John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is one of my favorite novels, and along with Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain, it depicts intense family dynamics and dysfunction while also encapsulating that American moment of expansion into and existence within the western U.S., especially in the great state of California. The U.S. flexed its ‘youthful country’ muscles during that period of history in other ways, ways not always healthy, wise or good. Another series of plot points in the book revolve around the lead up to, prejudices of and our eventual involvement in WW1.
We are, at this moment, in difficult times, and we will get out of them better and stronger. I have to believe this. I do believe it. We have been in difficult and challenging times before, and can be secure that while “the arc of moral justice is long, (but) it bends toward justice.” Steinbeck wrote the following – all of the quotes below are from his personal journal – on January 1, 1941, as war was looming once more in Europe and in Asia; there were rumors of camps and internment horrors; what would come of this?
Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.
It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded.
*I think we can safely compare the efficiencies of our current administration in Washington, the blueprint provided by Project 2025 and its desire to control Americans, especially women and brown people – as a not very nice companion to past efficiencies of the Nazis. We will get through this. Deep breaths.