The Zeitgeist

Reading Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" at the moment and it it's very interesting to read form the perspective of farmer families having lived on farmland in Oklahoma all their lives, trying to eke out a living from arid country blighted with dust-storms that destroy the crops year after year until the companies that own the land and are leasing it finally decide that they need to turn a profit off it so they evict the families, destroy the land with mechanised cotton farming and the families have to move further west to California...

'Peters', Jacobs', Rance's, Joad's; an' the houses all dark, standin' like miser'ble ratty boxes, but they was good partines an' dancing'. An' there was meetin's and shoutin' glory. They was weddin's all in them houses. An' then I'd want to go in town an' kill folks. 'Cause what'd they take when they tractored the folks off the lan' What'd they get so their "margin a profit" was safe? They got Pa dyin' on the groun', an' Joe yellin' his first breath, an' me jerkin' like a billygoat under a bush in the night. What'd they get? God knows the lan' aint no good. Nobody been able to make a crop for years. But them sons-a-bitches at their desks, they jus' chopped folks in two for their margin of profit. They jus' cut 'em in two. Place where folks live is them folks. They ain't whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car. THey ain't alive no more. Them sons-a-bitches killed 'em.'

It really makes you think, what is the value of a society that destroys people's dreams for the sake of profit which is meant to be creating those very dreams. How does an economic system deal with the value of lives, experiences, memories when it treats a piece of land as nothing but a resource for the generation of profit? What sort of value can the concept of "family" find within this kind of society when that value cannot be expressed in terms of finance?

And another interesting piece on the concept of incarceration as a means of punishment/rehabilitiation. From the perspective of Tom Joad, the protagonist, who was incarcertaed for four years for killing a man in self-defence.

'The thing that give me the mos' trouble was, it didn't make no sense. You don't look for no sense when lightnin' kills a cow, or it comes up a flood. That's jus' the way things is. But when a bunch of men take an' lock you up for four years, it ought to have some meaning. Men is supposed to think things out. Here they put me in, an' keep me an' feed me four years. That ought to either make me so I won't do her again or else punish me so I'll be afraid to do her again' - he paused - 'but if Herb or anybody else come for me, I'd do her again. Do her before I could figure her out. Specially if I was drunk. That sort of senselessness kind a worries a man.'

'They's a guy in McAlester - lifer. He studies all the time. He's sec'etary of the warden - writes the warden's letters an' stuff like that. Well, he's one hell of a bright guy an' reads law an' all stuff like that. Well, I talked to him one time about her, 'cause he reads so much stuff. An' he says it don't do no good to read books. Says he's read ever'thing prisons now, an in the old times; an' he says she makes less sense to him than she did before he starts readin'. He says it's a thing that started way to hell an' gone back, an' nobody seems to be able to stop her, an' nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God's sake don't read about her because he says for one thing you'll jus' get messed up worse, an' for another you won't have no respect for the guys that owrk the gover'ments.'


Makes you question what exactly the prison system achieves and what it's goals are. It's a huge drain on taxpayer's funding but it does it actually rehabilitate? Is it just a punitive measure? Is it just an expensive way to keep criminals off the streets? What is the significance in taking a man and locking him up with other men and then managing that society? And what is the alternative to this system?