This is Benjamin

white refugee flows

September 7th, 2008 | benjamin

I’m aware that at the moment, a fair few of the literary minded are reading The Road, which is an apparently terrifying tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic USA.

I’m having much the same bone-tingling, pit-of-stomach anxiety from reading two books: Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Hobsbawm’sIndustry and Empire. Its not like I’ve never ever read books of cataclysm or films about apocalypse, so what is it that’s been keeping me up at nights?

As far as I can tell, I’ve been disillusioned. I lived, blissfully, under the misapprehension of some kind of western economic miracle, in which the nations of the west emerged from medieval decrepitness and into an industrial wonderland. And now I learn that wasn’t the case, and that people in societies much like my own have suffered, probably do suffer the most emmiserating, depressing poverty and dislocation.

And I’m wondering, what stands between itand me?

A welfare state backed up by, what, a sophisticated knowledge economy?

Will this come to an end?

ps, does anybody know what happened to the massive population flows from the plains to the California depicted in Grapes of Wrath. Where did all those people go?