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Popular Culture Review
sagely replied “by gad, she’d better.” There’s the solemn old belle of Amherst,
playful, poignant, dreading, weary: “because I could not stop for death, he
kindly stopped for me”—the reductio ad absurdum of consumer culture,
imperialism, and the rat race, along with the rats who n\n (and rig) it, from
Calvinist faith-plus-good-works start to Weberian iron cage finish.
Finally, it is the voice of Preacher Casy, imparting wisdom in the guise
of paternal yet egalitarian advice to young Tom Joad, thirsting for both
righteousness and redemption, plus an end to the endless dust bowl horizon that
engulfs him and other migrating tenant farmer families and compadres: “maybe
all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of,” our common essence, which
those who enslave others presuppose in the very act of enslaving them. That (as
Sartre showed, exposing “bad faith” via “the look” and “the other” in Being and
Nothingness),^^' is what defines us, even as we define and distinguish ourselves,
struggling to stay alive, and to stave off individual destruction for as long as
possible.’^ And that’s the thing, the axiom or principle that makes Tom think,
and act—and reassure his fretful mother not to worry about him after he’s left
home and is gone for good (on the lam for killing a man in self-defense, a
violation of both moral and mosaic law, but necessary to fulfill a higher
obligation to revolt against unjust authority).
As strange as his predicament sounds (and is), it is one familiar to us,
not least from the pages of recent (and American) history—if we haven’t
forgotten that. When Joad repeats Casy’s dictum, “a fellow ain’t got a soul of his
own, but on’y a piece of a big one,” and is convinced that he will outlive his
death (or disappearance from the workers’ camp), he is merely echoing Casy’s
own echoes of Plato and Plotinus, not to mention countless cosmologies, from
Hindu to Navajo and back. Yet it is Steinbeck’s statement of it that rings true, as
an affirmation of the Biblical principle (reiterated in all his work) that we are our
brother’s and sister’s keepers, that we are mutually responsible, even when we
are driven to use force in order to oppose and overcome force, and that we
belong to the earth; it’s not matter, to be bought and sold, used and abandoned.
It’s a public trust, not platted private property (like the broken Coke [soda-pop]
machine in director Stanley Kubrick’s Swiftian satire on world war and global
peace. Dr. Strangelove, [1964]). People aren’t things—but neither is land a mere
object, or sea and sky mere containers of stored desire. What are they really?
The stuff of life—bits of stars (hydrogen or helium) turned temporarily into
human form, only to ebb and flow, yet endure as atomic debris and
thermodynamic waste. What is left (and conserved, like energy) is only memory,
only if we hang on to it. It’s not the kind of immortality we demand, but it’s all
we deserve.
Now the plot doesn’t always thicken; sometimes it merely gets thick, or
thick-headed: especially when those running the show are schmucks, whose
“thing” is to mess with things, until everyone’s thing is . . . No wonder they
called Steinbeck (like many before and since his day) a Communist—which is a
strange way to pronounce ideals and rituals older than Christ, embodied in