Columnist
The displacement of the Gulf Coast poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina recalls The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
In the novel, 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 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 adaptation of 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.”
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.