LIFE  GOES  ON . . .

 

Essay: The Black Blizzard    

 

Showing Our Age . . . Too wowed by The Black Blizzard to catch SNL          Started: 10/20/2008

 

Question: Is it Age or Gravitas, when you totally forget to watch THE Saturday Night Light Show of the Season, with Guest Appearance by GOP Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin, because you are so overcome by a documentary about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s Depression on the History International Channel?

 

Answer: Neither.  Stupidity, as I have TIVO.

 

Seriously, The Black Blizzard mesmerized both Husband Adams and me.

 

If anyone is secretly getting nostalgic for The Great Depression whilst they are mentally responding to lines from Barack Obama like “this is the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression,” they are probably yearning for the return of Great Cinema, not of the true conditions of those times.  

 

Total Lapse into Political Rant . . .

 

Sorry folks, voting for Barack Obama is NOT, I repeat NOT, going to ensure a New Golden Age of American Government, OR of American Movie Classics, or of anything else. 

 

 George Clooney is not Cary Grant, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart . . . 

 

Syriana is NOT The Grapes of Wrath. 

 

And Barack Obama is not JFK, nor FDR. 

 

Barack Obama is Barack Obama.

 

Every era, every nation, and every culture of that era and nation is a unique point in Time and Space.  For good or bad, all the retro language and all the retro redecorating aren’t going to convert us into the Stronger and more Decent people that we think we were in “The Olden Days.”

 

[Sorry about the above political lapse, but I do honestly recognize Barack Obama to be one of the most polished Orators of this Turn of the Century (20th into 21st).  I’d like especially the younger generations to be mentally vigilant and a bit cynical of the garden paths of psychological innuendo that any such skilled communicator may be trying to lead you down, for his or her own benefit.]

 

Back to the subject at hand . . .

 

This documentary will convince you that living on the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl of        The 1930s Great Depression was pure unadulterated Hell on Earth.

 

Many land-hungry Americans had been lured to the interior Great Plains by government programs of land grants for this last stretch of tillable “free land,” during the last Turn of the Century (19th into 20th).  The market soared for the grains produced by these Great Plains farmers during and after World War I and the Russian-Soviet Revolution, which had made inaccessible to the rest of the world the Old Bread Basket of the World, i.e., places now known as Ukraine, Belorussia, and Poland.  America had become the NEW Bread Basket of the World.

 

In the early 1930s one of the branches of the Gulf Stream shifted, bringing with it one of those periodic droughts that the Great Plains had probably gone through for thousands of years.  Unfortunately, much of the drought resistant prairie grasses, which had evolved to survive these precipitation cycles, had been ploughed under for the lucrative grain markets. 

 

This was a time that Nature truly did turn on Humankind with a vengeance.  The Black Blizzard documents much of the suffering and death of the 1930s Dust Bowl, the science and ecology behind it, and the political and social reactions to it.

 

The true emotional climax of this documentary, at least for me, occurred, not when the rains start returning in 1939, but when Congress got a true taste of what it was like to live through a dust bowl.  In 1935, on a day that was called Black Sunday, the biggest of these dust storms roared past the Mississippi River, just as another clever orator, knowing what was occurring, stalled in his lectures on land conservation, and kept Congress in their seats.  That day the biggest Black Blizzards of them all engulfed Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

 

No words can truly capture the emotional impact of any good documentary.  And The Black Blizzard is one of the best of them all. 

 

I’ll just have to catch that SNL show later. 

 

I’m pretty sure I made the right viewing choice for the night.                                   Completed 10/26/2008

 

 

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