From dust to bust, America's poor take on a new type of monster

[CHIMO]

Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath, Chris McGreal recreates John Steinbeck's famous fictional journey to reveal life in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression

Looking back on the past few weeks, Johnnie Levy can see how she was driven to the brink of death and didn't care.

The sharpest economic downturn of her 63 years stripped Levy of her beloved job as a seamstress and unravelled her world until she found herself sitting in a church hall in the black end of Tulsa waiting to see a nurse with a syringe in one hand and a Bible in the other.

Tulsa has seen its share of poverty and desperation over the years. In the 1930s, it saw a tide of hundreds of thousands struggling west along Route 66 to escape economic collapse in the north and the notorious dustbowl of drought and wind across the Midwest. Whether they had lost their land or their jobs, that flow of desperate humanity – chronicled so devastatingly through the fictional Joad family in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath – struggled hard to find enough to feed and clothe their children as they trekked towards an illusory dream of prosperity in distant California.

To travel the old road today – stumbling across crumbling ghost towns and half-abandoned communities, across the sprawling Native American desert reservations, through cities where people work all the hours they aren't sleeping and still cannot afford to go to the doctor - is to encounter new despair, some of it still recognisable to the Joads.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/27/grapes-of-wrath-1-tulsa

[Warpy]

1. Until these people let go of the idea that stupid is a virtue

then they'll continue getting some of the absolute worst governance in the country.

While I fee sorry for this woman's plight, I wonder where this came from: "'I voted for the other guy. McCain," she said. "Something grated against me . I really don't know what it was. I'm not racist. It's just one of those things where he's a good speaker, he talks very very well, even better than Bill Clinton I would say. But I wasn't about to go there. I went the other way.'"

While these people value the gut over the brain and folksiness over expertise, they're going to continue to drag the rest of us down with them.

I don't know about you, but I resent it.

[AwakeAtLast]

2. I have to agree with you

There's a whole lotta dumb in OK. x(

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Stoopid is like plutonium...

they spill it all over but we have to live ( or die ) with the results too.
I resent the hell out of the lemmings.

[wolfgangmo]

5. I don't want some dude I could sit down and have a beer with ...

... as president. I wan't the smartest, most compassionate, toughest, most wise, and gracious son of a bitch on the planet.

[Demeter]

7. Exactly So

From NH to Maryland to Florida, California, Texas and Alaska, the Stupids win.

There have been some lovely SF stories about getting rid of Stupids--not that any of them are practical. I'd much rather educate, or at least, indoctrinate them.

[corkhead]

3. "People who run government don't care about people like us"

no fucking shit asshole, when you vote for and elect people who don't care about people like you.

The disconnect amazes me.

The single biggest flaw in democracy is that if you keep a significant percentage of the electorate uneducated and stupid, they will be happy to be chickens voting for Col. Sanders.

articles like this drive me to drink.

[depakid]

6. Racing toward third world status...