The Age of Wrath: Part 1

The speck on the map called Tucumcari lies just near the Texas-Mexican border on historic Route 66, which runs from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean. A few motels advertise with bright neon signs, but just one street away discarded plastic shopping bags flutter in dusty front yards full of dented and rusting tin cans, tufts of crabgrass and scrawny, vicious dogs. Some roofs have fallen in and many windows are boarded up with plywood. It looks like a war zone. And, in fact, the United States has been — and still is — fighting wars that cost billions of dollars every month.

I scribble one word in my notebook: “Romania.”

And behind the sad houses, nothing but wide open spaces. Red dirt, yellow scrub, iconic pictures. Loneliness and hardship. Even my cell phone falls silent: No signal.

This is a political landscape. It reflects individuals back on themselves and reduces the government to nothingness. What kind of superpower is it that can wage wars abroad but is a world away when this wasteland is in such need?

Here, one really has to have a car. Maybe a gun, too. And certainly a church. Otherwise people would fall apart.

The landscape got in my face scarcely after I had left Oklahoma City. And it would stay with me for another 2,500 kilometers. The deep, endless skies; the red dirt, the gray drabness. Open spaces. Nothing but open spaces. Open, flat, empty land. Drive-thru country.

Oklahoma City lies in the middle of the United States. It is 1,000 kilometers to the nearest border, which is Mexico; a 16-hour drive to the Canadian border. The Atlantic lies a good 2,000 kilometers to the east; it is a little further to the Pacific in the west. That’s where I’m headed.

I’m driving Route 66, collecting impressions, voices and pictures out of America’s heartland a year prior to the presidential election.

John Steinbeck sent the Joad family over this exact same route, from their little Oklahoma farm westward, looking for work. “The Grapes of Wrath” is America’s classic novel of the Great Depression, a family’s history where they’re evicted from their little farm when the bank repossesses it in the 1930s and set out for California to try a new beginning. It’s a grandiose story and an enraging one. It’s an unforgettable book. 150,000 copies are still sold every month in the United States alone.

So that’s my plan: Follow in John Steinbeck’s footsteps to the end of the second great depression of this century, from the middle of the nation westward to California. The depression reloaded.

You don’t have to look hard to find parallels. There’s another drought in the southwestern United States, the worst in 60 years. And people are once again on the move, homeless, jobless and with no health insurance. People who have to find shelter somewhere — in tents or in camps, just like the Joad family.

But the pertinent question is whether the nation can once again find its way out of the crisis as it did before. The first time, there was a charismatic president who offered the New Deal that laid the foundation for national recovery and America’s rise to global power. And today?

(TO BE CONTINUED)