The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

[–] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

why don't people write like this anymore fuck

[–] Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net 12 points 11 months ago

They don't have the attention spans for it.

[–] KurtVonnegut@hexbear.net 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Partially because in the 1950s the American government focused hard on separating religion and socialism. They did not want a "liberation theology" spreading in the United States. So they heavily labeled the USSR as "godless" and then slowly but surely boosted the right-wing of evangelical churches, culminating in Reagan/Bush, the rise of the "religious right," and abortion being used as a wedge issue.

[–] AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What does that have to do with quality prose?

[–] KurtVonnegut@hexbear.net 5 points 11 months ago

Because the central metaphor of that passage is a religious one. It hearkens back to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

Which itself is adapted from "John Brown's Body." If you know anything about John Brown, he was a very religious man, and one of the main ways he got people to follow him on his anti-slavery crusade was by appealing to religion. In fact, as the Civil War went on, even the usually secular Abraham Lincoln began including more religious language into his speeches. This was partly to help calm the nation down due to the immense deaths during the Civil War. But it was also because John Brown's rhetoric was very effective. There were a lot of people in the north who actually did not want slavery to end (like McClellan and his moderate faction), because it materially benefitted him. There was actually very little material benefit to abolition for Lincoln directly or really most abolitionists. Abolition was an ideological project, and one which could not have been accomplished in the mid-1800s without using Christianity as a justification. In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother was the most famous preacher in America during the Civil War, and he constantly preached propaganda against the south and slavery which many people in the north agreed with, again, not because it materially benefitted them, but because they agreed that slavery was immoral from a religious standpoint.

One of the primary sources that Martin Luther King learned rhetoric from was the Bible. He was a reverend, and he sharpened his public speaking skills through the church. America has a long, long history of progressive rhetoric intertwining with religious themes. In fact it Steinbeck was using an appeal to religion in the passage you said you liked, even though you might not have noticed. So yeah, maybe there is a reason that the Bible is literally the best-selling, most widely read book in the history of humanity. Maybe it has some good rhetoric in it! And maybe people on the left can learn a little bit about how to capture people's attention and empathy by learning from its prose.