Reply #39: I got my own history with Cat..."Tractored Out by the Cats"

[Tom Joad]

or i should say, my alter-ego has its own history with the Cats.
Different situations of course, but there are striking parallels as well... the complete dehumanization of the driver, who in regular life is (in the Grapes' novel) just a regular neighbor doing a job, is under control of the monster that set him out to destroy other people's lives.

From The Grapes of Wrath:

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects….The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over the nose and mouth, he was part of the monster, a robot in the seat…

A twitch of the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow gotten into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception…He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. …

The iron gate bit into the house corner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways, crushed like a bug. And the driver was goggled and a rubber mask covered his nose and mouth. The tractor cut a straight line on, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor. Chapter 5

An Israeli bulldozer operator presents his view:

"For three days, I just demolished non-stop. The whole area. Any house they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some other houses. were warned by loudspeakers to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give just one push, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. ...I didn't give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn't just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.”

From an interview with a Cat' driver, who under orders of his Israeli military superiors, operated a giant Caterpillar D-9L bulldozer and helped make 4,000 camp residents homeless in Jenin refugee camp, April 2000.

Amnesty International has stated "the repeated practice by the Israeli army of deliberate and wanton destruction of homes and civilian property is a grave violation of international human rights and humanitarian law, notably of Articles 33 and 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and constitutes a war crime".