the camps of that era and among people like the Joads but want to pontificate on the subject much in the way of the myth of the noble savage, I can only say you must know that kind of poverty without the benefit of Steinbeck’s silver spoon pedigree to understand.

Socialism has often proven to be the siren call to those who find it so easy to be on the side of the angels, as they construe such beings, while ignoring the grim realities of life. It is for this reason the universities are filled with those out of touch with reality even from the time of Emerson that know very little about such grim realities but taut socialism and have earned the pejorative appellation Ivory Tower.

These days what with socialism so well entrenched in the universities, their product schools, and throughout America and virtually half of Americans feeding at Caesar’s table drawing a government check in some fashion it has become downright heretical to speak against the early socialists like Steinbeck that promoted the idea everyone was owed a living rather than earning a paycheck. Utopian ideals were placed in the hands of politicians who promised everyone a chicken in every pot and a living without having to earn their own way, and those that took advantage of the ignorance and desperation of the Dust Bowl migrants were easy targets of socialists like Steinbeck. It’s easy to hate those that take advantage of others, but not so easy to place blame on those who look to politicians to take from the productive to feed the unproductive.

My having been born in Weedpatch some of my earliest memories include bigotry, prejudice, and what the insults Okie and white trash meant. In too many instances of my own personal experience such insults were all too well earned, and the myth of the noble savage as abused by Steinbeck had no place among those who had to root hog or die, though the best of southern civilized good manners were still to be found. But the false idealism advanced by socialists and the universities through pandering politicians has brought us to the place we are today, a place where slave labor from Mexico is used for “Work Americans won’t do!”

It was easy for Henry Thoreau to fault those that built pyramids for “some ambitious booby” calling such workers “degraded,” and to compare such an Egyptian temple to the United States Bank. “It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter.” To bring Henry’s estimate up to date, we must include beer as well. Henry went on to say, “For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them,—who were above such trifling.”

But trade cursing everything it touches, as Henry pointed out, and when there is a living to be made people adjust to whatever is required of them. Henry’s fault was in failing to acknowledge the fact that people “degrade” themselves to menial tasks when there is no other way of putting food on their tables. He was astute enough to plant beans, to learn what beans could teach him when it came to providing the necessities of life but was not himself in danger of starving whether he planted beans or not. And that is a very significant difference, the kind of difference that made Steinbeck a fraud.

If our measure of success as a nation is that Steinbeck’s success has been the supplanting of Okies with Mexican slave labor from which he and his family profited then where is the advantage to America? As a symbol, The Grapes of Wrath aided in large part by the film was spectacularly successful. That these are socialist propaganda conveniently sidesteps the larger issues of what has taken the place of honest labor Americans not only used to do, but is now denied them by welfare or the inability to speak Spanish.

Nothing can take away from Steinbeck’s honor due his artistic ability as evidenced by both his Pulitzer and Nobel. As a lover of great literature, as a writer and author I fully appreciate his artistry and find no fault in that. But I’m acutely aware of the prevailing attitude of the better classes of Steinbeck’s era, one in which socialism was gaining in strength advanced by the universities of America. But today, I think of Al Gore’s praise by the very same kind of people who were heaping praise on Steinbeck. Al has both an Oscar and a Nobel, but these do not make him an honorable or truthful man cleaving steadfastly to the truth.

As those on the side of the angels sing the praises of the dignity of labor while damning the exploiters of the common man, I’m reminded of the German fellow I knew while working as a machinist that told me, “We were starving until Hitler came to power; and when he took over we had meat and potatoes.”

There has never been a more successful symbol of power than that of Hitler’s design of the black, white, and red Swastika flag that even today evokes a visceral response in anyone seeing it. No one of any sensibility would compare such a symbol equated with the ruthless power of evil to The Grapes of Wrath or An Inconvenient Truth. But when any symbol comes to represent “vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter” it serves us well to question the value and aim of such a symbol and question the real motives of those bestowing the honors on the creators of such symbols.