December 27, 2003
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Currently Reading – Gellhorn
Biography of the noted reporter, Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), who covered international conflict in the period between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. She was a feisty, independent, bohemian woman from a comfortable Jewish family who became a writer early on and remained so till she died. (She was also married to Ernest Hemingway for about 6 years.) Here is a paragraph from the book in the early period when Martha is covering the Great Depression:
Martha had a knack for total absorption in work. Soon, she was engrossed by what she was doing, interviewing up to five families a day among the thousands of mill hands and sharecroppers scrounging for jobs that no longer existed, along with factory owners, doctors, union representatives, teachers, and relief workers. Meticulously, she noted rates of pay, levels of relief, and the story of each family. She trudged around slums of tumbledown shacks in her elegant Parisian shoes, where latrines drained into the well from which all drinking water came; she looked at “houses shot with holes, windows broken, no sewerage, rats”; she listened to children so listless with malnutrition that they could barely stay awake, trying to recite the Gettysburg Address for her by heart; she heard doctors talk about rickets, hookworms, anemia, and pellagra, the skin disease of the starving, caused by vitamin deficiency, and the starving, and the way that it had become endemic after months on a diet of pinto beans and corn bread, and about tuberculosis, which was spreading fast through the villages. In one factory, she found three young women lying on the bathroom floor, their eyes closed; they told her they had come in to rest for a few minutes because the eight-hour shifts on heavy machines with no breaks was making them faint. And as she traveled around, her indignation rose, and her reports began to include more observations and conclusions of her own, more recommendations for action, in tones of outrage that grew ever more precise and icy. A doctor, she wrote, had told her that his patients were “degenerating” before his eyes. “The present generation of the unemployed,” she went on, “will be useless human material in no time. Their housing is frightful (talk about European slums); they are ignorant and often below-par intelligence.” Returning from a mill town where those fortunate enough still to have jobs were forced to pay half as much again for their food at the company store, she added: “It is probable – and to be hoped – that one day the owners of this place will get shot and lynched.” The people who really touched her were those who, too proud to go on relief, unable to understand why their entire lives had collapsed around them, were desperately hanging on with occasional part-time work, while their children slowly starved to death. This was an America Martha did not know. The flappers and cocktails and mah-jongg parties popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the fashion magazines had not filtered below the top levels of society. Country roads were seldom paved and were often unpassable in snow or heavy rain. It was another world.
Over the holidays, I watched the film Seabiscuit a second time. It was also set at this time in American history. We have recently had this time of high unemployment, which seems to be very slowly restoring itself, but I know that out there in this country there is still so much poverty and suffering. It seems like the gap between the homeless and the rich is growing ever wider. Kind of puts a perspective on the glitz and sparkle of the season.
On another note, the holiday goes on. Yesterday was bumpy. I feel incredibly human today and not perfect and not all-knowing.
Deep Thought:It seemed to me that, somehow, the blue jay was trying to communicate with me. I would see him fly into the house across the way, pick up the telephone, and dial. My phone would ring, and it would be him, but it was just this squawking and cheeping. “What! What?!” I would yell back, but he never did speak English.
Today I am grateful for: Good books
Comments (3)
Thanks for that post. It’s good to have things put in perspective for us sometimes, lest we forget how lucky we really are. There are parts of the world where this sort of scene (and worse) continue. It kind of makes you sick after this season of blatant consumerism and excess.
By the way, your cat Zoe looks like our Skittle, and Sushi is a good match to our Asia. Too bad we can’t get our 10 cats together for a play date.
My mother says none of her siblings can stand to eat pinto beans any more, because they had so much of that growing up in the Depression: they ate what they could get and beans were cheap….
The present health american plague that I see is the lack of medicare prescription coverage. Hospitals are overwhelmed from the outcomes of this. The elderly & disabled can’t afford, get very, very sick & end up hospitalized for a week or two. We get them back on track, only to go home & not able to afford their meds once again. Hospitals are expected to absorb the costs that medicare does not pay, & patients with insurance, expecting to be treated well, wonder why the help is not there. Like the patients, some of the hospitals cannot afford the extra hands. I could go on & on about this. Thanks to people like martha, who rub our noses in reality.