Showing posts with label white Christian nationalists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white Christian nationalists. Show all posts

Thursday, July 31, 2025

90-second Book Review: Four Winds by Kristin Hannah is a Fine book About The Dust Bowl Years

 Kristin Hannah's novel, The Four Winds, published in 2021, is a fine book on the Dust Bowl years in America's Heartland.

I like the book for two reasons. First, Hannah's description of what it was like to live on a Dust Bowl farm is harrowingly accurate. I wasn't born until after the Great Depression, but my mother grew up on a farm in northwestern Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years. Her description of that time confirms the accuracy of Hannah's narrative.

The sky turned black when the dust storms rolled through, and visibility was restricted to just a few feet. Although my mother's family stuffed bits of newspapers around the windows and door sashes to keep the dust out of their farm home, it got in anyway, covering every surface with a layer of fine, gritty sand.

My grandfather had a small herd of cows but no forage. Finally, he was forced to sell them to the government for a pittance. 

To reduce the glut in cattle, government shooters came onto the family farm, gathered up grandfather's cows, and shot them. My mother saw that happen, and she remembers a line of cars filled with scavengers who followed the shooters and harvested the meat.

My mother's family often went to bed hungry. The drought made it impossible to grow a vegetable garden, and their fruit trees died for lack of water.

My grandfather came to Oklahoma from Nebraska in a covered wagon, and he prospered for a few years when the price of wheat was high. He owned three horse-drawn harvesting machines. I remember those old relics rusting away in front of his home.

As a child, I imagined those machines as Christopher Columbus's ships: the Pinta, the NiƱa and the Santa Maria. And I remember walking through one of my grandfather's pastures. No cows; nothing but sagebrush and sand.

The Great Depression broke my grandfather's spirit. He spent his last days sitting in a rocking chair and masticating Swisher Sweet cigars like chewing tobacco. I don't recall ever having a conversation with him.

I also liked Hannah's book for its description of the reception the Dust Bowl refugees got when they migrated to California. My mother's family stuck it out, but over a quarter of a million Oklahomans migrated to California in the 1930s.


Californians tried to keep them out, and when they got in anyway, California's big landowners hired them to pick fruit, vegetables, and cotton for starvation wages. Whole families worked all day just to buy their daily food.

Any review of Four Winds must include a comparison with John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Both books have a feminist theme. Elsa Martinelli, Hannah's protagonist, goes to California as a single mother with two children. By the novel's end, Elsa becomes radicalized and helps organize a farm workers' strike.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad assumes the leadership of her extended family after the menfolk break under the strain of their flight to California. When the going gets really tough, Steinbeck implies, you gotta rely on the women to survive,

Every American should read The Grapes of Wrath and The Four Winds to understand rural Americans' desperate lives during the 1930s. They should also see John Ford's epic movie, The Grapes of Wrath, which won two Academy Awards in 1941.

It is fashionable today to view all Americans living in the Heartland as "white Christian Nationalists" who have prospered by exploiting people of color. Of course, that's not true. Most people in  Flyover Country work hard, practice their religion, and lead modest lives.

Moreover, the descendants of the Dust Bowl refugees claim a heritage of suffering, exploitation, and unbearable hardship--as harsh as any American has suffered in the twentieth century--regardless of color. This is my heritage, and I'm proud of it.



















Friday, January 10, 2025

Los Angeles Wild Fires: The Lord's Burning Rain

This old town is filled with sin
It'll swallow you in
If you've got some money to burn
Take it home right away
You've got three years to pay
But Satan is waiting his turn.

Gram Parsons, "Sin City"

I'm not blaming anybody for the Los Angeles wildfires. Yes, the water hydrants ran dry in some burning neighborhoods, but no one could possibly have envisioned a conflagration as massive and catastrophic as the inferno that overwhelmed the LA firefighting infrastructure.

And I'm not blaming Mayor Karen Bass for the fire disaster. She had no business traveling to West Africa on a political junket while a disaster was looming, but Bass didn't start the fires.

For me, the LA wildfire is nationally significant as a sign of the arrogance and cluelessness of America's political and media elites. The people in LA's elite neighborhoods sneered at the working folk in Flyover Country as they insulated themselves from the real world with chauffered limousines, gated communities, and private bodyguards. 

The glitterati labeled working-class patriots as "white Christian nationalists," despising them as racists because they worried about crime and our country's open southern border.

Hollywood moguls made boring, overlong films full of woke DEI drivel and then wondered why movie attendance was down.

Movie stars donated millions of campaign dollars to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris even though they knew both were idiots.

Now, the chickens have come home to roost, and the Tinseltown world of the West Coast elites is falling apart.

I feel sorry for the average Angelinos who lost their homes in the wildfires, but I have no sympathy for the wealthy assholes who got rich under Bidenomics and whose cosmos is going up in smoke.

Mayor Karen Bass and her DEI minions are done--exposed as incompetent dolts. Governor Newsom and Kamala Harris are done as important political figures, having shown no talent for leadership. George Clooney and Julia Roberts, sycophantic fundraisers for the Democratic Party, are done as respected movie stars.

Many West Coast elitists are still rich, but their wealth won't save them from irrelevance. As Gram Parsons put it, "On the thirty-first floor, a gold-plated door won't keep out the Lord's burning rain."